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Comment Re:so long, it's been good to know ya (Score 2, Insightful) 96

by He Who Has No Name (#66248920) Attached to: Longtime Web-Weirdness Site Fark Faces Ad Pinch

I have a Fark account that's nearly 25 years old, including more than one submitted headline that made it to the pre-TF front page.

I don't think I've even visited Fark in maybe 15 years. They got... how do I put this gently... *extremely* thought-police-y in a Orwellian-Kafka-esque way that straight up made my skin crawl. Later on what they were doing escaped containment and was known more widely as "woke". They were one of the early zealot converts and, well, it didn't work out very well for them long term.

So long and thanks for all the foobies, I guess.

Submission + - Max Planck Slapped With Paper Retractions by Suspected Rogue Algorithm (science.org) 1

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:

"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."

The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.

"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."

However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:

"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."

Comment Re:great news (Score 1) 35

Perforce and Alienbrain come the closest to cleanly mapping onto the workflow needs of the art team in game studios. In some places the coders from dev side were forcing Git onto the art team and I can speak from extremely infuriating personal experience that Git, in that context, is a disaster and an active hindrance. It's made for code. It gets in the way of handling art content in that environment.

I trust Epic has run into that themselves and designed Lore to go around those problems.
The Internet

Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic By 2027, Cloudflare CEO Says 51

Posted by BeauHD from the humans-are-legacy-users dept.
Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said.

The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."

Submission + - r/linux poster unearths Meta's lobbying net behind OS Age Verfication blitz (archive.org)

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: In an incredibly in-depth researched post that was removed by Reddit mods almost as soon as it went up but is preserved at Archive.org, Reddit user Ok_Lingonberry3296 has dug deep into lobbying activity and records across multiple states and at the federal level to unearth what — or who — is behind the nationwide state-level and federal legislation blitz of nearly identical age verification laws targeting operating systems instead of companies — with no carveout for open source, no awareness of how these centralized control models break when applied to a FOSS operating system like Linux, and no apparent regard for the avalanche of second order effects the legislation could cause in contexts like embedded devices, VMs, and data centers.

The culprit that emerges isn't a huge surprise: a recently created lobbying org called the Digital Childhood Alliance, which appears to be functionally a front group for the lobbying efforts of... (drumroll) ...Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, formerly Facebook.

Ok_Lingonberry3296 writes: "...Rep. Kim Carver (R-Bossier City), the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. The bill as drafted required only app stores (Apple, Google) to verify user ages. It did not require social media platforms to do anything.

...Senator Jay Morris, who expanded the bill to include app developers alongside app stores after Google's senior director of government affairs publicly questioned why "Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on passing these bills." When Morris introduced his amendment, Meta went silent. The conference committee compromise maintained dual responsibility but kept the primary burden on app stores, which is what Meta wanted from the start.

At that same Senate hearing, Morris directly questioned DCA Executive Director Casey Stefanski about who funds her organization. She reportedly deflected, said she "wasn't comfortable answering," then under continued pressure admitted tech companies provide funding but refused to name them."

The research gets into funding, connected groups (on both sides of the political aisle) involved with lobbying, messaging, funding, and other parts of the legislative push, and most of all, tracks the money.

For those that want to dig into the research itself, OK_Lingonberry3296 posted their entire folder of research and sources on github, here: github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

A quick synopsis of where the US laws currently stand:

CA | AB-1043 | Enacted, effective Jan 1, 2027
CO | SB26-051 | Passed Senate, in House committee
LA | HB-570 | Enacted, effective July 1, 2026
UT | SB-142 | Enacted, first in nation
TX | SB-2420 | Enjoined by federal judge
NY | S8102A | Pending
IL | HB-3304, HB-4140, SB-2037 | Pending
Federal | KOSA, ASAA | Pending

Comment Re: renewables (Score 1) 184

"We're going to make ourselves absolutely dependent on a rabid dog for a thing we have to have and can never actually turn off so that if the rabid dog attacks our neighbor, the rabid dog might be slowed down by us turning off the thing we can't ever actually turn off" is logic that could only ever exist in European parliaments.

Idiots. Arrogant, cowardly idiots with the blood of millions on their hands, now.

Comment Re: renewables (Score 3, Insightful) 184

It wasn't a momentary, passing thing. Activism in the west against civil nuclear power, especially in Europe, has been heavily driven by Russian intelligence for decades precisely because - surprise! - kneecapping European energy independence serves Russian goals and makes the Russian petrol empire more money. European energy policy was under sustained attack, and once bad actors got into various drivers seats, the Euros were too proud and arrogant to listen to anybody trying to send up warnings. Now they're paying the price.

Oh, and the previous German prime minister who oversaw most of the major German nuclear energy drawfown (Schroeder) was probably either compromised by Russia or a full blown Russian asset; he went from the PM office to a board seat at Gazaprom. Merkel is heavily suspect as well at this point just based on the blatantly obvious results of her policies, including the ones she continued from Schroeder.

Whatever. They can eat the consequences of their own arrogance.

Comment Re: The Chinese Way (Score 1) 62

I don't care if somebody is an immigrant or not. Their actions are what I care about. Either they hold to and live by values I respect and am compatible with, or they don't. That's not immutable characteristics, that's choices. If they hold to the values I this country hold, they're my brother, full stop. If they don't, they need to go somewhere else that works for them, because that place isn't here and I'm not okay with terraforming it to fit them instead of us.

Comment Re:The Chinese Way (Score 2, Insightful) 62

That makes exactly zero sense.

We handle criminal citizens internally because they are family, not guests.

We deport criminal guests precisely because they are guests, not family.

It's so painfully self-evident that anybody arguing otherwise is probably being deliberately obtuse, and that's being generous.

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