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Comment JHFC ACM (Score 1) 28

This is likely the proceedings with the paper:

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/epd...

It appears the ACM PDF reader loaded an 850MB PDF into my phone's browser and has been stuck doing a search on "beam steering" for ten minutes.

No joke, I read ACM papers on information retrieval and human computer action three decades ago and this is just hostile design.

I'll try again on my desktop at home tomorrow but maybe somebody can extract the paper before then.

And, yeah, as others have said this is old (November 2025) but it would be handy to have integrated with my Home Assistant. Much better than setting up ESP-32's with 26Ghz radars in each room.

Comment Re:"Potentially" is doing a lot of work here (Score 1) 57

These missiles are known for evading Patriot PAC-3's with non-ballistic maneuvering.

That's at least part of what needs CPU. However a $6 233MHz ESP-32 could handle those calculations.

Those nVidia boards are often used for home video boxes, including transcoding. It's possible this was just a video uplink component.

Reportedly the Tomahawks used in the Minab Massacre were video-guided and did fly-arounds to time the double-tap and experimental use of thermobaric detonation of unspent fuel to incinerate the surviving girls and responding parents.

We should worry more about bringing those people to Justice than whatever Russia is doing.

Comment Re:It's PBS, there's no money for anything (Score 1) 97

Their finances have been widely covered in the news.

Their IT Lead is making ~$180K.

Their interest income alone was $500K.

They didn't have a local copy strategically, not for a lack of $5K.

Cloud backup is just another backup, not primary storage, if you care about your data.

Some of us have online, nearline, offline, offsite, and multiple cloud backups with much smaller budgets.

That's for people who care about their data (including the bean counters).

Many IT folks (most?) have had to "I told you so" after a bean counter said no to a small spend. I wouldn't assume the IT department is incompetent without evidence.

Comment Re:the solution to "the mental health crisis" (Score 1) 254

My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

Comment Re: If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score 1) 43

If the original ToS on Twitch grants Amazon a license to create derivative works then they don't have anything to worry about.

It's like your local superstation had the rights to run ads on Star Trek in addition to the license fee they paid but they didn't therefore get a right to create a new Star Trek series or publish a "Best Moments of STTNG 1989" show around the holidays.

Now if they had gone to Paramount about the Best-Of show in theory they could have negotiated a license for that, having already been media partners. Heck, some software company got Riker to pitch their product from the Bridge.

The big authors' settlement with OpenAI sets at least some precedent in this nascent field of IP law (which is enforced whether we like it or not).

But I've never heard of a Twitch streamer talking about a derivative work that Amazon created from their show using their words or likeness.

To be fair Youtube does indeed do a yearly "best of" show.

Who knows, maybe we'll see an AI Hassan Piker doing and saying some wildly ill-advised shit in the near future. Would not be entirety shocking.

Comment Re:Zoom Should Not Be Trusted (Score 2) 12

This is smart but harder than it needs to be.

Do we have a wrapper available that can let native Zoom launch and only have access to ~/.config/zoom and some USB input devices but not the rest of the machine?

Somehow building a custom MAC profile is expert-level stuff two decades on and not an end user's job.

An on-demand screen sharing permission popup should be achievable.

It's silly that a browser sandbox is better than any native sandbox available.

Perhaps such a tool readily exists and just needs to be mainstreamed into existing distros.

I know there was a Debian project a while back that aimed for all services to pass systemd strict security by default but nobody wanted to do the work.

That's the right mindset but separate from user apps.

Comment Atomic Structure (Score 1, Interesting) 22

There's some interesting stuff going on trying to understand more of the atomic structure beyond the current models.

The math on gluons has worked quite well but for some reason questions like, "OK, but what are gluons?" has been derided as "crank science" in Pergamon Press-gated Academia.

Such a diversion from Science from the beginning of Human history through the 1960's.

Structures like DeLay-Bendebury Fibers and other models of what's going on behind the math are happening outside of Academia where Physics PhD's are discarded and PhysEd BA's are celebrated.

Whichever model comes next will likely happen adjacent to the podcaster sphere and be reduced to useful engineering before Academics take a look at it.

There are plenty of good researchers working in institutions but for fundamental revisions at this point they all seem to need to leave Academia and go out on their own seeking private investment.

Which is fine except that we're all paying for the uninterested remainder. The great advancements that make our lives better always begin in fundamental science generating new models that better describe this reality. We don't get much from a jobs program for Mathematicians playing Physicists and it's very expensive.

It's quite strange that most people find the status quo completely acceptable and are willing to throw another $100B at a higher energy collider but are unwilling to grant base-layer investigations that are nearly free in comparison.

If we believe the former head of Skunkworks they've recruited the best and brightest since the 1970's and had made breakthroughs by the early 90's in at least topological physics. So we get to pay for that but aren't allowed to use it which is intolerable. But it's also understanble in a pre-Internet era where the only feasible choices were String Theory or black projects.

Comment Re:This is a bit too new to tell (Score 2) 182

You didn't get it. This is speeding tickets issued by fully automated systems. No court has ever seen this.

The solution is to stop treating it as a money-printing system. Punish people who speed in front of kindergardens, and leave people alone who at the city edge in the industrial zone on a Sunday evening didn't decelerate quite fast enough coming in from the highway.

But complaining about getting in front of a judge to discuss how The Internet Moderators have treated you, what the fuck are you doing with your life.

I literally have no clue why you're saying that or who you think you're talking to.

Comment Re:This is a bit too new to tell (Score 4, Insightful) 182

The DSA has teeth, but bureaucracy is slow.

Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.

Comment math (Score 1) 111

Flock says that in optimal conditions, its cameras accurately read more than 96% of license plate characters.

that's a per-character stat.

If your average license plate has, say, 6 characters, you get a 78% total probability that it reads them right.

If you have 8 Flock cameras in your town of let's say 100,000 people, sitting at busy roads or intersections, 10 to 20 thousand cars per day is a reasonable estimate, which means you get 62,400 to 124,800 mis-read license plates. Per day. Every day. Under optimal conditions.

That's more false readings than you have people.

I wonder if just randomly assigning traffic tickets to license plates in your register wouldn't get you a lower false positive rate.

Comment Re:Disconnecting the car? (Score 1) 249

Why go to effort to duplicate what I already have and already paid for?

Sorry you utterly failed to sell me on this idea.

Because you have the actively user-hostile version, as discussed. It is extremely sad that such tech is user-hostile, and it is equally sad that there aren't enough regulations in place to mandate that such options are opt-in-with-informed-consent, or able to be disabled in a way that retains as much functionality as possible while still respecting an opt-out, but since there is not, the options are either:

1. accept your system in the state in which it currently exists, complete with the ads or potential for them, or

2. disconnect and claw back as much functionality as you can.

You've accepted the first, and it's 100% your right to do so. However, since the situation we currently live in does not allow for both.

Comment Re:Only response (Score 1) 31

By complete coincidence I recently purchased this cordless angle grinder kit after watching a glowing review from one of my regular channels and wondering how good it could be for $75. It's not as good as a Milwaukee but I've been using it around the house and I'm going to modify a shoe rack with it this evening.

Of course this has nothing to do with the story and surely these aren't the types of arms the Framers envisioned when they set the foundation of upholding the Constitution upon the duties of the Citizenry.

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