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Comment Re:Outsourcing (Score 2) 38

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

Comment They're Doomed (Score 1) 106

I've been using AI to write code recently. I figured I should give it a go.
Not reviewing and understanding and editing the output code is a recipe for disaster.

For example, in code for a cryptographic hash function there are padding rules to bring the data size to a multiple of the block size and add a length. So for example with SHA3, a minimum of 65 extra bits. If your data length mod the block size is 65 bits less than the block size, then add the pad bit, put the length at the end of the block and fill in between with zeroes.

If you are longer than that, then it all spills over into the next block and you add a block.

If your length exactly ends up fitting in the block size, then you add a whole extra block with just the padding bit and length and a bunch of zeroes.

The hash that claude spit out missed that last case, so creating a hard to find bug, where in one out of 512 bit sizes, the hash fails. If I had not spotted that by reviewing the code in detail, there would have been a catastrophic bug creating a security vulnerability and system failures in chips.

So read the code and fix it or be doomed.

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Science

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 Re: Damn! (Score 1) 151

>These employees produced valuable work

Rocksmith 2014 is/was a wonderful thing. It's still on Steam and available with all the different DLCs.
Rocksmith's current version is crap subscription nonsense with greatly reduced functionality and none of the good music available in Rocksmith 2014.

Their last good output wrt Rocksmith was 12 years ago. I don't hold any hope of them returning Rocksmith to its former glory.

Comment Re:problem already solved 40 years ago (Score 1) 89

The only reason I can think of, especially with a lot of storage, is that the keyboards could be "sticky" for a person, but the monitor fixed to the desk. I'd say HP missed the mark on this one; going minimal specs and having the big stuff either with the screen or centralized would be much easier.

The keyboard could also be good. Like with mechanical keys and a satisfying thunk or thonk or click or whatever floats your boat. But I expect that it won't be that. The keyboard will be horrible.

Comment Re:Story checks out. (Score 1) 93

>The statistical methods used medical studies are relatively much simpler than in say, engineering. That's not where gotchas are. So we need robust studies, a convergence of evidence, and meta-analyses from competent centers.

I don't follow (that last line). Engineering, at least in my area uses fairly simple models because we can get lots of data and we can control confounders because silicon doesn't care the same way that human subjects do. E.G. for PUF reliability you can measure the distribution of pairwise hamming distance across thousands of chips. This is more conservative than golden value hamming distance, but you compensate for the drop in sensitivity by getting more data.

The need for meta analyses in medicine comes about because of the large amount of underpowered studies in medicine and nutrition. The use of statistics in the source studies is often, well creative. The metas read like the statistical clean up crew. It feels like larger studies (costing more, I know) would lead to simpler statistics - but that's a guess.

Definitely I've come to 'trust' some researchers to do the research in a way that you know the claims match the data, because they've been consistent in doing that. Many others I just ignore for the opposite reason. Medicine has had its research problems, but nutrition research is where the real shit show has been going on for decades.

Comment Nonsense (Score 1) 93

I'm involved in two companies after leaving Intel.
Everyone works remotely. There are no office costs to pay. We meet online.

If you're starting a company today and you want to be free to employ people for their skills rather than their location, this is the way to do it. Subscribe to one of the many online conferencing services and get to work.

Comment Re:Story checks out. (Score 1) 93

>Unless you have at least a masters in the related subject, ideally a PhD

I disagree. You can spend a few years studying the nomenclature, norms, methods and underlying science and be entirely capable of reading and understanding a paper in context for a field that is not the one you started in.

Sometimes it's what you bring to the party that helps. I bring some knowledge on statistical inference and experimental methods, which arises from my day job. My interest was understanding my own health. It took about a decade of reading papers and textbooks to get up to speed. It has freed me from listening to health advise in media and not knowing how to tell if it's sound. I can go to the sources and see them in context.

If you want a difficult statistical environment, try education - That was my wife's PhD topic. My domain has no shortage of data. I can make all the data I need from silicon. The difficulty is in understanding it and what to do about it.

You could read my most recent paper ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007... ) and understand it with only a solid grasp of school level algebra and a spot of probability. I wouldn't expect anyone not involved in my field to care one bit about this algorithm, but I like it. It's neat.

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