181220132
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
right in the wake of the lunar mission achieving a major milestone and on top of its 1.5 trillion military budget proposal, the trump administration want to save money by slashing nasa budget significantly.
tired of winning yet?
180964808
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes.
Lipps is now back home but says the experience has had lasting consequences. While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said. She also told WDAY News no one from the Fargo police department had apologized.
This isn't the first time "AI" and lazy police together have put innocent people away, concludes the article.
180641768
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
According to a new report from a think tank, "Ember", the availability of cheap green tech can have developing countries profit from earlier investment and skip steps in the transition from fossil to alternatives.
India is put forward as an example. While china’s rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle, by some measures, India is moving ahead faster than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development. It’s an indication that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies.
That’s mainly because India has access to solar panels and electric cars at a much lower price than China did about a decade ago. Chinese investments lowered the costs of what experts call "modular technologies” — the production of each solar panel, battery cell and electric car enables engineers to learn how to make it more efficiently.
India's per-capita consumption of oil for road transport is 60% lower than when China hit that milestone. As a result India’s peak road-oil consumption per person will likely never reach Chinese levels.
180614970
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
You're too dumb and too poor to own one. So, welcome to the age of the dumb terminal and the perpetual fee for the cloud.
180327613
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Our shared linguistic ecosystem may be so polluted by AI slop that some now sound like AI. Worse, in some cases AI-infected speech is being spouted by (ostensibly human) elected officials.
180142255
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
China has announced a "major breakthrough" in "advanced nuclear" energy. It has successfully achieved the first-ever conversion of thorium into uranium fuel within a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR).
The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) confirmed that it has secured valid experimental data after loading the reactor with thorium, as reported by Global Times.
The institute expects to have a working thorium-molten salt reactor in 100MW prototype in 10 years, beating fusion power expectations by a full decade.
179911514
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Meta is using a classic BitTorrent defense in its legal battle with adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings. In its motion to dismiss, the tech company argues that IP-address evidence is insufficient to prove who the infringer is. Meta further counters that the "sporadic" downloads on its corporate network began years before its relevant AI research started. Instead of AI training, Meta argues the activity was likely just for "private personal use"
178877888
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
TLDR: old and busted: post-truth. New hotness: post-reality.
Apparently, matching the language or content of a message to the psychological profile of its recipient (known as “personalized persuasion”), that is, wrapping a lie in flattery and expectations of the person lied to is "one of the most effective messaging strategies".
TFA demonstrates that the "rapid advances" in large language models like ChatGPT could accelerate this influence by "making personalized persuasion [that is, lying with a personal touch] scalable".
Using data from several studies the authors show that personalized messages crafted by ChatGPT have significantly more influence over the feeble minds than non-personalized messages.
Apparently, this worked for everything — marketing of consumer products, political appeals for climate action, personality traits, political ideology, moral foundations.
It was also all too easy — providing the LLM with a single, short prompt naming or describing the targeted psychological dimension was enough.
TFA purports to demonstrate the potential for LLMs to automate, and thereby scale, the use of directed lies for fun an profit all for your own good.
Thank you for ignoring this matter until it is too late.
178838132
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Three decades of satellite-based measurements of global sea-level change enable a comparison of models and reality and show that early IPCC climate projections were remarkably accurate. Predictions of glacier mass loss and thermal expansion of seawater were comparatively successful, but the ice-sheet contributions were underestimated. The findings provide confidence in model-based climate projections.
Key findings:
* IPCC projections in the mid-1990s of global sea-level change over the next 30 years were remarkably robust
* The largest disparities between projections and observations were due to underestimated dynamic mass loss of ice sheets
* Comparison of past projections with subsequent observations gives confidence in future climate projections
177941130
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
In a funny turn of events, don the buffoon and ketamine elona had a public spat over their social networks.
elona admitted to election interference, asked the king to acknowledge it and repent.
kind threatened elona's fat government check with cancellation.
elona responded in kind by threatening the "American" space program, which it cheaply privatized a decade ago.
A brilliant example of what happens when morons elect children to positions without oversight or turn imbeciles into billionaires by the force of the government subsidy.
And normalize corruption.
Please, give us more of this.
177297679
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Moreover, previous estimates of huge "productivity gains" are largely faked and the new "work" it is not necessarily useful.
A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces.
The reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
The finding contradicts a randomized controlled trial published in February that found generative AI increased worker productivity by 15 percent on average. The difference stems from other experiments focusing on tasks highly suited to AI, whereas most real-world jobs involve tasks AI cannot fully automate.
177257977
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Staff members at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) were told on 30 April to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice,” according to an email seen by Nature.
The policy prevents the NSF, one of the world’s biggest supporters of basic research, from awarding new research grants and from supplying allotted funds for existing grants, such as those that receive yearly increments of money. The email does not provide a reason for the freeze and says that it will last “until further notice”.
Earlier this week, NSF leadership also introduced a new policy directing staff members to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities”. Proposals judged not “in alignment” must be returned to the applicants by NSF employees.
The stupid appears to have scored a resounding win.
177032893
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
US government funding for the world's CVE program – the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws – ends Wednesday.
The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability management. It is used by companies big and small, developers, researchers, the public sector, and more as the primary system for identifying and squashing bugs.
The lack of US government funding means that, unless someone else steps in to fill the gap, this standardized system for naming and tracking vulnerabilities may falter or shut down, new CVEs may no longer be published, and the program's website may go offline.
I guess China can now step in with a leadership role here as well, eh?
177008533
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs.
Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday.
Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice.
177006791
submission
Mr. Dollar Ton writes:
The Trump White House proposed a draft version of its budget request for NASA. It calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency's budget, with the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more, defunding the science programs by nearly 50 percent. Among the proposals: a two-thirds cut to astrophysics research; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science. Other significant cuts include ending funding for Mars Sample Return as well as the DAVINCI mission to Venus. The budget cuts also appear intended to force the closure of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
