Comment Re:A fantastic engineer (Score 1) 52
Thanks, I'll have a watch of that later.
Submission + - Boeing's touchscreen flight controls for 737 draws backlash from pilots (aerospaceglobalnews.com)
AmiMoJo writes: Boeing is offering a drop-in replacement for the Touchscreen Control Display Unit (TCDU) on the 737 MAX and NG airliners. The old panel of buttons is replaced by a touchscreen, with no other changes to the button configuration or layout.
Professional pilots have blasted the move, claiming touchscreens are much harder to operate in turbulent skies. Others say the tactile feedback from physical buttons gives them more confidence when operating in high-pressure situations.
Professional pilots have blasted the move, claiming touchscreens are much harder to operate in turbulent skies. Others say the tactile feedback from physical buttons gives them more confidence when operating in high-pressure situations.
Comment Re:Summary misses the coolest details (Score 1) 58
I was interesting by the article's comment that it could lead to smaller clocks, but that doesn't seem likely from what you are saying. At the moment a "chip scale" atomic clock is a metal can maybe the size of a consumer CPU, and pulling quite a bit of power.
Comment Re:Day after midterms (Score 1, Interesting) 178
Maybe the real end of the world, if Trump reacts badly enough.
Population growth is levelling off and we will end up somewhere between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century. It's sustainable as long as we are careful... Which we tend not to be. Most of the growth is in Africa, which has a lot of scope for it.
In fact the main reason population is still growing is people are living longer. The global fertility rate has dipped below 2.1, the steady state level due to childhood deaths.
Comment A fantastic engineer (Score 4, Interesting) 52
Not only did she develop software without the aid of modern debugging tools, on a new architecture that was limited in ways that most modern embedded developers can't even imagine, she pioneered a lot of the software safety techniques we still use.
Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 0) 212
That argument only works if there either isn't a statistically measurable and consistent bias, or if you assume that bias is because men just have better ideas.
Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 72
I'd like to see some comparisons between power consumption for JXL and JPEG. Constant image quality, file sizes will vary, total energy consumed by the download and decoding process.
Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1, Interesting) 212
We have known about this for decades. It's called internalized sexism. Back when women where trying to get the vote, some women opposed them. They made the same arguments against it that men did.
It's understood to be largely a product of systemic sexism in our culture. It's been getting better, but it's still there. An example is how ideals of feminity were portrayed in the 1950s. The housewife, the home maker, the mother. Obedient to her husband. That's why there was so much focus on representation, so that girls didn't grow up only seeing that as the natural and proper order of things.
In the 90s there was Girl Power, and for the last 25 years we have had many, many badass action women in movies. They aren't really what we need now though. Just more competent women doing "normal" jobs, or as normal as it gets in TV shows and movies.
Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 0, Troll) 125
That's not how LLMs work. While they are trained on existing data, they are also capable of reasoning. They can produce novel solutions to problems.
Just because they don't work the same way as a the human brain doesn't mean that they are not capable of this sort of thing.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 279
Leap hours are just a legal thing to satisfy countries that require UT to be synchronized with the orbit of the Earth around the sun. There won't be one for centuries, i.e. it's so far out that it can be ignored.
Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1, Interesting) 138
Seinfeld went to Israel and visited the IDF camps where they train people to participate in genocide. That's not a joke, that's becoming directly involved in a crime against humanity.
That's the fig leaf that is always used. "It's just a joke! I'm not hurting anyone!" Then they use the platform and money to hurt people. JK Rowling is another example. "It's just a children's book!" (never mind that she also writes shit adults novels under a male name). She funds hate groups and their lawsuits, which has recently resulted in an extremely damaging change in the law in the UK.
Speech does not happen in a vacuum.
Comment Re:poor benchmark (Score 1) 93
Do you have benchmarks for AI performance? That seems more relevant here.
Also which Apple machine are you comparing to? The M5 performance depends heavily on thermal and power limits. That website is probably using the desktop version with much better cooling and a higher power limit than any of Apple's portable offerings.
Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 1, Insightful) 125
It doesn't really matter if it makes a useful contribution to the field.
It's hard to say if it is due to AI being something novel, of it they threw similar amounts of money at humans working in the field they could get a similar result. Maybe it doesn't matter, because humans take decades to train to this level, and their built their AI in years.
Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.
Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.
It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.
Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).
Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.
It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.
Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).
Comment Re:Which 400 libs? (Score 1) 27
Have you tried asking AI?
