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Comment They exist. (Score 1) 47

by Gravis Zero (#66369460) Attached to: First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick

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 + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
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.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
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).

Submission + - UK vegetables 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc since the Sixties because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.

'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.

'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.

'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”

'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'

Comment Re:There was a mass shooting (Score 1) 90

Why is it so easy to ask ChatGPT how best to kill people?

The interface is in natural written language which is the selling point of the whole thing. Additionally, it's not actually intelligent so it is not cognizant of anything much less the harm the information may cause.

Bottom line: it's just a machine.

Comment Re:There was a mass shooting (Score 1) 90

In Canada someone used ChatGPT to plan a mass shooting. It was detected and the account was shut down, but it was decided not to report it to police. She went on to kill 8 people in a school shooting and herself.

We can't actually know if the scenario was a plan or a precautionary measure, you know, safety first.
However, what we know for sure is that she went on a mass shooting after her account was suddenly closed without explanation. This is exactly why they shouldn't shut down someone's account without providing them with a clear a rationale! ;)

Comment Missing the obvious solution (Score 2) 54

I feel like these AI processes should be launched as a separate unprivileged user and group. Only when you change the file permissions should they be able to access your files. This avoids possible flaws in agent interfaces and hands off the responsibility to the OS. Why are simple solutions like this so hard to grasp?

Comment Re:Nope. (Score 1) 125

by Gravis Zero (#66360370) Attached to: 20% of Swiss Glaciers Lost In Five Years

They don't like the truth and would prefer to make reality just another narrative they can dismiss so pointing things out doesn't work either,

Absolutely. There other irksome comment I hear is "scientists will figure it out" because I want to scream that they have figured it out but you didn't like the answer.

Frankly, things might be fucked up in society now but it's only a taste of the chaos to come and people will wonder what they "did to deserve it" not realizing that they have done everything to deserve it.

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