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Comment Re: 3 separate machines in one box, (Score 1) 37

Doing it in software means you can move CPUs from one machine to another based on the time of day. Your CI infrastructure can lose some resources from its UI at night and make another server for nightly builds when most of your users are away, without either having a VM layer in between or needing the builds to happen on a kernel configured with the features needed by the UI.

Comment You have every reason to ... (Score -1, Troll) 67

---- suspect this to be entirely dishonest proaganda.

1) They are comparing pre-lockdown levels of traffic- when "working from home" was almost zero, with post-lockdown -- many people continue to work from home, assuming they still have a job. There are massively fewer cars on the road than there were. Less pollution is a good thing, but fewer jobs? not so much. (I am retired).

2) They viciously forced people to sell older cars prematurely rather than allow them to be replaced at the normally time (I never replaced my car, as I could not afford one having only got scrap value for the old one - of course I resent this and feel bloody minded towards thee whole thing. i am not alone). Fewer cars - more poverty.

3) Electric cars because petrol is very, very expensive. We pay about £1.80 per LITRE! (Not Australian pounds - Slashdot still cant get this right!)

4) Global warming means less pollution from household boilers - no firm data on this.

Moral: the research finds what they were paid to find. (A good researcher usually finds more research is needed if he wants to keep his job).

Comment Re: How this may play out (Score 1) 73

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

Comment Re: Side effects (Score 2) 209

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Comment Automatic verification (Score 2) 174

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

Comment Re:AI rollups are the new cash cow (Score 1) 148

As a British English speaker, my biggest hate with human call centres is the cultures where they are not allowed to give a negative answer.

eg Should I try "X" is answere with

THIS IS AN ACTUAL DISSERVICE!

If the answer is "No" and you are not allowed to say it - you are not allowed to do the job! (And should not be given the job).

Comment YOLD (Score 1) 89

The Year of the Linux Desktop was 1995, for me. I used to spend time advocating Linux. You can still find my old posts on comp.os.linux.advocacy and many mailing lists. But two things happened: I didn't have time for it due to family/career and Linux just got so easy to use it didn't really need my advocacy or help anymore. It has been on a very slow but as it took over pretty much every market *except* the desktop and nothing short of legal action against Microsoft or enforcement of open standards on the part of the government was going to change that.

Imagine getting millions of people to work for free over the course of 40 years implementing what the people in the product want instead of a corporate agenda and giving the result away for free and still only having single digit marketshare! That's a clear sign of a broken market.

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