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Comment I am deeply, deeply skeptical. (Score 1) 88

... and it has nothing to do with AI per se. My experience with legacy code that there is stuff there that is absolutely impossible to figure out by just looking at the code alone. These parts usually encode weird edge cases of external systems, workarounds for even earlier data, "temporary" hotfixes, etc. Even well designed systems have a few corners like these. And even if there are comments, comments tend to assume a certain shared context. I find it unlikely that an AI or even a Homo Sapiens can properly specify these old software by _just_ looking at the code alone... I find this unplausible to be honest.

Comment Re:Its yours to use forever (Score 1) 242

You know who is paying a massive amount of money to Microsoft, ongoing? Large state governments. You know who has a lot of ancient hardware incapable of running windows 11? Large state governments.

I doubt it'll happen, they'll walk right up to the line and then extend the support another year.

Submission + - Linus Torvalds: Rust will go into Linux 6.1 (zdnet.com)

slack_justyb writes: As previously indicated on Slashdot. Rust was slated to be coming to the Linux Kernel sometime in the 6.x version. Well wonder no longer on which version of kernel 6.x will have the first bits of Rust officially in the kernel, as Linus has confirmed that 6.1 will be the first with the new NVMe kernel drivers being in Rust.

The first version non-production ready code for the NVMe Rust based kernel drivers were already producing performance comparable to C code. So the final drivers to hit 6.1 are already looking promising. It also helped Rust's case that, thanks to the ground-breaking work of Linux kernel and Rust developer Miguel Ojeda, Rust on Linux has gotten much more mature. Kernel maintainers were convinced it is time to move forward with Rust in Linux. In short, they agreed that Rust on Linux was ready for work.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Computer? 3

destinyland writes: Today GitHub's official Twitter account asked the ultimate geek-friendly question. "You never forget your first computer. What was yours?"

And within 10 hours they'd gotten 2,700 responses.

Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 800, Compaq Presario... People posted names you haven't heard in years, like sharing memories of old friends. Gateway 2000, Sony VAIO, Vic-20, Packard Bell... One person just remembered they'd had "some sort of PC that had an orange and black screen with text and QBasic. It couldn't do much more than store recipes and play text based games."

And other memories started to flow. ("Jammed on Commander Keen & Island of Dr. Brain" "Dammit that Doom game was amazing, can't forget Oregon Trail...")

Sharp PC-4500, Toshiba T3200, Timex Sinclair 1000, NEC PC-8801. Another's first computer was "A really really old HP laptop that has a broken battery!"

My first computer was an IBM PS/2. It had a 2400 baud internal modem. (Though in those long-ago days before local internet services, it was really only good for dialing up BBS's.) I played chess against a program on a floppy disk that I got from a guy from work.

What was your first computer?

Comment Re:no card limits how much you can purchase monthl (Score 1) 104

Sole-proprietor != single person. It means you have sole control of a business, and have unlimited liability for the debts of that business. You can hire both employees and contractors.

I know two people who run fairly high-revenue SP's and they both rack up 6 digit levels of expenses a month (~3-5 employees/contractors) and have invoice balance due in the 7 and sometimes 8 digit range. Now, neither of them are stupid enough to use credit cards if they wind up with debt to float. If you have a sound business plan, there is plenty of access to get normal business lines of credit from banks (I think the SBA has a program that supports it), as well as things like HELOCs in a pinch.

A comment on auto-pay: I use it on everything but my credit cards. I personally find reviewing how I spent money in the past month and reflecting is well worth the minor inconvenience of spending 15 or 20 minutes a month looking at my statement and paying the balance.

Comment Re:So it's basically an old-school overtraining (Score 1) 217

The late great Rick Riolo had a story about this, involving genetic algorithms.

The Air Force gave his team a contract to develop the most fuel efficient drone flight algorithms they could. So they got access to the Air Force's best simulation environment, and set up a genetic algorithm optimization that maximized fuel conservation. A few months later they came back, and discovered that every surviving algorithm had more fuel than it started with. The optimization had found a flaw in the simulation environment.

We're a long way from machine learning of affordances, much less meaning.

Comment Re:How similar must the form factor be? (Score 1) 232

Have you looked at:

the GPD Pocket 7.0? It's an atom that can run win10, 8/128gb, 7 in.
https://www.windowscentral.com...

My cousin needs a netbook factor with a real keyboard (and no camera, which kiboshes a lot of options) for use in archival research and was considering one. I never asked her whether she bought one though.

Comment Re: No (Score 2) 390

You miss the point. Every citizen petitioner has the right to access to the same avenues of petition regardless of their message. You can disallow protests at 4am inside the White House so long as it's a blanket ban. Letting the Society in Favor of Puppies and Kittens have an advocacy event the Green Room before dawn means that any other organization, regardless of how controversial its opinions are, must be given similar consideration (see e.g.: De Jonge v. Oregon or Edwards v. South Carolina).

Comment Re:The Change (Score 3, Interesting) 123

Indeed, that is also consistent with many theories of Bonobo/Chimpanzee species split and the attendant bifurcation of their social evolution (ie. why the Bonobos fuck and the Chimps fight). The Bonobos, being south of the Congo river (newly formed circa 2m years ago), had little climatic distress to deal with, while the Chimps to the north did, which is why they developed a much more aggressive social organization.

Comment Re:Not one example? (Score 2) 50

I'm a professional neuroscientist that specializes in vision research with a computational bent. They used all the main stream, state of the art, openly available object recognition algorithms currently in use. Computer vision is a huge market, with many applications, from the DoD to self-driving cars to image-based searches. I doubt some 5-figure prize is going to out perform the best algorithms several distinct industries and academia have managed to create while being funded to the tune of over a billion a year for the last 10 years or so.

These are serious researchers. If you think you think you can get any type of computer vision that significantly outperforms humans on this type of task, there is a unicorn startup and multiple ultra-high profile publications awaiting you.

And just FYI based on your further post: they used two types of convolutional neural nets (see Methods: Model Versions and Parameters).

Comment Re:Biggest archaeological event? (Score 1) 80

With regard to that, I'd highly recommend Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan, which is a biography of arctic explorer John Rae, who conducted the search for the Franklin expedition (and probably could have rescued them if things had worked out just a little bit differently) and discovered the final link in the northwest passage that Amundsen used 50 years later.

Comment Re:So which agencies' backdoors are in there? (Score 1) 135

My experience tells me absolutely nothing about whether Canada was being diligent in border screening.

In every single case I crossed a border as a minor it was with free will and full paperwork, so I can't say if the screening was diligent in a way that would uncover a coercive crossing situation.

It also doesn't tell me anything about their screening criteria. Making too many type 2 errors, like I experienced with my grandparents, means that resources are not being effectively directed. And that has costs as well, since after that experience neither my family nor I returned to Canada until after I was an adult.

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