Comment Best of Luck (Score 1) 2
I hope you find something good soon.
Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7
Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.
Comment One thing is faster - increase of technical debt (Score 2) 139
I really do think coding using AI tools is a bit faster, at least it seems that way to me. As most of the morning but lengthy work can be done faster by AI.
But I am also pretty sure it's VERY easy to rapidly incur technical debt, especially if you are telling AI to review its own work. Yeah it will do some stuff but who is to say post review fixes it's really better?
More than ever I think the right approach to coding with AI is to build up carefully crafted frameworks that are solid (maybe use AI to help but review and tests very carefully) then allow AI to build on top of solid fundamental structures that you know are solid, and do not let the AI modify those - maybe let it ask for feature requests.
Submission + - SPAM: Can great art be reimagined as mathematics?
An anonymous reader writes: Mathematics and art have long been portrayed as opposing modes of human understanding. So does it make any sense to reimagine iconic art through the lens of mathematics? Artist and writer, Justin Mullins, argues that it does. He reinterprets Dali's Lobster Telephone using the mathematics of vacuous truths, compares proofs of Pythagoras' Theorem to Monet's repeated studies of Rouen Cathedral and links Einstein's struggle with the cosmological constant to Géricault's Raft of the Medusa . Mullins says all art is homomorphic--transformations that preserves structure--and says his own work follows the same principle.
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Comment Re:With Science (Score 1) 95
Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.
Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."
There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.
Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123
"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.
"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...
[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.
First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.
Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.
"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...
[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.
First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.
Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.
Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 92
The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:
Trump guts nuclear safety regulations
“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”
We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record
Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 92
Are You Scared Yet?
I would be.
The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!
Christopher Allen Wright (born January 15, 1965) "12) is an American government official, engineer, and businessman serving as the 17th United States secretary of energy since February 2025. Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America's second largest hydraulic fracturing company, and served on the boards of Oklo, Inc., a nuclear technology company, and EMX Royalty Corp., a Canadian mineral rights and mining rights royalty payment company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright
Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:
Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
"If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn't be such a great concern, but it just doesn't seem feasible."
We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.
But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.
Comment Re:Once again (Score 1) 11
Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.
There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.
Submission + - Am I The Last Surviving 3-Digit User ID on Slashdot? 5
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: Some distinctions mean very little to anyone other than the singular individual holding them. Are there others remaining? Does Rob Malda ever bother checking in here? Who remembers the promising ascent and rapid zenith of VA Linux Systems? How about the decade-old sighting of the Slashdot PT Cruiser?
If you're out there we want to hear from you. Or just tell us why we don't.
If you're out there we want to hear from you. Or just tell us why we don't.
Comment Re:Once again (Score 2) 11
Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.
If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.
Comment Re:I use Win11 (Score 1) 24
...the desktop apps are better than just about anything you will find on Linux or the BSDs.
I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.
It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.
Comment But that is everything (Score 2) 92
as long as the topic is not controversial and political.
The problem is that the Wiki mods are VERY VERY biased. Not just a little. I have run into this personally just trying to make very simple edits. They would not accept simple facts that I had backup sources for.
This was just for movie credits for an actress that at some point had turned conservative...
So for anything political, Wikipide will be factually wrong, sometimes (or often) egregiously so.
But that's ok if it's only for political content right???
But there's the trouble you see. It affects what is political TO THEM in ways you cannot comprehend, so ANY page might be touched by the corruption of the Wikipedia moderator biases. I wouldn't think a simply actress filmography would be affected yet it was. No visitor other than that page would ever know it was inaccurate or incomplete.
So you can trust absolutely nothing from Wikipedia without extensive checking of what facts they refuse to list. Which makes the entire body of work garbage - I have not used it for years now.
Comment The future is China (Score 1) 2
and it's here today.
No homelessness. No medical bankruptcy. No food insecurity. Affordable education. Decent places for everyone to live.
New Large Coral Reef Discovered Off Naples Containing Rare Ancient Corals (independent.co.uk) 13
Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces."
Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...
hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."
Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.
The undersea research was funded by the EU.
Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.
hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."
Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.
The undersea research was funded by the EU.
Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.
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MAC user's dynamic debugging list evaluator? Never heard of that.
