Comment Re:I see (Score 1) 94
You mean, presently? You mean, at this moment?
Comment What Will Their Excuse Be? (Score 2) 32
I wonder what the UK's excuse will be for failing to investigate and prosecute child exploitation by literally everyone from top to bottom within their demesne if they finally get their way on crushing the ability for individuals to be secure in their personal effects.
Comment Mind's Eye, or Simply Guessing? Not Compression. (Score 1) 93
There's probably some big argument to be made about whether or not there's some deep philosophical meaning or inference behind this line of experimentation. The AI regeneration of the original image from the latent space "minimap" is kind of like how humans look at, you know, maps, or even just at objects in general, and infer a multitude of details, big and small, about things like objects, locations, their appearance and function. It might be fun and interesting to get back text weight interpretations, not from the image, but from the latent space files post processing.
But, fundamentally, we're asking the AI to guess at what it was in the original picture. This is not image compression and should never be used this way. Imagine if this sort of thing was done with surveillance camera video. It would reduce the evidentiary quality of photography to the level of a human eye witness, which is notoriously awful. This is a neat experiment and nothing more from the perspective of image processing. The amount of detail lost and gained is the same as asking a human to "imagine" something with a verbal description, the same as storing an image as a set of text prompts. Why bother with using any kind of image representation if that's the case?
It would be interesting if the image to text prompt conversion could also be fed into a chatbot and spit out a story about a series of images.
But, fundamentally, we're asking the AI to guess at what it was in the original picture. This is not image compression and should never be used this way. Imagine if this sort of thing was done with surveillance camera video. It would reduce the evidentiary quality of photography to the level of a human eye witness, which is notoriously awful. This is a neat experiment and nothing more from the perspective of image processing. The amount of detail lost and gained is the same as asking a human to "imagine" something with a verbal description, the same as storing an image as a set of text prompts. Why bother with using any kind of image representation if that's the case?
It would be interesting if the image to text prompt conversion could also be fed into a chatbot and spit out a story about a series of images.
Comment Re:And then ... (Score 1) 202
This is highly unlikely.
Can I have some of the drugs you're on? I'm tired of knowing about how Assange has been treated.
Submission + - Senators Introduce a Bill To Protect Open-Source Software (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: When researchers discovered a vulnerability in the ubiquitous open-source log4j system last year that could’ve affected hundreds of millions of devices, the executive branch snapped into action and major tech companies huddled with the White House. Now, leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are introducing legislation to help secure open-source software, first reported by The Cybersecurity 202. Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and top ranking Republican Rob Portman (Ohio) plan to hold a vote next week on the bill they’re co-sponsoring.
The Peters/Portman legislation would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop a way to evaluate and reduce risk in systems that rely on open-source software. Later, CISA would study how that framework could apply to critical infrastructure. The log4j “incident presented a serious threat to federal systems and critical infrastructure companies — including banks, hospitals, and utilities — that Americans rely on each and every day for essential services,” Peters said in a written statement. “This common-sense, bipartisan legislation will help secure open source software and further fortify our cybersecurity defenses against cybercriminals and foreign adversaries who launch incessant attacks on networks across the nation.”
The Peters/Portman legislation would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop a way to evaluate and reduce risk in systems that rely on open-source software. Later, CISA would study how that framework could apply to critical infrastructure. The log4j “incident presented a serious threat to federal systems and critical infrastructure companies — including banks, hospitals, and utilities — that Americans rely on each and every day for essential services,” Peters said in a written statement. “This common-sense, bipartisan legislation will help secure open source software and further fortify our cybersecurity defenses against cybercriminals and foreign adversaries who launch incessant attacks on networks across the nation.”
Submission + - Hunga Tonga Eruption Put Over 50 Billion Kilograms of Water Into Stratosphere (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface. We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor—so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.
Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.
The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped.
Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.
The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped.
Comment Re:Faraday cage (Score 1) 131
Faraday cages are made of cheap aluminum, and players will have no difficulty walking in or out of the door. There are no difficulties.
Also in my experience, they can be completely full of holes, as long as the holes are smaller than the wavelength of the EM signal they are trying to block, hence why they are called cages.
FTFY
Comment Re:Good. (Score 2) 164
Plus, the government is full of people who were put there and kept there, by voters.
FTFY.
Bzzzt, wrong, the vast majority of people working in the government are unelected bureaucrats, been that way since the aftermath of the assassination of President Garfield in 1881. Not that your points are wrong, but the problems are deeper and more intractable than you think they are. The elections, especially of the US President, are a mere dog and pony show when it comes to the machinations of the government as a whole.
Comment Re:Chalk one up for Harmonious Discourse (Score 1) 72
You'd have to take my comment seriously and think it wasn't an attempt at dry/gallows humor to suggest such a thing. It's just humorous that there's pro/anti-censorship, pro/anti-big tech, pro/anti-Zionism, pro/anti-woke rancor just baked into the cake of any discussion of TFA. All they need to add are police brutality videos and antebellum Confederate monument removal for maximum rage.
Comment No-Win Scenario (Score 2) 72
Given a deep analysis of the confluence of interconnected, politically-charged topics raised in TFA, I've come to the conclusion that there isn't a comment to make here making any kind of point that won't result in a mod and flame war.
Maybe we should censor this study/article instead in the interests of civic stability.
Maybe we should censor this study/article instead in the interests of civic stability.
Comment Re:SQL (Score 1) 197
I have two FOCUS books I still sometimes reference:
Creating Reports (1232 pages)
Describing Data (532 pages)
I know we're beyond the point where companies can be assed to create verbose and complete documentation for literally anything, but I shudder to think of what the documentation would look like for any no-code report generation system that actually provides useful information. I can always spot the people who use drag/drop reports/graphs; they never in fact say anything worthwhile and are completely useless for the purpose of analysis. If they even selected a table or graph layout that makes sense for the underlying data. The number of these I've seen bleed into production software UI's is frankly pathetic and disgusts me.
Creating Reports (1232 pages)
Describing Data (532 pages)
I know we're beyond the point where companies can be assed to create verbose and complete documentation for literally anything, but I shudder to think of what the documentation would look like for any no-code report generation system that actually provides useful information. I can always spot the people who use drag/drop reports/graphs; they never in fact say anything worthwhile and are completely useless for the purpose of analysis. If they even selected a table or graph layout that makes sense for the underlying data. The number of these I've seen bleed into production software UI's is frankly pathetic and disgusts me.
Comment Re:floating turbines are much more useful (Score 1) 66
I can't think of anything more sad to receive than a government-issued design award.
Comment Re:Generic Branding (Score 1) 61
*Sextium. Whoops.
Comment Generic Branding (Score 1) 61
Sounds like Intel wants to associate it's main, corporate brand with low quality, like Walmart, or HP. One thing I'm disappointed by from a branding perspective is them just dropping Pentium without moving on to Sexium. Everyone knows sex sells.
Comment Re:floating turbines are much more useful (Score 0) 66
If they can get the cost down "more than 70 percent over the next decade" it would be a huge win.
They aren't doing this. They are going to subsidize it.
Floating turbines could be installed almost anywhere along the coastlines, a vastly larger footprint than shallow water sites.
Yup! It said that much in the summary.
"contests for floating platform designs, develop software to help design offshore farms and integrate them into the grid", this concept has worked well in the past.
It's called capitalism. It's self-administrating and doesn't require government to confiscate my money and waste it on unaccountable bureaucracy to make it happen. The award for designing the best floating platform/fusion reactor/fidget spinner is people willingly, gladly even, giving you piles and piles of sweet, filthy lucre.
"floating offshore wind offers the possibility of repurposing some of the offshore fossil fuel extraction industry and workers", also a very big plus.
Meh. If it happens, it happens.
