Comment "option" (Score 1) 15
This is how it starts, an option... right up until they steamroll you by making it mandatory and a dependency. I recall how systemd was "optional" until it suddenly wasn't.
Comment Re:data || GTFO (Score 1) 77
Throughput Vs latency. Hardware RAID tends to be fast for processing large volumes of data, but the overhead increases the latency.
It's a bit different with DRAM though because the controller is complex and built into the CPU. AMD, for example, already transparently encrypts data in RAM with no performance loss, all in hardware.
Comment Re: They exist. (Score 1) 72
Those diamond batteries were bullshit.
Sir, I am an expert in chemistry having had multiple minutes of experience in searching for information about it. As such, I defer to you because sure, like I would know.
It's not that I don't like chemistry, it's just that I think the reality needs to refactor it's lower level APIs, starting with mathematics. I'm not saying it's wasteful but too much computational power goes into Pi. They should make it a simple integer value like 3 and make e like... 2.
Submission + - ChatGPT, Gemini Call BS on Microsoft's PERM Program Ban 'Comment'
theodp writes: Asked to comment on the merits of the Microsoft Comment on Recent Immigration Questions, which was posted without attribution on the Microsoft On The Issues blog in response to the U.S. Government's suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, and IT outsourcing giants from the Green Card program (PERM), ChatGPT suggested it was a red herring defense at best: "The central issue is whether Microsoft has complied with the requirements governing permanent labor certification, including whether qualified American workers were genuinely considered for positions being offered to foreign workers. Microsoft instead emphasizes that 80% of its H-1B applications involved existing employees rather than new hires. That framing encourages readers to think the government's concern rests on a basic misunderstanding: that the government is counting existing workers as new foreign hires. But that is not necessarily the government's argument. Existing H-1B employees can subsequently be sponsored for permanent residency, and their employers must still comply with the applicable PERM requirements."
Asked to provide a second AI opinion, Google's Gemini agreed: "Microsoft’s response is a classic piece of defensive corporate communication. It successfully highlights true statistics—such as its high median wages and the fact that most H-1B filings are internal extensions—to counter the narrative that it is a low-wage outsourcing shop. However, its statement completely sidesteps the central accusation: that its ongoing sponsorship of thousands of green cards via the PERM program ran afoul of labor regulations while it was concurrently laying off thousands of domestic American workers. By omitting this tension, Microsoft's response answers questions the administration wasn't actually asking while ignoring the underlying compliance and fraud investigations that triggered the freeze."
Microsoft is hardly the only tech giant whose PERM program hiring practices have attracted U.S. government scrutiny. In August 2026, the U.S Dept. of Justice's Civil Rights Division announced a $3.2 million settlement involving OpenAI OpCo LLC and its analytics provider Statsig that addressed allegations of "discriminating against U.S. workers" during the PERM hiring process. And in 2023, Apple was required by the U.S. Dept. of Justice to pay up to $25 million in backpay and civil penalties to "resolve allegations that Apple illegally discriminated in hiring and recruitment against U.S. citizens and certain non-U.S. citizens." And in 2021, Facebook agreed to pay up to $14.25 million to settle civil claims by the U.S. government that the social media company discriminated against American workers and violated federal recruitment rules.
Asked to provide a second AI opinion, Google's Gemini agreed: "Microsoft’s response is a classic piece of defensive corporate communication. It successfully highlights true statistics—such as its high median wages and the fact that most H-1B filings are internal extensions—to counter the narrative that it is a low-wage outsourcing shop. However, its statement completely sidesteps the central accusation: that its ongoing sponsorship of thousands of green cards via the PERM program ran afoul of labor regulations while it was concurrently laying off thousands of domestic American workers. By omitting this tension, Microsoft's response answers questions the administration wasn't actually asking while ignoring the underlying compliance and fraud investigations that triggered the freeze."
Microsoft is hardly the only tech giant whose PERM program hiring practices have attracted U.S. government scrutiny. In August 2026, the U.S Dept. of Justice's Civil Rights Division announced a $3.2 million settlement involving OpenAI OpCo LLC and its analytics provider Statsig that addressed allegations of "discriminating against U.S. workers" during the PERM hiring process. And in 2023, Apple was required by the U.S. Dept. of Justice to pay up to $25 million in backpay and civil penalties to "resolve allegations that Apple illegally discriminated in hiring and recruitment against U.S. citizens and certain non-U.S. citizens." And in 2021, Facebook agreed to pay up to $14.25 million to settle civil claims by the U.S. government that the social media company discriminated against American workers and violated federal recruitment rules.
Comment Re:A fantastic engineer (Score 1) 54
Thanks, I'll have a watch of that later.
Comment They exist. (Score 3, Interesting) 72
Chip-scale atomic clocks are a thing. The problem is that they aren't exactly low enough power to be wrist mounted as they need 115 mW constantly. You absolute can make it into a wristwatch (and people have) but it will need regular charging... unless you are using betavoltaic nuclear batteries. However to reach the power output needed with what is on the market, you would need about 120K of them.
The natural reaction to this is "what's the purpose of building up that kind of arm strength if the batteries are just going to die in 50 years?" and the answer is the diamond battery! This is a newer betavoltaic battery which is in the same power output range but lasts for thousands of years because it's based on Carbon-14.
Start doing those reps today because the watch of your dreams is 2400Kg.
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) 72
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) 185
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) 54
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.
Submission + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 1
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.
In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.
The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.
"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.
For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality. They might look like Adobe's apps, but it doesn't sound like they're able to replace the long-established programs just yet.
Thomas says Adobe's cancelation fees helped motivate the project, which is understandable.
Thomas believes other developers will follow suit, predicting a future where free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid apps will be widely available.
"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."
"Software is over," he declared, somewhat boldly. And hopefully cancellation fees.
In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.
The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.
"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.
For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality. They might look like Adobe's apps, but it doesn't sound like they're able to replace the long-established programs just yet.
Thomas says Adobe's cancelation fees helped motivate the project, which is understandable.
Thomas believes other developers will follow suit, predicting a future where free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid apps will be widely available.
"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."
"Software is over," he declared, somewhat boldly. And hopefully cancellation fees.
Comment Legality has nothing to do with it. (Score 1) 2
Adobe will sue not because they are legally correct but because it is an effective tactic. They need only to make the case expensive until they bankrupt the defendant. Legality is not relevant to their case.
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) 74
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.
