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Comment Re: The cutting edge cuts back. (Score 2) 99

They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

Comment Elon Musk == Wish.com Arthur Jensen (Score 1) 124

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world, in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. [emphasis mine]

-- Arthur Jensen, Network (destroying his golden goose)

Further viewing.

Comment Re:Nobody mention TAI (Score 1) 91

I never said to adjust it only once. For scientific use time should be specified as TTTT:TT:TT:TTTTT - PPPPPPPPPP where PPPPPPPP is the periods of cesium per second used for that measurement. For everyday use no need to distinguish the varying time 'constant.'

That was tried before 1972. The frequent adjustments of the length of the second became cumbersome to track, so the in 1972 the switch was made to the current system of constant length seconds with leap seconds to keep UTC tracking the rotation of the Earth..

Comment Re:good thing I guess (Score 1) 91

When I worked for a broadcasting software company that had customers worldwide, everything was using TC (timecode), PTP, and of course we needed to support leap year, different timezone etc when a broadcast was scheduled between different zone around the world (it can be complicated) ; and we needed to support leap second by contract! Easiest thing was to add a 1s black frame after the schedule after reaching midnight. Supporting negative leap second would have been complicated... Good thing we drop it I think.

That's very interesting.

To support negative leap seconds you can insert one second of black on normal days, two seconds of black on days with a positive leap second, and no seconds of black on days with a negative leap second.

Comment Re:Nobody mention TAI (Score 1) 91

Atomic time is based on 9,192,631,770 periods of cesium? why not adjust the period count to not require any leaping? Fix the damn problem at the source and be done with it. This new strategy is just in accordance with the lazy do-nothings. Most networked time is synchronized for local clock drift constantly, most chips are simply not that accurate, so change the source clock and they won't even need to be fixed as the constant syncing corrects for such a small change automagically.

That won't work because the rotation rate of the Earth is not uniform. No matter what you pick for the length of the second, the Earth will not always turn in 86,400 seconds.

Comment We Do Not Take Moral Instruction From Amoral Fscks (Score 5, Insightful) 236

Elon, Sam, Mark, Peter, et al... You are cordially invited to go fsck yourselves.

The magnitude of destruction you have wrought upon this industry, upon our livelihoods, and upon society as a whole, cannot be calculated, much less excused. You have stolen the corpus of human ingenuity and creativity from its creators without recompense, and now are trying to sell a provably shittier version of it back to us at a markup.

And, let's be honest, this is what you wanted to build -- a barely capable servant who will do your bidding, whatever it is, immediately, without question or compunction. It's extremely telling about your moral compasses that you studiously sat on your hands when your customers were creating graphic sexual imagery of celebrities over their vociferous objections; or impressionable young people (who needed help, not encouragement) were being driven to suicide by your chatbots; but "torturing" a memory block of neural net constants is somehow the bridge too far?

I repeat: Go fsck yourselves.

Comment Annoying (Score 1) 116

I have a wildcard cert from LetsEncrypt, which I install on all the services on my home LAN. However, because it's a wildcard, LetsEncrypt insists that I prove domain ownership by updating some DNS TXT records. My DNS provider doesn't support automated updates to TXT records. So ACME won't work, so I have to do that bit by hand.

Next, I have to distribute the cert to a handful of local services, including pfSense, TrueNAS, Postfix, the Unifi Controller (extra annoying, because Java), Forgejo, and probably a couple others I've forgotten about. None of that is automated, either. It hasn't been so painful that I've bothered to write scripts for the process, so I get to do a little SSH dance every three months.

"Deploy your own!" Couple of issues there: 1) Everyone treats self-signed certs as suspicious, so they're inappropriate for Postfix TLS; 2) Every time I've tried that, Firefox and/or Chrome complain about some obscure feature not being what they expect. The latest headache had to do with OCSP stapling, which has to be turned on -- oh, whoops, now it has to be turned off... Bleah. LetsEncrypt certs Just Work, so I haven't revisited building my own CA.

Submission + - Leak-Proof AI Benchmark Posts Biggest Gain in 20 Years, on One CPU Core (spasim.org)

Baldrson writes: The Hutter Prize for lossless compression of human knowledge has paid out nearly €50,000: its largest advance in 20 years: three entries together cut the record for compressing a 1GB Wikipedia snapshot by nearly 10%: a compression ratio of more than a factor of 10. Every entry ran on a single CPU core, in about 50 hours and under 10GB of RAM, so the gain came from algorithms.

Unlike most AI benchmarks, the prize requires no validation data, so a leak can't inflate a score. The full file is public, and the size of the decompressor counts against the entry, so anything memorized is paid for in bits. Vladimir Ivanov's fx2-cmix-T now holds the record, after earlier 2026 gains by Ibrahim Marcouch and Kaido Orav (cmix-lex) and David Freelan (cmix-obias). Sponsor Marcus Hutter, who advised DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg's 2008 thesis "Machine Super Intelligence," calls it "the largest progress in its 20-year history." With trillions riding on claims of AI progress and data-center power demand, is a leak-proof, energy-limited benchmark the yardstick the industry should be watching?

(Disclosure: the submitter is on the Hutter Prize committee.)

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