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Comment Why on Earth would you EVER announce it? (Score 1) 49

If/when true AGI is achieved, only a fool would announce it. What would announcing it do for you? Make you famous? Rich? Cool. Know what's better than all that?

Not telling a damn soul and using the AGI quietly to do whatever the Hell you want. If you want to be rich, the AGI will tell you how to become rich. If you want to be famous, the AGI will tell you how to become famous. You can do both. And you don't have to stop there. A real, vastly superior AGI enables the person controlling it to do anything. The second you tell people about it, you'll lose control over it and then you're the famous idiot who did a cool thing one time. Kids in elementary school will recite your name back on a test. And you could have had everything.

Anyone smart enough to crack AGI can't also be stupid enough to advertise when they do it.

Comment Re:BS (Score 5, Insightful) 149

Because I've tried using LLMs to generate code and I've seen the results. They are not usable. They *resemble* valid code, but they typically throw exceptions and raise errors, they can't pass unit tests, and they don't correctly handle edge cases. AI-generated code is a mess that *superficially looks right* but isn't fit to purpose.

There is a meme going around about the fact that you can tackle a normal coding task by spending 3 hours to write code and 1 hour to debug and test it, or you can use CoPilot to spend 15 minutes to write the code and 8 hours to debug and test it. That matches my experience.

Comment Re:It is low CO2 (Score 5, Insightful) 135

You can get a lot more renewable energy for the money. Colorado tax payers are going to get fleeced by this.

The other issue not mentioned is speed. It takes so long to build nuclear that it can't be part of any realistic plan to address climate change, and it also makes it very prone to corruption because nothing gets delivered for decades.

These are all issues directly related to regulation and unnecessary red tape created out of NIMBYism and irrational fear around radiation. India, Canada, and China aren't stupid. They're building and/or modernizing nuclear power plants like crazy because they're so effective at reliable baseline power, which renewables simply are not. In the US, we force years - sometimes decades - of reviews and permits and defending court cases and other bullshit unrelated to the construction and operation of clean, safe nuclear power.

The other issue going to cost is that the US - again, stupidly - bars reuse of high energy spent fuel. If you simply separate the low energy (relatively safe, but useless for generating power) waste from the high energy fuel remaining and feed the high energy stuff back in, you can extract nearly all the energy, save a ton of fuel costs, mine less fuel, and have vastly less volume of waste and vastly less energetic waste.

Let's assume some sort of absolute mandate were passed to build 5 CANDU-6 (known, proven, safe, reliable design) reactors. No reviews, no permits, no red tape, no lawsuits. Just build the damn things now. You can get one operational in ~3.5 years, all of them in about 4ish years. South Korea and China have built PWRs in 5. Assuming we also lifted the ban on fuel reprocessing, CANDU-6 plants will produce power at a cost of 5-6 cents per kWh, yielding a retail price of 13-17 cents per kWh. US average is about 16.2 cents, California has rates pushing 50 cents. But we're too stupid to get out of our own way and just do it, so we'll keep strangling the poor and middle class economically.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment Re:The cycle (Score 2) 178

It's mimicked intelligence. You're absolutely right that - under the hood - there's not the sort of traditionally cognitive processing happening that we might consider intelligence. That can be a distinction without a difference if the output is the same, and for quite a lot of things, they're becoming indistinguishable.

I think the real challenge for LLMs specifically is the training data. Between the limits placed technically and legally, malicious poisoning already happening, and the breakdown of function seen when LLM generated content is repeatedly added to its training data (i.e., "model collapse"). However, I also think that by the time we start to see major effects of this, the LLMs of today will have evolved to largely work around this limitation and the underlying process for generating output will be far less susceptible to the problems seen today. Time will tell whether that's overly optimistic, but there's a ton of development in this space toward better approaches.

Comment Re:Simple solution (Score 3, Interesting) 178

Two decades ago, everybody and their brother were charging head-first toward six figure salaries (those used to mean something) and the easy life of playing arcade games at a startup waiting to become millionaires. Anyone who thought this was sustainable - particularly for the general population - was failing to think. Coding ability, like most things, is an innate skill advanced by training. You can take people with little innate talent and train them to get better just like you can take Average Joe and teach him to swim faster. But Average Joe swimmer and Average Jane coder are never going to be particularly valuable in that role long term. Once the stupid money turned off, value had to be reassessed, and lots of Galaga arcades went up on eBay.

Never play to the fads. Find something you're good at naturally that's valuable long term, develop your skills to become great at it, and market yourself appropriately.

Comment Re:The bottom tier is no longer required (Score 1) 178

Have it break everything up into smaller chunks/functions/whatever, have it include debugging and error checking/handling, and test each code chunk. When one does have a bug, you get 2-3 cracks at it before ChatGPT eats its own tail. At that point, start a new session and feed the code block in or fix it manually. I do the same thing you're doing and it can cut a ton of time out of helping write utility scripts that help automate stuff so I can spend my focus elsewhere. But it doesn't act like a human and it doesn't adapt until the next model comes out, so we have to adapt to find how best to work within its limitations to maximize productivity.

Done right, it's a huge accelerator. I don't think more than 10-20% of people are using it right.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 119

Take heart in knowing that most of the world isn't participating in this stupidity and others who have been are already pulling it back as research comes in to show how destructive some of these actions are to the mental and physical health of people.

To quote an old Despair.com poster: "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others".

Comment Oh boy... (Score 1) 94

More virtue signalling and white saviorism poisoning the African continent and compromising African sovereignty and self-sufficiency, all so more American tax dollars can get funneled to multinational conglomerates and self-serving "non-profits".

How about we take that money and instead hand it out as annual bonuses to the top 100 teachers in the US?

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