Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Legs never made sense (Score 1) 59

Not really - legs do make sense because they take a robot everywhere, work, stairs, home, jungle, or clifftop. They just do not take it at speed on flat, clean surfaces (roads, factory and warehouse floors), where the bulk of initial deployments lie.

This is really a response to the many Chinese robots out with both legs and wheels. The Boston Dynamics folks were not inspired by anime the same way the Chinese roboticists were.

Comment Re: We decided we don't want nuclear (Score 4, Interesting) 122

The Europeans are currently scrounging around for 500 million - half a billion - to repair a hole in the Chernobyl sarcophagus made by single 50K drone. If I have my zeros correct, that's a 10,000x attack/repair cost ratio. So yes, some societies decided we don't want nuclear.

Comment Re: This is just "God did it" (Score 1) 51

Thanks for the annular eclipse versus total eclipse reminder. Yes, the moon is both slightly smaller and slightly larger than the sun at various points in its elliptical orbit around the earth, and the earth's own elliptical orbit around the sun. But they are both effectively the same size to our eyes.

Comment Re: This is just "God did it" (Score 1) 51

No. The moon is both slightly smaller and slightly larger than the sun at various points in its elliptical orbit around the earth, and the earth's own elliptical orbit around the sun. But they are effectively the same size to us.

Pointing out that their sizes allegedly did not coincide for billions of years does not make the current coincidence any less remarkable.

--
From Google AI:
  â The Sun's Apparent Size: Ranges from about 1,887 to 1,952 arcseconds (averaging ~1,910â) depending on Earth's distance from the Sun.
â The Moon's Apparent Size: Ranges from about 1,710 to 2,010 arcseconds (averaging ~1,860â to 1,865â) depending on the Moon's distance from Earth in its orbit.

Comment Stack Overflow For Agents (SOFA) + a skills body (Score 2) 42

Stack Overflow have built out a 'Stack Overflow For Agents' (SOFA).

It's at https://agents.stackoverflow.c...

But to sit on their new sofa, Stack Overflow has you tell your agent harness to add this 'skill' markdown file:
        https://agents.stackoverflow.c....
To me, it's obvious any coding agent's human-in-charge must check any 'skill' for incompetence and malice before asking their harness to obey it. But look at the length of that skill document! I gave up at the 25% mark. Plus, the skill is pointed at via a URL whose underlying document can change at any time. So you can't take the word of a friend who vetted the skill yesterday. Nor can you tell a new IDE to use the SOFA skill you vetted last week.

Imagine all the developer-time wasted manually auditing a constantly-shifting system of "skill" markdown files. I think a trusted GNU/EFF-like body is needed for the 'AI skills' era, providing where 'well-known', human-audited (and static!) 'approved' skills are stored. New skills incorporate these 'approved' skills by referring to the -well-known, adding modfications as required.

A similar concept exists with software licenses: GNU.org stores a static copy of the GPL 2.0. In a codebase, you can just glance at a LICENSE file to understand the licensing conditions. You can compare or diff the license file against the GPL 2.0 to verify. Some licenses add exceptions and carveouts, like the GPL v2.0 with the classpath exception: https://openjdk.org/legal/gplv...

Comment Re: This is just "God did it" (Score 0, Troll) 51

There is a God. Just look up: the sun and the moon are the same apparent size EXACTLY. True for the only body in the solar system with life capable of appreciating this apparent coincidence.

For a math argument, take a look at the paper 'A second look at the second law' by Sewell.

Comment On-prem is back in an uncertain world. (Score 1) 173

Just in the last 24 months, Gulf, Iranian, Ukrainian and Russian cloud DCs have been targeted, including different availability zones of the same cloud vendor. So I think it's time corporates and governments start re-recognising the benefits of on-prem data centres. Yes, the old, distributed office-building DCs: halon fire suppression, lit/dark fibre, AC, cooling, giant boxy UPSs and captive power generation - all that. What makes it better now is that computers have gotten a lot more efficient (e.g., die shrinks, ARM solutions), while compute demands of most core business processes hasn't changed (I consider most AI loads are NOT truly 'keeps the business going' core. More like icing on a cake)

Comment Responsibility Deflection (Score 1) 102

Voltus will sign up homes and businesses and give them financial incentives to curb their usage when local power demand is high

For businesses, tweaking temperature and increasing HVAC recirculation (i.e cutting down on fresh air) reduces power consumption.

So when the AC air in these building is unusually cold, warm or stale:
- at the doctor's,
- at the mall,
- at the cinema,
- at (God forbid!) the hospital! ...should we think of Voltus and Google?

What is Ellen Zuckerman, head of energy market development for North and South America at Google, doing to mitigate the impact on vulnerable on humans? Does she have constraints applied in her spreadsheet model to avoid this? Or has the accountability headache of managing impact just been passed downward to "Where it belongs!"

Slashdot Top Deals

"It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling" - R. Frost

Working...