Comment Re:I remember when that happened (Score 1) 54
Comment Quantum Papers (Score 1) 21
These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.
Comment Re:Is this (corporate) exceptionalism, USA? (Score 1) 21
It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.
Comment Huh? (Score 1) 2
I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)
I don't recall being asked a damn thing.
My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.
Comment This is an interesting topic, at least to me. (Score 1) 2
I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.
What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)
Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.
I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.
The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.
Submission + - The MOST artificial intelligence is Chinese? (linkedin.com) 2
If we (non-Chinese?) were actually technically ahead of them (Chinese heathens?) then this would not be an issue. Unlike the computer security race we lost a few years ago? However the real concern is not with these public AI tools, but with the secret ones, both government and private... (Bond villain conspiracy theories, anyone?) But I don't think there is likely to be an outspoken and authentic expert from inside China also inside the (Slashdot) house.
Personal disclaimers needed? Lately most of my AI games of the non-fun type have involved Claude, but Gemini keeps sticking it's remarkably unintelligent nose into my business to the point where I've become much more tolerant of Bing than I used to be. More broadly, there used to be a time when I would have high confidence of seeing useful discussions on Slashdot with some known experts who were probably the real people to boot (in at least two senses of "real"), but these days Slashdot has also been infected with the lack-of-trust virus. Another terminal case? I can't say, but I'm no longer surprised when one of the oldtimers keels over. Bash.org had a great collection of jokes...
Comment Ok. (Score 4, Interesting) 78
So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Comment Re:What's it made of? (Score 1) 61
They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.
Comment Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score 4, Interesting) 61
As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.
*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.
Comment Re:Get off my lawn (Score 1) 79
The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.
Comment Re:Get off my lawn (Score 1) 79
Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!
We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!
Comment Re:First Post! (Score 1) 79
Pah, youngsters.
However, some of you might be old enough to remember the April 1st when the front page turned pink and a link to Cute Overload caused absolute chaos. Did CmdrTaco ever get a pony, btw?
Comment Re:Recidivism rates (Score 1) 151
And the number of false convictions (roughly 25% of those convicted in the US) doesn't cause a problem for you?
Then you're part of the problem.