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Comment Re:A good idea (Score 1) 96

by OpieTaylor (#64418762) Attached to: FTC To Vote On Noncompete Ban

Can't believe how many anti-worker bootlickers there are in this thread!

Non-competes need to be banned 100%, no exceptions, because of how companies use them: even **illegal** non-competes scare other companies from hiring workers covered by them, because they don't want the hassle of fighting it.

It has to be universal.

Comment Re:Reminds me of an online argument (Score 1) 91

You're right of course that lifestyle, social cues, emotions, sleep should be part of your health goals, including fat loss.

Where this research is helpful is in identifying which foods you should wean yourself off of.

"Wean" because the highly processed, sweetened/salted foods are addictive--and lifestyle, social cues, emotions, and sleep strengthen you to fight that addiction.

Comment Re:This IS my experience (Score 1) 95

What do you think about AI for automated testing? It seems like the AI could be trained on both existing tests and user behavior (from logs), and look for clear errors.

The AI would have much more patience than humans to check for defects that require a combination of factors to trigger.

Developers could then focus on the main scenarios, knowing that the AI safety net will check the outliers.

Comment Re:Americans Should Be Happy (Score 2) 25

by OpieTaylor (#63461442) Attached to: EU Takes On United States, Asia With Chip Subsidy Plan

"Almost everyone since you could make an argument that Taiwan losses if they are no longer absolutely critical to global microprocessor manufacture."

You could also argue that Taiwan wins when TSMC is no longer the strategic prize to be captured by China. And then leveraged to force US and EU to back down from sanctions.

If that scenario is off the table, then China has to deal Russia-like sanctions.

Submission + - Germany keeps two nuclear reactors on standby, reneging on pledge (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Germany will keep two of its three reactors operational through the end of 2022, despite a pledge to shut them all down by December 31. A likely winter gas shortage prompted the change.

"German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement on Monday the move did not mean Berlin was reneging on its long-standing promise to exit nuclear energy by the end of 2022" reports Reuters. Habeck went on to say, "It remains very improbable that we will have crisis situations and extreme scenarios" requiring further use of nuclear.

"Germany is part of a European system hit by a decline in Russian gas deliveries, the French nuclear power squeeze and a drought that has curbed hydroelectric production and cooling water supplies to thermal power stations as well as hampering barge deliveries of coal" Reuters says.

A problem with the planned use case for the reactors is that nuclear plants are not designed to be variable backup energy generators, but rather continuous first-line generators.

Submission + - Ships at sea are spoofing their location to evade sanctions, etc. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by artmancc
artmancc writes: Like aircraft, many of the world's ocean-going vessels are required to have transponders that broadcast their location. The information is public and can be seen on websites such as AIS Marine Traffic. But according to an analysis reported in The New York Times , a maritime data company called Windward "has uncovered more than 500 cases of ships manipulating their satellite navigation systems to hide their locations." The article, by Anatoly Kurmanaev, highlights the Cyprus-registered tanker Reliant, which was observed taking on oil at a Venezuelan refinery last December. At the same time, however, the ship was reporting its position as some 300 nautical miles (about 500 kilometers) away, "drifting innocuously off the coast of St. Lucia."

Submission + - Tree-Planting Schemes Are Just Creating Tree Cemeteries (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Thousands of cylindrical plastic tree guards line the grassland here, so uniform that, from a distance, it looks like a war memorial. This open space at the edge of King’s Lynn, a quiet market town in the east of England, was supposed to be a new carbon sink for Norfolk, offering 6,000 trees to tackle the climate crisis. The problem is that almost all of the trees that the guards were supposed to protect have died. Experts have told VICE World News that not only were they planted at the wrong time of year, but that they were planted on species-rich grassland that was already carbon negative, which has now been mostly destroyed by tree planting. Environmentalists also point out that the trees were planted so shallowly into the ground that most were unlikely to ever take root. By planting the seedlings in April, instead of in winter or early spring, they never had a good chance of survival anyway.

A pledge to tackle the climate crisis has turned into the opposite of carbon offsetting – all using council funding (they declined to tell VICE World News how much). “Councils don’t have a lot of money,” Dr Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist and local climate activist, told me as he showed me through the site. “There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it’s clear to me that doing good wasn’t ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That’s what makes me sad about the whole thing.”

A number of regional and national governments have announced enormous tree planting schemes in the past few years as momentum has built to tackle the climate crisis – and many of them haven’t gone to plan. Hackney Council’s partnership with charity Trees for Cities, which was funded by Coca Cola’s company Honest Organic, was criticized in 2020 when it appeared that most, if not all, of the 4,000 trees planted had died. Environmentalists have criticized Pakistan’s “10 billion trees” project for being an expensive waste of resources and Egypt, which will host the next UN climate conference, claims it will plant 100 million trees across the country.

Submission + - White House Bans Paywalls On Taxpayer-Funded Research (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The White House has updated federal rules to close a loophole that enabled journals to keep taxpayer-funded research behind a paywall. This policy guidance will end the current “optional embargo” that allows scientific publishing houses to paywall taxpayer-funded research behind a subscription to the whole journal. These costs add up quickly. For a college or university, even the bare minimum of journal subscriptions can add up to thousands of dollars a year, which is a hard sell on a limited budget. And that’s just the required reading.

The new rule also expands the definition of a “scholarly publication” to include “not only peer-reviewed articles but also book chapters and conference proceedings.” And unlike the previous policy, which covered some 20 federal agencies, this new rule applies to all of them. In short: If we the people paid for the research, you the company don’t get to refuse us access to it.

While this announcement was something of a surprise, it builds on trends dating back a decade. The growth of preprint servers where authors could publish studies submitted for public review has made research more widely available. There are, or rather were, restrictions on how long journals could hide federally-funded research behind a paywall. This new rule supersedes them all. Under the new policy, research performed with federal dollars must be made public on the same day it appears in a scientific journal. While research may still be published in paywalled journals, the same work must also be made available for free. Federal agencies should have plans in place to support the initiative within a year.

Submission + - US Life Expectancy Falls Again in 'Historic' Setback (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the average Americancould expect to live until the age of 76, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday. The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years. The reduction has been particularly steep among Native Americans and Alaska Natives, the National Center for Health Statistics reported. Average life expectancy in those groups was shortened by four years in 2020 alone. The cumulative decline since the pandemic started, more than six and a half years on average, has brought life expectancy to 65 among Native Americans and Alaska Natives — on par with the figure for all Americans in 1944. In 2021, the shortening of life span was more pronounced among white Americans than among Black Americans, who saw greater reductions in the first year of the pandemic. White Americans saw the second-largest decline in average life expectancy in 2021, a drop of one year, to 76.4 in 2021 from 77.4 in 2020. The decline was steeper than that among Black Americans, at seven-tenths of a year. That was followed by Hispanic Americans, whose life expectancy dropped only two-tenths of a year in 2021. But both Black and Hispanic Americans were hit hard in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Average life expectancy for Hispanic Americans fell by four years, to 77.9 from 81.9 in 2019. The figure for Black Americans declined almost as much, by more than three years to 71.5 years in 2020. White Americans experienced the smallest decline during the first year of the pandemic, a drop of 1.4 years to 77.4 from 78.8. For white and Black Americans, life expectancy is now the lowest it has been since 1995, federal researchers said. Asian Americans held the highest life expectancy among racial and ethnic groups included in the new analysis: 83.5 years, on average. The figure fell only slightly last year, from 83.6 in 2020.

Submission + - AI-Generated Artwork Wins First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. “I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate’s name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair’s website (PDF), he won in the digital art category with a work called “Theatre D'opera Spatial.” The image, which Allen printed on canvas for submission, is gorgeous. It depicts a strange scene that looks like it could be from a space opera, and it looks like a masterfully done painting. Classical figures in a Baroque hall stair through a circular viewport into a sun-drenched and radiant landscape.

But Allen did not paint “Theatre D'opera Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs. “TL;DR — Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize,” artist Genel Jumalon said in a viral tweet about Allen’s win. “Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty." “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” a Twitter user going by OmniMorpho said in a reply that gained over 2,000 likes. “If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”

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