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Comment What about other vehicles? (Score 1) 51

Hydrogen does not make a good fuel, tor a tonne of reasons, but nitrogen fuel would be less prone to nasty reactions and fewer problems. Could N6 combustion be controlled at levels suitable for heavy road vehicles or trains?

(Electric trains have their own problems, due to the fact that the junction needs to be poor and the cost of copper is so great that lines need to use far worse conductors to reduce theft.)

Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 47

America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."

You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

Comment Re:What (Score 1) 23

And they were probably $100,000 a pop.

Now they're commercial and getting much cheaper and more available as the tech becomes mainstream.

Like, pretty much, almost anything in high-end military, Formula 1 or rally driving, etc. etc. etc.

Expensive thing deployed as brand-new tech to get a slight edge in a billion dollar business becomes off-the-shelf cheap junk tech to help granny snoop on grandpa. It's really not unusual.

Comment Sigh. (Score 1) 41

I like Reddit.

I've literally never even clicked its AI thing in the app or on the website, and I only discovered it was even there a few days ago. My eyes literally gloss over anything that's not the stuff I use regularly (I don't care about stickers, coin, trends, or all the other nonsense either).

Stick to what you know. I don't frequent a barber shop because I hope one day it'll also sell me travel insurnace. I can't see myself using Reddit as a search engine unless it quite literally turns out to be the most amazin search engine in the entire world, better than all the others, and everyone just moves to it like we moved to Google at the beginning. And I very, very much doubt that would happen.

Comment Re:AI does scut work well. (Score 1) 75

The 100W intern includes the inefficient energy conversion from renewable fuel. The GPU uses 200W after the conversion, so factor in power plant inefficiencies and transmission losses. The GPU may or may not be using renewable fuel.

Perhaps what we really need is to find a way to get human cells to produce chloroplasts so Intern 2.0 can be direct solar powered.

In addition, on the other end of the operation, GPUs add to the growing e-waste problem while interns are biodegradable.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

You are correct. That's precisely how MWI is thought to work.

The premise of the argument is that, to conserve superposition information, you would necessarily need to prove that it would be grouped with information QM requires to be conserved, when viewed in a space that permitted it to be conserved. If it isn't, then there's no mechanism to preserve it, so no MWI.

Comment Re:Well, test the interpretations. (Score 1) 111

Not strictly correct. You would be correct for all consequences over any statistically significant timeframe, but (a) I've purposefully included things that aren't actually outcomes, and (b) over extremely short timeframes (femtoseconds and attoseconds), differences would emerge very briefly, because different mechanisms take different routes.

Remember, the maths only concerns itself with outcomes, not the path taken, so identical maths will be inevitable for non-identical paths.

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