Comment Environmental groups that are funded by whom? (Score 1) 63
Environmental groups, funded by the CCP, want America's FCC "to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters,"
Submission + - The Mind-Bending Company That Gets a Million Job Applications—and Rejects (archive.ph) 1
schwit1 writes: Getting an offer from Bending Spoons, which owns AOL, has become harder than getting into Harvard
It’s a mind-bending number. The most cutthroat banks and consulting firms brag about hiring rates of 1%. Citadel and Citadel Securities took 0.36% of the quants who applied for internships this summer. NASA lets in 0.1% of those who want to be astronauts. But 0.04%? It means that getting a job at Bending Spoons is 100 times harder than getting into Harvard.
The company is run by executives in their 30s and early 40s. The employees are mostly in their 20s and 30s and have never worked anywhere else. Many are younger than the brands they take over.
“Being able to spot people who are unusually talented and motivated very early in their careers, then giving them unusually high levels of responsibility and coaching, has been an absolutely key advantage for us,” said Ferrari, who is 41.
It’s a key part of the business model, too. When Bending Spoons buys a company, it begins each radical transformation by slashing most of the acquired employees—and replacing them with the much leaner team of Spooners.
There are now about 700 people who made it through the notorious hiring process and now work in technical, product and growth roles across the organization. They move from one Bending Spoons acquisition to the next, making what Ferrari calls “very deep changes”—rewriting the code, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning the user interface. And they are “held to particularly demanding performance standards,” the company promises.
In fact, an entire team of Spooners does nothing but evaluate other Spooners and potential Spooners.
It’s a mind-bending number. The most cutthroat banks and consulting firms brag about hiring rates of 1%. Citadel and Citadel Securities took 0.36% of the quants who applied for internships this summer. NASA lets in 0.1% of those who want to be astronauts. But 0.04%? It means that getting a job at Bending Spoons is 100 times harder than getting into Harvard.
The company is run by executives in their 30s and early 40s. The employees are mostly in their 20s and 30s and have never worked anywhere else. Many are younger than the brands they take over.
“Being able to spot people who are unusually talented and motivated very early in their careers, then giving them unusually high levels of responsibility and coaching, has been an absolutely key advantage for us,” said Ferrari, who is 41.
It’s a key part of the business model, too. When Bending Spoons buys a company, it begins each radical transformation by slashing most of the acquired employees—and replacing them with the much leaner team of Spooners.
There are now about 700 people who made it through the notorious hiring process and now work in technical, product and growth roles across the organization. They move from one Bending Spoons acquisition to the next, making what Ferrari calls “very deep changes”—rewriting the code, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning the user interface. And they are “held to particularly demanding performance standards,” the company promises.
In fact, an entire team of Spooners does nothing but evaluate other Spooners and potential Spooners.
Comment Money Makers for Money Makers. (Score 3, Interesting) 115
led police to identify me as a car thief and set up a sting to take me down. I mean, they even had a drone flying overhead during the 'bust'...
While taxpayers are distracted about the cost of the Flock network in both dollars and privacy, the ones really profiting from all this hope you don't notice the vicious money-burning process that involves this level of taxpayer-funded "just-in-case" police response.
Just wait until the city gets the bill for that fucking bullshit involving at least 17 corporations, LLCs, non-profits, and partnerships. You thought hospital bills were getting ridiculous, follow THAT money and see how it funds citizen safety. Thrice.
Comment Barely enough for..dual-use? (Score 1) 67
Perhaps we're not thinking dual-use enough.
Perhaps there is an application for a barely more than moonlight mod within a schedule that demands action now.
Some military-looking "rescue" teams deployed on a moonless night along the Southern border to execute sub-sonic suppressor tests with a new satellite-powered night vision enhancement? You don't say..
Submission + - Say Hello To Google, Mystery Owner Behind Wyoming's Largest Data Center Project (cowboystatedaily.com)
schwit1 writes: The 2.7-gigawatt data center once called Project Jade 8 miles south of Cheyenne has been unmasked as a massive Google campus. Google’s project, according to planning documents, will be a 716-acre campus in the Switchgrass Industrial Park.
Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 36
So it turns out politicians can pass legislation that helps people.
Uh huh.
The No-Robocall Chapter of the American Association of Breath Holders cordially invites you to their next invitational. You may expect an email invite from the Nigerian Embassy, which will naturally manage to make it through your CAN-SPAM filter..
Comment Re:The death of homework (Score 2) 102
Homework is also for reading topics that can be discussed in the next class.
Comment Re:As it should be - but there needs to be more... (Score 1) 36
'Free' should have no strings attached.
They should not be permitted to say something is 'Free' if they require you to pay for shipping.
Submission + - Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat (insidehighered.com) 1
schwit1 writes: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”
Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”
Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
Submission + - Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That's finally changing. (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 writes:
A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.
Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.
This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.
“I actually thought I would basically disprove that [claim], and on my first try, I got to $67 per kilogram after nine use cycles,” Jones told Ars. “It’s based upon some significant assumptions in the paper, but it’s not something that’s completely crazy. It certainly wouldn’t be something they’d reach on the first few times, on their first model; but over time, and with a learning curve, why not? I think it’s possible.
“These [Wall Street] analyst dweebs just have no clue what daily orbital access at under $100/kg means.”
— veteran aerospace engineer Will Collier
Submission + - Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search (adweek.com)
schwit1 writes: For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.
The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.
The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.
In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.
Submission + - Morgan Stanley Agrees SpaceX Can Deploy 8 Gigawatts of AI Data Center by 2028 (substack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Adam Jonas projects about 8 Gigawatts of SpaceX AI data center in 2028 and 16 Gigawatts by 2030. Very little of that AI data center comes from AI data centers in space.
Morgan Stanley has this in a 142 page report on SpaceX that has several material inconsistencies between its high-level assumptions about orbital compute scale, mass/payload, capex, and monetization and the known technical specifications for Starship launches, satellite power density, and real-world AI compute deals.
I agree that 8 gigawatts of AI data center is very doable for SpaceX in 2028-2030. They already have the natural gas turbines on order from Doosan in South Korea, all of the APR Energy production and 60-70% of the Solaris mobile turbines. Twelve 380 MW doosan turbines are on order and those are 4.5 GW. 1 GW per year from APR Energy and the Caterpillar joint venture is 6.5 GW plus the 2 Gigawatts that are already installed.
They have shown that they can build faster than anyone else and they have the power supply issues solved with suppliers and contracts for natural gas turbines that are already being installed.
Morgan Stanley has this in a 142 page report on SpaceX that has several material inconsistencies between its high-level assumptions about orbital compute scale, mass/payload, capex, and monetization and the known technical specifications for Starship launches, satellite power density, and real-world AI compute deals.
I agree that 8 gigawatts of AI data center is very doable for SpaceX in 2028-2030. They already have the natural gas turbines on order from Doosan in South Korea, all of the APR Energy production and 60-70% of the Solaris mobile turbines. Twelve 380 MW doosan turbines are on order and those are 4.5 GW. 1 GW per year from APR Energy and the Caterpillar joint venture is 6.5 GW plus the 2 Gigawatts that are already installed.
They have shown that they can build faster than anyone else and they have the power supply issues solved with suppliers and contracts for natural gas turbines that are already being installed.
Submission + - In 503 New York City schools, majority of students failed both math and reading (freebeacon.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "These are not schools teetering at the edge of success. They are schools that have been massively failing — persistently, systemically, and at staggering public expense — for years, and in many cases for decades," says the report, titled "By Any Honest Measure: New York City's Long Record of School Failure — and the Price We Keep Paying."
"The cost is enormous. New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619," the report says. "The city is now committed to billions more to fund a class-size mandate that the evidence does not support, while propping up hundreds of vacant schools that drain resources at a premium rate with no return."
Particularly haunting is the appendix listing the 503 "double fail" schools, which are failing to get majority pass rates on standardized tests in math and in English. The schools are named after some distinguished Americans—abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Zionist Henrietta Szold, baseball player Roberto Clemente, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and physicist Albert Einstein. Or they carry names full of ambition and ideals—"Leaders of Tomorrow," "School of Leadership Development," "Renaissance School of the Arts," and "Brooklyn Democracy Academy."
"Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties," the report says. "No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."
"The cost is enormous. New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024 — $36,293 per pupil, double the national average of $17,619," the report says. "The city is now committed to billions more to fund a class-size mandate that the evidence does not support, while propping up hundreds of vacant schools that drain resources at a premium rate with no return."
Particularly haunting is the appendix listing the 503 "double fail" schools, which are failing to get majority pass rates on standardized tests in math and in English. The schools are named after some distinguished Americans—abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Zionist Henrietta Szold, baseball player Roberto Clemente, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, poets Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and physicist Albert Einstein. Or they carry names full of ambition and ideals—"Leaders of Tomorrow," "School of Leadership Development," "Renaissance School of the Arts," and "Brooklyn Democracy Academy."
"Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties," the report says. "No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way."
Submission + - Legal torpedoes headed for Meta (reuters.com)
Sparkatron writes: A coalition of US states is suing Meta for damages of $1.4 TRILLION dollars. Yeah, you read that right, TRILLION. It is just a coincidence that this is very close to Meta's entire market capitalization of $1.5T. The suit alleges that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to be addictive to under-age children, and that Meta deliberately concealed evidence of harm to children. A lawsuit with a price-tag this big would seem to be aimed more at creating headlines than seriously obtaining compensation. So far the Stock Market has initially ignored the lawsuit. But in this day and age of seemingly irrational verdicts, like the ~$1Billion defamation award against Joe Rogan, maybe that isn't so wise. Who knows? For those of us that quit face-bvtt years ago because Mark Zuckerberg is a reptilian alien attempting to destroy the human race, this lawsuit seems virtuous. For others this might seem like an abuse of the courts. Worth keeping an eye on, its success could encourage more ludicrous lawsuits to punish other technology companies.
Submission + - This factory was severely short on workers. Then it offered flexible work. (npr.org) 1
Tony Isaac writes: Flexible, appbased scheduling at GE Appliances’ Roper plant lets a large pool of parttime workers choose fourhour shifts and even select the type of work they prefer, a system born during the pandemic when the factory faced severe labor shortages. The MyWorkChoice model now supplies hundreds of trained workers each week, stabilizing production and enabling major expansion, while giving people—from retirees to sidejob hustlers to longtime employees—control over their hours even though pay and benefits are lower than traditional fulltime roles.
