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Comment JHFC ACM (Score 1) 28

This is likely the proceedings with the paper:

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/epd...

It appears the ACM PDF reader loaded an 850MB PDF into my phone's browser and has been stuck doing a search on "beam steering" for ten minutes.

No joke, I read ACM papers on information retrieval and human computer action three decades ago and this is just hostile design.

I'll try again on my desktop at home tomorrow but maybe somebody can extract the paper before then.

And, yeah, as others have said this is old (November 2025) but it would be handy to have integrated with my Home Assistant. Much better than setting up ESP-32's with 26Ghz radars in each room.

Comment Re:"Potentially" is doing a lot of work here (Score 1) 57

These missiles are known for evading Patriot PAC-3's with non-ballistic maneuvering.

That's at least part of what needs CPU. However a $6 233MHz ESP-32 could handle those calculations.

Those nVidia boards are often used for home video boxes, including transcoding. It's possible this was just a video uplink component.

Reportedly the Tomahawks used in the Minab Massacre were video-guided and did fly-arounds to time the double-tap and experimental use of thermobaric detonation of unspent fuel to incinerate the surviving girls and responding parents.

We should worry more about bringing those people to Justice than whatever Russia is doing.

Comment Re:It's PBS, there's no money for anything (Score 1) 97

Their finances have been widely covered in the news.

Their IT Lead is making ~$180K.

Their interest income alone was $500K.

They didn't have a local copy strategically, not for a lack of $5K.

Cloud backup is just another backup, not primary storage, if you care about your data.

Some of us have online, nearline, offline, offsite, and multiple cloud backups with much smaller budgets.

That's for people who care about their data (including the bean counters).

Many IT folks (most?) have had to "I told you so" after a bean counter said no to a small spend. I wouldn't assume the IT department is incompetent without evidence.

Comment Re: If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score 1) 43

If the original ToS on Twitch grants Amazon a license to create derivative works then they don't have anything to worry about.

It's like your local superstation had the rights to run ads on Star Trek in addition to the license fee they paid but they didn't therefore get a right to create a new Star Trek series or publish a "Best Moments of STTNG 1989" show around the holidays.

Now if they had gone to Paramount about the Best-Of show in theory they could have negotiated a license for that, having already been media partners. Heck, some software company got Riker to pitch their product from the Bridge.

The big authors' settlement with OpenAI sets at least some precedent in this nascent field of IP law (which is enforced whether we like it or not).

But I've never heard of a Twitch streamer talking about a derivative work that Amazon created from their show using their words or likeness.

To be fair Youtube does indeed do a yearly "best of" show.

Who knows, maybe we'll see an AI Hassan Piker doing and saying some wildly ill-advised shit in the near future. Would not be entirety shocking.

Comment Conversations (Score 1) 119

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

Comment Re:Zoom Should Not Be Trusted (Score 2) 12

This is smart but harder than it needs to be.

Do we have a wrapper available that can let native Zoom launch and only have access to ~/.config/zoom and some USB input devices but not the rest of the machine?

Somehow building a custom MAC profile is expert-level stuff two decades on and not an end user's job.

An on-demand screen sharing permission popup should be achievable.

It's silly that a browser sandbox is better than any native sandbox available.

Perhaps such a tool readily exists and just needs to be mainstreamed into existing distros.

I know there was a Debian project a while back that aimed for all services to pass systemd strict security by default but nobody wanted to do the work.

That's the right mindset but separate from user apps.

Comment Atomic Structure (Score 1, Interesting) 22

There's some interesting stuff going on trying to understand more of the atomic structure beyond the current models.

The math on gluons has worked quite well but for some reason questions like, "OK, but what are gluons?" has been derided as "crank science" in Pergamon Press-gated Academia.

Such a diversion from Science from the beginning of Human history through the 1960's.

Structures like DeLay-Bendebury Fibers and other models of what's going on behind the math are happening outside of Academia where Physics PhD's are discarded and PhysEd BA's are celebrated.

Whichever model comes next will likely happen adjacent to the podcaster sphere and be reduced to useful engineering before Academics take a look at it.

There are plenty of good researchers working in institutions but for fundamental revisions at this point they all seem to need to leave Academia and go out on their own seeking private investment.

Which is fine except that we're all paying for the uninterested remainder. The great advancements that make our lives better always begin in fundamental science generating new models that better describe this reality. We don't get much from a jobs program for Mathematicians playing Physicists and it's very expensive.

It's quite strange that most people find the status quo completely acceptable and are willing to throw another $100B at a higher energy collider but are unwilling to grant base-layer investigations that are nearly free in comparison.

If we believe the former head of Skunkworks they've recruited the best and brightest since the 1970's and had made breakthroughs by the early 90's in at least topological physics. So we get to pay for that but aren't allowed to use it which is intolerable. But it's also understanble in a pre-Internet era where the only feasible choices were String Theory or black projects.

Comment Re:Only response (Score 1) 31

By complete coincidence I recently purchased this cordless angle grinder kit after watching a glowing review from one of my regular channels and wondering how good it could be for $75. It's not as good as a Milwaukee but I've been using it around the house and I'm going to modify a shoe rack with it this evening.

Of course this has nothing to do with the story and surely these aren't the types of arms the Framers envisioned when they set the foundation of upholding the Constitution upon the duties of the Citizenry.

Comment Re:Need new AI editors (Score 1) 65

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

Comment Grok is not a useful advisor. (Score 1) 1

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Comment Re:Bleagh. (Score 1) 20

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.

Comment Bleagh. (Score 1) 20

We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

Comment Switchgrass 2.0 (Score 1) 41

Anybody remember Dubbya going on and on about gasoline made from switchgrass?

Somehow growing succulents in fragile desert ecologies and irrigating them seems like a dead end.

Maybe they got a government grant.

As someone alluded to above the forest litter causing all these fires may be a good source of cellulose. Betcha robots could make it economical.

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