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Submission + - Young Journalists Drone, Expose Russian Ships Off Dutch-German Coasts (digitaldigging.org)

schwit1 writes: Seven German journalism students, as a continuation of their OSINT course project, tracked the movements of ships with Russian crews off the coasts of the Netherlands and Germany and linked them to swarms of drones appearing over European military airfields and other strategic sites.

The guys not only analyzed thousands of data points, but also used leaked documents, established connections with sources in European agencies, and drove 2,500 km across three countries chasing one of the ships – even launching their own drone to fly over it.

At the end of the article, there’s precise data on the vessels, so you can follow them yourself.

Submission + - Japan renders current conventional submarines obsolete (x.com)

schwit1 writes: With the Taigei class and its lithium-ion batteries, Tokyo already set a new benchmark: up to three weeks submerged without ever raising a snorkel. That, however, was merely the opening act.

Today, Toyota and Panasonic are leading the global race in solid-state batteries, with prototypes arriving in 2027–2028, mass production after 2030, and Japan’s next submarine class will be the first to use them, either in pure battery form or as a hybrid with a small reactor for onboard recharging. This hybrid would be similar to what the Chinese are developing.

The leap is staggering. A 4,000 ton conventional submarine will patrol for 40 to 60 days without surfacing, sprint well above 20 knots for hours on end, and do it all more quietly than many nuclear subs, thanks to being significantly lighter and running solely on battery power.

Solid-state cells weigh roughly one-third as much, generate 40% less heat, and eliminate half the cooling systems. The result is a faster, stealthier hull that can travel thousands of kilometers without ever breaking the surface.

Those hundreds of saved tons translate directly into more powerful electric motors, extra torpedoes and missiles, cutting-edge sensors, or greater crew comfort. The same hull now carries twice the energy or twice the weapons.

It appears there are also plans to equip the system with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ micro nuclear reactor. Its design has no moving parts, which gives it excellent quietness. It’s essentially like a battery that can run for 20 years.

Submission + - Iran's Capital Is Moving. The Reason Is an Ecological Catastrophe (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Amid a deepening ecological crisis and acute water shortage, Tehran can no longer remain the capital of Iran, the country’s president has said. The situation in Tehran is the result of "a perfect storm of climate change and corruption,” says Michael Rubin, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “We no longer have a choice,” said Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian during a speech on Thursday. Instead Iranian officials are considering moving the capital to the country’s southern coast. But experts say the proposal does not change the reality for the nearly 10 million people who live in Tehran and are now suffering the consequences of a decades-long decline in water supply.

Comment Re:Positive feedback loops are bad, m'kay? (Score 2) 208

Yup, same as the feedback loops in "cold readings"

Charlie Stross(@cstross@wandering.shop) wrote, in Mastadon:
The LLMentalist effect: Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms used by (fake) psychics to gull their victims: https://softwarecrisis.dev/let...

The title of the paper is "The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con"

Comment Google is very successful, because... (Score 1) 47

  • - they own the agent for the advertiser,
  • - they own the agent for the publisher,
  • - they own the auction house, and
  • - they don't provide an audit trail.

I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.

Comment Alas, the "birthday paradox" will misidentify you (Score 2) 55

If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.

That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry guns.
0.8% is a good error rate. 34% wrong is typical in matching black women. See
https://www.aclu-mn.org/en/news/biased-technology-automated-discrimination-facial-recognition#:~:text=Studies%20show%20that%20facial%20recognition%20technology%20is%20biased.,published%20by%20MIT%20Media%20Lab.

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