Comment Re: Robot battle reenactment (Score 1) 64
If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.
Comment By any other name - (Score 1) 100
Norbert Schorghofer is an absolutely epic name, I hope we can all agree on this.
Submission + - The global race to make a practical quantum computer just took a big leap forwar (phys.org)
alternative_right writes: Quantum computers harness the power of quantum mechanics, the laws that govern physics at atomic and subatomic scales. Among various designs for such machines, Helios is a trapped-ion quantum computer, which means it uses charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.
It operates using 98 qubitsâ"the units of information that a quantum computer uses to process data. This number of qubits makes it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far. Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025.
Helios and its predecessors use an architecture (or operational structure) with separate regions for storing and processing quantum information. The architecture is called a QCCD (quantum charge-coupled device) and was invented in 2002. This is akin to the architecture of classical computers that have memory for storage (hard disk drives, solid-state drives) and a separate processor (CPU, GPU).
The specific geometry of Helios resembles a rosette, with a ring for storage and two streamers for processing. The crucial element is the four-way X junction where they meet. A QCCD physically transports the charged objects (the ions) electrically from the storage to the processing regions.
The processing is done using laser pulses. This requires a quantum algorithm to be broken up into ion transport and quantum processing. This differs substantially from other quantum computing architectures, such as superconducting qubits, where the qubits are fixed in space and processing is executed by electrical signals switched on and off in time.
It operates using 98 qubitsâ"the units of information that a quantum computer uses to process data. This number of qubits makes it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far. Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025.
Helios and its predecessors use an architecture (or operational structure) with separate regions for storing and processing quantum information. The architecture is called a QCCD (quantum charge-coupled device) and was invented in 2002. This is akin to the architecture of classical computers that have memory for storage (hard disk drives, solid-state drives) and a separate processor (CPU, GPU).
The specific geometry of Helios resembles a rosette, with a ring for storage and two streamers for processing. The crucial element is the four-way X junction where they meet. A QCCD physically transports the charged objects (the ions) electrically from the storage to the processing regions.
The processing is done using laser pulses. This requires a quantum algorithm to be broken up into ion transport and quantum processing. This differs substantially from other quantum computing architectures, such as superconducting qubits, where the qubits are fixed in space and processing is executed by electrical signals switched on and off in time.
Submission + - Election Spam Is About To Get Even Worse In Your Inbox Thanks To New Google Move (dailywire.com)
alternative_right writes: Google quietly changed Gmail this week to make it easier for political campaigns and PACs to bypass spam folders and pump endless fundraising emails into the inboxes of millions of users.
The move could help qualifying political groups keep fundraising pleas out of the email graveyard and boost donations ahead of the midterm elections. The change follows years of complaints from Republicans that Gmailâ(TM)s spam filters disproportionately blocked their emails more often than Democrats.
The companyâ(TM)s new policy, first reported by the New York Times, came through an opaque policy announcement on its Help Center on Monday.
The move could help qualifying political groups keep fundraising pleas out of the email graveyard and boost donations ahead of the midterm elections. The change follows years of complaints from Republicans that Gmailâ(TM)s spam filters disproportionately blocked their emails more often than Democrats.
The companyâ(TM)s new policy, first reported by the New York Times, came through an opaque policy announcement on its Help Center on Monday.
Comment The US Gov has only itself to blame (Score 1) 165
By my count, the US government has had at least 4 different moon landing programs in the last couple of decades. In fact, there are probably more than that just in shuttle-derived programs. The Orion capsule was the only working system to come out of one of the earlier programs, which was then incorporated into the current plan.
The whole human space flight program has been held hostage by congress, or several specific congressmen, who see it as a cash-cow for their states. They have held up, delayed, and interfered with plans to such an extent that it's effectively been on hold. Then NASA's budget is disputed and reduced every single year - except for the SLS, which NASA is compelled to use. Even though it costs $4 billion per launch, is mostly disposable, and is years and years behind schedule.
Then there was the huge distraction of the orbital moon station. Which, it turned out, was unnecessary.
They've also changed their minds about the lander more times than I can count. The SpaceX option just looks ridiculously oversized and impractical. The one from Blue Origin is also behind schedule and, frankly, Blue Origin doesn't have a very successful history with hardware.
The whole project has been a completely unfocused mess, which I hate to say seems typical of most large multi-year projects in the US these days. It's like the whole country has become bogged down and forgotten how to get things done.
Admittedly, a vehicle like the Apollo lander and CM wouldn't be allowed to fly these days - they were considered extraordinarily unsafe even at the time. The goal, however, was to show off to the USSR, so the risks were accepted. It's lucky they didn't lose any astronauts during that program.
Comment Re:Heavy Lifting (Score 3, Interesting) 66
Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.
Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.
If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.
Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."
I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.
Submission + - Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help ship (theguardian.com)
Alain Williams writes: Mark Zuckerberg has faced questions over why a small cruise ship in south-east Alaska rescued a stranded skiff and its crew when his 387ft superyacht had been closer.
The Silicon Valley billionaire’s yacht, worth a reported $300m, is said to have “repeatedly” declined to assist when a nearby boat called for help last week.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, was not on board at the time, a spokesperson told Forbes.
When a nearby 21ft skiff ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau, the Alaska Beacon reported operators of a cruise ship that was further away than Zuckerberg’s yacht came to the rescue.
“I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky.
“Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this).”
The Silicon Valley billionaire’s yacht, worth a reported $300m, is said to have “repeatedly” declined to assist when a nearby boat called for help last week.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, was not on board at the time, a spokesperson told Forbes.
When a nearby 21ft skiff ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau, the Alaska Beacon reported operators of a cruise ship that was further away than Zuckerberg’s yacht came to the rescue.
“I’m on a small-ship Alaska cruise with my son,” a passenger on the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy posted on Bluesky.
“Our boat rescued a stranded vessel last night and apparently we did that after the Coast Guard radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht – which was closer – and they repeatedly refused to respond. (There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this).”
Submission + - AI Co's bulk-buying rare books, remove spine, high speed scan and shredding them (x.com) 3
schwit1 writes: A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
This is irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026.
This is irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026.
Comment Re:Can I pay him not to post? (Score 2) 215
Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"
We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.
I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.
Submission + - AI won't take your job - but you may get fired anyway (radicalpolitics.org)
johanneswilm writes: For a handful of very specific engineering problems, one can specify hard requirements. One might ask, for instance: how many sensors, how much CPU and GPU power, and how many lines of code does an autonomous vehicle need in order to drive more safely than a human driver in 99.99 percent of cases?
But for the vast majority of software, there is no such fixed number. We can simply add more and more features to make software more convenient for users and to add functions that no one ever thought possible in the past. This elasticity of demand — the economist’s term for how much more of something people want when it becomes cheaper — is the key to understanding why AI-assisted programming is unlikely to eliminate programming jobs.
Much of the programming world, particularly web development, is centered around the United States, where shareholder value is the legally and culturally dominant corporate priority. The influential investor class, dominated by the wealthier segments of the baby boomer generation, has been told by AI company CEOs that large language models can replace software engineers. These investors expect technology companies to demonstrate commitment to AI by reducing their engineering headcount, regardless of whether such reductions make technical sense.
But for the vast majority of software, there is no such fixed number. We can simply add more and more features to make software more convenient for users and to add functions that no one ever thought possible in the past. This elasticity of demand — the economist’s term for how much more of something people want when it becomes cheaper — is the key to understanding why AI-assisted programming is unlikely to eliminate programming jobs.
Much of the programming world, particularly web development, is centered around the United States, where shareholder value is the legally and culturally dominant corporate priority. The influential investor class, dominated by the wealthier segments of the baby boomer generation, has been told by AI company CEOs that large language models can replace software engineers. These investors expect technology companies to demonstrate commitment to AI by reducing their engineering headcount, regardless of whether such reductions make technical sense.
Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 120
It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.
Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.
If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.
Comment Nice, but... (Score 5, Insightful) 68
... sadly for the Americans, the rest of the world now knows they can't count on a US based provider for this kind of thing any more.
It was uncomfortable enough relying so heavily on American software back when it couldn't be switched off remotely on the say so of an idiot. Today it's an intolerable risk.
Comment Re:Amazon is corrupt! (Score 4, Insightful) 22
I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.
Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.
Submission + - Max Planck Slapped With Paper Retractions by Suspected Rogue Algorithm (science.org) 1
He Who Has No Name writes: Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:
"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."
The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.
"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."
However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:
"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."
"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."
The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.
"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."
However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:
"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."
Comment Re:Dictators (Score 3, Informative) 55
The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.
Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.
