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Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 140

> I wonder how many problems they tried before they solved one successfully.

Was gonna mod Insightful, but the replies aren't getting it.

"Solving this problem cost $2000."

That may be true.

"We tried to solve 50 problems at $2000 each and one was successfully solved."

This can also be true which means:

"We spent $100K and we solved one open problem."

which is fiscally, but not akshually, the same as:

"We spent $100K to solve one problem."

If Astra is "all that", OpenAI should have a pricing tier, "no charge unless the problem is solved."

Now *that* would be an impressive vote of confidence and everybody should be excited about it.

Comment bookworm in progress... (Score 1) 47

I see some of these CVE's are fixed in trixie but not bookworm 6.1.177-1 (yet).

Still other CVE's are fixed in bookworm but not yet in trixie. Seems like a few reboots are in the offing.

First time I've seen several fixes in oldstable before stable. It must be a wild week over there. n.b. fixed, not 'not vulnerable'.

Glad the oldstable crew is hard at work!

Comment Re:Stupid law (Score 1) 51

Is anybody aware of open source hardware/software to do the page turning and photograph/OCR the pages?

Google's rig used a puff of air, IIRC.

I asked somebody in the field and they said, "oh, you want a professional rig - those cost $10K and up.

I was like, "no, I have several rare books I'd like to index and this setup is far less complicated than my $249 3D printer." (I already have a good camera.)

I thought I'd find a hackaday or something but my cursory search wasn't fruitful.

Comment Re:Seems like a job for the OS (Score 1) 31

But how long would it take to implement in every supported OS version and then get all the developers to declare a manifest and update their app?

A policy change can be enforced tomorrow (for better or for worse).

The AI bros might even get Samsung to change their mind. Apparently their 'subcontractors' use this technique to scrape all the content they use for training.

Would threatening to cancel a year's RAM order from the chip subsidiary cause a decision to change in the TV subsidiary? I have no idea how dispersed and decentralized Samsung is.

I'd bet it will stick, though, which is likely for the best. Odds are people aren't running Tor exits on their TV's. Maybe there are legitimate apps I'm not aware of.

Comment Flying Saucers (Score 1) 55

People keep saying it's hard to get a non-blurry picture of them.

Some have suspected somebody has gravity bubble tech which would bend the light.

This thing just spins but isn't itself a disc, though on average it's s disc while in motion.

Post WWII-Germany/Paperclip there were more visible saucers seen over Washington and such but the Germans were developing solid discs. The blurry ones are more over the past few decades as drone tech has become common.

Curious.

Comment Re:PDF (Score 4, Interesting) 82

> I don't know why anyone would send one in any other format.

I'm told by attorneys that Office is nonnegotiable in Law.

Microsoft could probably raise the price to $500/mo and they'd get it.

Should a citizen be required to pay a creepy Redmond company to interact with the Courts?

It"s at least Unconstitutional in New Hampshire, likely other states as well.

Not that Courts themselves care about Unconstitutionality very often. Nor do they personally pay anything for Office. Empathy tends to be low.

But if one wants to make a decent argument that is a good one.

Comment Re:Trickle theory. (Score 1) 86

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

Comment Re:They'd serve different purposes. (Score 1) 20

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Comment The difference between gut feeling and study (Score 1) 75

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

Comment They'd serve different purposes. (Score 2) 20

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

Comment How much safety does this give? (Score 1) 1

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

Submission + - FBI gets voter's IP address in new fraud probe tactic (axios.com)

alternative_right writes: The Trump administration has a new tactic for trying to isolate cases of alleged voter fraud â" digging into the IP addresses of those who went online to register to vote.

The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios.

User Journal

Journal Journal: How to improve C/C++ code quality, random thoughts 1

I am thinking about the following concept. Take doxygen comments and extend them as follows.

1. Permit identification of pre-conditions for functions (what has to be true when the function is called)
2. Permit identification of post-conditions for functions (what is intended to be true when the function exits)
3. Permit identification of hints about what kernel operations are being used by that function

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