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Comment Re:Building wealth (Score 1) 202

by david-bo (#66387266) Attached to: Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society

"Besides not having the option of owning a home, which was doable for a lot of people in the post WW2 era, many people don't have any retirement savings except Social Security. And there are also far too many Americans who are a paycheck or two away from homeliness. People are buying groceries on credit, which is insane."

This is mostly not true. The purchase power, even for poor people, has never been higher. Poor people make bad choices in life, that's why they are poor, not for lack of money. E.g., don't have kids until you have a stable housing situation, are established on the job market and/or finished an education. Don't drink alcohol, smoke or eat take away food until you have a couple of months income saved. Start saving money when you live cheaply with your parents. Etc etc.

How many of the people you describe in the quoted paragraph do you think followed these very simple advices?

Comment Re:Welcome to the Uber/WalMart economy (Score 1) 202

by david-bo (#66387258) Attached to: Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society

There is no such thing as capitalism, see https://dagens-fel.livejournal... . Stop spreading myths. Stop be ignorant.

Besides, the so called problems you describe are handled by competition, both about customers as well as employees. And children are their parents' responsibility. Duh!

Submission + - Physicists Trapped a Particle of Antimatter And Kept It Caged For Months (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Theoretically, the birth of the Universe should have produced equal quantities of particles and antiparticles.

Why the current Universe is so heavily skewed in particles' favor is an enduring mystery – one whose solution remains all the harder to find because of antiparticles' tendency to go and collide with particles.

But an extraordinary effort may have finally tamed one of the biggest tricksters of the antiparticle milieu – the positron, the antimatter counterpart to the ubiquitous electron.

In a cryogenic, superconducting vacuum trap, physicists at Northwestern University in the US successfully kept a single positron for months – a breakthrough that, they say, paves the way to the most rigorous probes yet of particle physics.

Submission + - Trump DHS asked CISA to Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine (propublica.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: ProPublica (and others) is reporting that a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

In addition, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.” [Or, perhaps do something worse?]

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Comment Re:Wait a second (Score 1) 152

by david-bo (#66381388) Attached to: Does a Universal Basic Income Bring Long-Term Changes?

"because it reinforces this false narrative that poor people are poor because they don't use their money 'wisely.'"

Stereotypes are mostly true: https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Smart people can live well on very low incomes. Stupid people can't live well even on high incomes (but they mostly have low incomes because they are stupid).

Comment Re:You can't pay people to not be awful (Score 1) 152

by david-bo (#66381386) Attached to: Does a Universal Basic Income Bring Long-Term Changes?

"26% of these people used the money to help friends and family. That's way higher than what people with way more money would likely do."

Yeah, because smarter people understand the value of personal responsibility. Most stereotypes are true https://www.psychologytoday.co... - people are homeless because they are stupid.

So yeah, downvote me now. But that won't change reality.

Submission + - World timekeepers vote to abolish leap second by 2027 (www.geo.tv)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: International delegates have voted to scrap the leap second, ending a 50-year practice that kept atomic clocks aligned with the Earth’s rotation. The decision was made on Thursday, October 15, at a conference of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Versailles, France, with 69 member states casting votes.

Leap seconds have been added 27 times since 1972 to reconcile coordinated universal time (UTC), measured by ultra-precise atomic clocks, with astronomical time, which is based on the Earth’s uneven rotation. The extra second was typically inserted at the end of June or December.

While the adjustment is imperceptible in daily life, it has caused significant problems for modern technology. A leap second crashed Reddit and LinkedIn in 2012, and Cloudflare suffered brief outages in 2016. Tech giants including Meta, Google, and Amazon have long campaigned against the practice, calling it “a major source of pain.”

Submission + - Physicists discover "astonishing" property of light that defies expectations (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists have uncovered a surprising hidden ability of light that allows it to develop spinning, twisting behavior as it travels through empty space, without special lenses, mirrors, or materials. Researchers discovered that light’s internal geometry can naturally produce left- and right-handed patterns, challenging long-standing assumptions about how light behaves. By carefully arranging a beam’s structure, scientists can control where and how these spinning patterns emerge, unlocking a new way to manipulate light.

Submission + - Cyberattack against stores forces refrigeration systems to heat frozen goods (franceinfo.fr)

Submitted by advid.net
advid.net writes: Stores belonging to several major French retailers, such as Système U, Intermarché, and E.Leclerc, were affected by a cyberattack targeting their refrigeration systems on Monday, October 12. A source close to the investigation told France Inter that total losses could amount to several million euros.

The Les Mousquetaires group explained that Danfoss, the company that manufactures its refrigerated display cases, was the victim of a cyberattack overnight from Sunday to Monday. The temperature of the freezers and refrigerators was set to 50C (120F).

Submission + - For The First Time Ever, Quantum Spins Shift a Centimeter-Scale Object (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: There's another notable first in the field of quantum physics to report on, and it's all to do with electron spin: the tiny, built-in magnetism of these particles, as if each one is carrying a microscopic compass needle.

Previously, the force of these spins has only proved enough to nudge individual atoms in one direction or another. Now though, researchers have managed to shift something much, much bigger.

A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan has published a new study in Science Advances that details how a centimeter-sized object can be nudged by these quantum forces.

Submission + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 2

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.

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 220

by david-bo (#66368360) Attached to: Female AI Agents 'Paid' Less Than Males, Study Finds

Remember, stereotypes are mostly true, https://www.psychologytoday.co...

On a free market, irrational discrimination can't prevail, with two exceptions: the state can discriminate because they don't need their "customers", they get paid anyway, and private individuals can discriminate (e.g., female gynaecologists), but would you like your personal freedom of contract to be restricted? Probably not! Discrimination is a basic human right!

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Thus spake the master programmer: "When a program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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