Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Be careful what you ask for. (Score 1) 49

The Foundation TV series has been a lot of fun but I just can't shake how very much it is NOT ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION. Not even a little bit. It's fine that they didn't want to tell the Foundation story. Honestly, I'm not sure it would make good TV in a faithful adaptation. But... why set yourself up for failure like that? It's not like the majority of the people watching it are 1940s era Sci Fi fans.

Comment Re:That much? (Score 2) 24

Inside the /. bubble, sure, that makes sense. But crypto badly wants to be mainstream and, demographically, it's a lot younger than this community is. You might be surprised at how few people under 30 maintain bookmarks or consume news from specific outlets intentionally.

Comment Containers (Score 3, Interesting) 16

I'm increasingly convinced that if you're running an AI interaction at all it needs to live in a container. Somehow the sci-fi wisdom of "no seriously, don't give an AI access to the internet" flew right out the window when AI could tell us when our boss' emails actually had something in them worth reading. I get that, but ESPECIALLY for software developers, if you're going to make use of agentic AI systems, you need to have a metaphorical (if not literal) moat around the agent before you just turn it loose.

That was true before we started talking about the security implications of an AI with privileged access coming under attack.

Comment Re:Pure fusion bombs... (Score 2) 31

Sure, but "pure fusion" bombs are pretty much science fiction at this point. Igniting fusion in LiDu requires a tremendous amount of energy and not an insubstantial flux of neutrons. You're not getting either of those things in a profile suitable for military deployment without a fission primary. It might be a small (maybe even less than a kiloton) primary but you're not getting the Plutonium or Uranium (or maybe Neptunium in some cases) out of there any time soon.

Comment Re:How would a jammer work ? (Score 1) 131

It can't be that fruitless. Green Bank West Virginia, which houses the National Radio Observatory, has all kinds of restrictions on what kinds of devices and equipment are allowed within some distance of the NRO since they interfere with the signals.

I will concede that the radio sources the NRO is looking for are rather weaker and more distant than broadcasting satellites in low earth orbit.

Submission + - Betterment's Financial App Sends Customers a $10,000 Crypto Scam Message (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to “triple your crypto,” according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an “unauthorized message” that was sent via a “third-party system.”

Comment AI Reaction (Score 5, Insightful) 23

This was an inevitability, and not just because of the tightening job market. The real gasoline dumped on the tire-fire of employment (especially tech employment) in the United States is AI. It used to be that, when I posed a job opening, I got maybe 100 applications over the course of a few weeks from people who moderately embellished their resumes. And that's because the conventional wisdom was to spend the time to put together a really class-A application to the jobs that were the best fit for you.

But AI has changed the math.

Now the hours-long process of fine-tuning your resume to fit a job description and crafting a nice cover letter to go with it are the work of a click or two. Candidates have every reason in the world to apply to as many jobs as they can. It's a classic prisoners dilemma; sure, everyone else is worse off if the HR departments are flooded but if everyone else does it and you don't, you're never going to land a job.

And so the firehose opens and the job ad that used to get me 100 resumes over the course of a month gets me 1,000 resumes over the course of an hour.

And, just for funsies, most of them are wildly unqualified. AI is happy to lie on your resume for you and getting it not to do that is hard. So now not only do I have a ton of resumes to go through, I have a crisis of trust on my hands. Who, out of all of these applicants, are telling the truth and who's basically echoing the job-ad back to me?

In that situation, it makes a ton of sense to lean back on trust relationships. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc have reputations to uphold. I can count on them to police their candidates. My local university wants to maintain a good relationship with area businesses; if their graduates are BSing me in their resumes I can meet the head of their career center for coffee and get them to deal with it.

There is no solution here. The employment market is a feedback loop. The bigger the applicant:job ratio grows the harder it is for employers to adequately consider and respond to applications, turning the application process into something more akin to a lottery ticket than a proper application. The more converting an application to a job feels like random chance the more incentivized applicants are to prioritize quantity over quality, driving the ratio ever higher.

Nothing short of a sudden and profound cratering of the unemployment rate is going to slow this arms race. This isn't the end state of the market; it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Slashdot Top Deals

Do you suffer painful elimination? -- Don Knuth, "Structured Programming with Gotos"

Working...