I can, however, tell you that you don't understand what science is, or how it functions.

It has not. In fact, the criticism against string theory is *precisely that it is pretty much impossible to debunk* because you've got so may parameters to mess with that you can make just about anything work with string theory. It's a bit like overfitting: if you want to find an equation that perfectly fits your 10,000 data points, you can certainly give a polynomial of order 9,999. Is that going to accurately model the mechanism that caused the data points you gathered, or be a good predictor for additional sampling? Not necessarily. You've overfitted the crap out of your model, it behaves weirdly between the points, it treats random noise or outliers as deterministic and valid, etc.

Is this what's going on with string theory? Maybe. It could also be that it's right. It's *really hard* to come up with an experiment that could falsify it with the technology we currently have. Does that by itself mean it's wrong and we should give up on it? No. Does that mean we should also be looking at other avenues? Yes. And we are, there are plenty of physicists who work with alternative theories and are vocal critics of string theory.

There is no person that holds that belief that isn't a moron. You included, thank you for outing yourself. I won't respond to any more of your responses, because I do know that debating idiots like you is like playing chess with a pigeon: You knock the pieces down, shit on the board, and strut around like you've won. I'll continue answering your post for anyone else who cares to read so they can understand WHY you're an idiot, but I don't really care about your opinion.

1. 1. Anything that is rigorous is real science. It's not defined as useful to you right now. Anything we discover, whether the path we're going down ends up being correct or not, is valuable.
2. 2. I'll let Angela Collier, who, btw, *also* does not like String Theory and happens to agree with you that it was a waste of time, tell you about many of the exciting discoveries made in physics over the past 70 years. I'm not even going to address the point you said "scientists" in general, as in, making the claim that ALL science has apparently been a standstill for decades, where the world I live in today is barely fucking recognizable compared to the world I lived in 20 years ago. I don't mean just in technology, I mean in terms of what we know. My god, we have NEVER been in a time that is more prolific than the time we live in right now, whatever you're learning in school will be outdated by the time you leave college, will be outdated by the time you get a graduate degree. If you're not learning while you work, you're a dinosaur and your job is at risk. The world of science today moves FAST.

Maths masturbation is *great* and we need more of it. This is one of the problems with Sabine: she likes to go, "it's just math." Buddy, If it's not rigorous math, it's not worth anything, if it is rigorous math, and it doesn't match reality, the paper it was written on is still worth its weight in gold. Do you like the world you live in with online baking and secure encryption? Thank all the mathematicians of old doing number theory for the sake of it, finding properties of prime numbers and elliptical curves. Einstein didn't like Minkowski's use of a four-dimensional spacetime to frame his special theory of relativity and then he learned it turned out to be super useful, and embraced geometry when developing his general theory of relativity, and embraced something else that essentially had no use outside of pure mathematics at that time: tensors.

If (and I do mean if, because like I said, it hasn't been 'debunked' as you claim) String Theory turns out to be COMPLETELY wrong, all the work done in it will be useful to advance what we discover is right.

You and Weinstein need to engage in a little bit more of "Maths Masturbation". Especially considering his "geometric unity" theory doesn't have enough math in it to be a rigors theory. He should get on that.

Roger Penrose is a brilliant man whom I highly respect, who happens to disagree with String Theory and actually most of the direction that any quantum theory of gravity tends to go towards. Most physicists want to quantize gravity, he thinks they should instead be trying to explain quantum physics in relativistic terms. Now, he's in the minority with that claim, but he could be right, and I appreciate that someone is making strides toward that. Although he often uses strong language to disagree with, I *seriously* doubt he would say the people working with it have "wasted their time" or aren't doing "real science."

I also want to point out Sabine is pretty critical of CCC, Penrose's theory he hopes will replace the inflationary model. Because Sabine, isn't trying to propose alternatives. She pretty much goes, "I think string theory has go nowhere, oh well. Let's just not study it or any alternatives anymore, lest we do any math masturbation." That's not science. Creating hypothesis, making the theory rigorous, and testing predictions is the job.

I do my Elvis impersonations in private, so no one will ever know.

Yes, and I think Cloudflare was likely on that point. At least, I would have been.

They are right to take the approach they are doing. First stop is education and challenging the orders. Educate the politicians and the courts on both the technology and the reasons behind the way the technology operates. Fight it in the courts because that's the right thing to do, even if bad actors want the harm and also technically illiterate folks don't understand the harm, the moral grounds need the fight to be fought.

ONLY after that fails, absolute simple, blind, malicious compliance. If France refuses to listen to the technologists and wants the ban, that's fine, roughly 25% of the global websites will be blackholed in France, and sites that rely on those will also shut down. Any and all requests get met by a redirect to the French court order. When the politicians and the courts demand the impossible and want to nuke themselves to the online dark ages despite people telling them they're making a mistake, so be it.

Wish we had changed Unix seconds to TAI instead of UTC when dropping 32-bit... Who cares where the stars are.

This gets to some extent into the issue of what we mean by "novel" and admittedly that has some subjectivity to it. One take on what is going on here is that this should be showing us how much that we thought of as creative was just rearranging things. There's a legitimate argument that the AI isn't doing anything creative or clever here, and that if someone says, "Well, by that metric the vast majority of human mathematicians aren't doing anything creative or clever," and while I see that as a pretty hard response, one response is to just say "Yeah, go bite that bullet."

Here? None.

I'm not sure where the line is there. For at least some of these, part of it seems to be the AI importing pieces of techniques used in other areas of math. In general, no human discovery is completely novel. Newton's work relied on prior work of Galileo, Oresme and many others. Einstein's work relied on ideas of hundreds before-hand. At the same time, there's people whose work really does look like it is fundamentally different in many ways than what went before, and both of those are examples. In math, Peter Scholze's perfectoids for example clearly build on existing ideas, but there's a lot of stuff that looks deeply new. How to draw the line here isn't always clear. For what it is worth, Harald Helfgott, who is a much smarter and more knowledgeable mathematician than I am thinks that of what he's looked at it seems like the AI is still producing things in what amounts to almost the "convex hull" of known math or close to it. But his idea of what that looks like may be much bigger than my idea.

I said Darth Cheeto's executive orders were less rooted in law than what's come before and you think I support him? WTF? I said your statement supported the position you were replying to. That's not support, that's telling you you're supporting something almost, though not quite, as bad.

For the rest, I am pro-immigration (even asylum) but anti-unlawful immigration. I don't hold against people that they want better lives and will use any excuse to obtain them, but I do hold against people when they are responsible for upholding the law and not only fail to do so but subvert it (and then claim that they had nothing to do with creating the crisis). Yes, I hold that against both parties equally, and yes, that applies to where we are in terms of the economy, Iran, etc. I am not being partisan here.

I think the original article was somewhat tongue in cheek.

And those corrections require atomic clocks.

You think LLMs would write "Slashdot doesn't have table support, so it's hard to do side-by-side well, but:"? You think LLMs like writing sentences that end in conjunctions that express incomplete thoughts? Do you think LLMs write "high frequences", "naively pairs", call H.265 X.265 (I was thinking of what you refer to it as in ffmpeg), imbalanced parens after "lacks motion vectors",etc?

Don't get me wrong, I am a LLM user, I absolutely do use it sometimes for search, fact checking things I'm writing, spelling/grammar checks (clearly not that time, lol), etc. But I write my own posts.

I agree. I am a "lib" and don't agree with much the Trump administration does. H1B has been abused for decades. Tech companies use it to hire workers at low rates and then abuse them as they become "indentured servants," afraid of getting fired in which case they have to beg for new employment and sponsorship to stay in the country. The system has been gamed for years. Want to hire an H1B and get a lawyer? The lawyer will tell you two things: Make a job ad which basically asks for the exact resume of your H1B candidate. Exact versions of VMWare, Python, etc you name it...be precise. Then post it in a print newspaper, not online on any job boards or a place a normal person would look. Voila! No American applicants. If you do interview Americans, all you have to do is say "candidate did not have required skills" with no real justification. No one checks. I once consulted at a bank and they literally had an entire floor of Indians on H1B with one white person in the corner office supervising them. I had plenty of friends that would have been qualified to work those jobs. The H1B system has been terrible for some time and needs dismantling. That said, all this will do is cause these companies to hire people in other countries to stay there and work remotely, for even less money than H1B. There also needs to be restrictions on outsourcing labor that can be done in America by Americans.

....THIS is what gets upvoted on Slashdot these days? Woooooooooow.

Y'all are going to have to explain how they show more creativity than humans.

How they can solve problems that require reasoning. Go ahead and simply ask it one. Or make up a new puzzle and ask it that. To any level of depth you wish to make it.

Or how they can solve things where brute-forcing the solution would take longer than the heat death of the universe.

Do any of you have any evidence it "put puzzle pieces together" to find novel cancer treatments?

Seriously guys, obvious neo-luddite mindrot propaganda? From people of your caliber? Your ID length?

Good point, but probably not (directly) related to this study.

Slashdot doesn't have table support, so it's hard to do side-by-side well, but:

JPEG XL advantages:

Licensing:

JPEG XL: Fully royalty-free (Open source / Apache 2.0)
HEIC: Proprietary patent minefield (MPEG LA, Advance, Velos; royalties apply)

Legacy JPEG Migration:

JPEG XL: Lossless, reversible bitstream transcoding (~20% smaller); fast enough for real-time web servers
HEIC: Lossy re-encode only (generational quality loss; cannot reconstruct original JPEG)

Fine Detail & Textures

JPEG XL: Retains sharp text, fine lines, subtle textures, and film grain
HEIC: Video-derived coding (HEVC / X.265). Tends to smooth out high frequences and smudge grain.

Software Encoding Speed

JPEG XL: Extremely fast; highly parallelized SIMD architecture
HEIC: Exceptionally slow and computationally expensive in software

Software Decoding Speed

JPEG XL: Fast, lightweight multi-threaded CPU decoding
HEIC: Heavy CPU overhead (without using hardware acceleration)

Progressive Rendering:

JPEG XL: True progressive decode; smart saliency algorithm to focus bandwidth on critical details first.
HEIC: None; full file must be received and decoded before display

Lossless Compression
JPEG XL: Dedicated modular mode; vastly outperforms PNG and WebP
HEIC: Ill-suited; you basically have to try to do lossless compression with an inherently-lossy format

Bit Depth & HDR

JPEG XL: Native HDR; up to 32-bit floating point per channel
HEIC: Typically capped at 10-bit or 12-bit integer

Max Dimensions & Scaling

JPEG XL: Up to 1B x 1B; efficient viewport/crop loading without full decoding
HEIC: v5.2, 4096x2160; v6.2: 8192x4320; a tiling hack allows up to 16384 x 16384

Channels & Color Spaces:

JPEG XL: Arbitrary color spaces (hyperspectral); unlimited extra channels (alpha, depth, thermal, masks, CMYK, etc)
HEIC: Rigid container; limited auxiliary channels and standard video color spaces

HEIC advantages:

Rollout / acceleration:

JPEG XL: no dedicated hardware acceleration (thankfully, it's not as important because it's so much more efficient). Software adoption still rolling out.
HEIC: Hardware silicon (ASICs). Default capture format on modern iOS/Android; native capture in Sony, Canon, and Nikon cameras

Video:

JPEG XL: Supports animations (GIF/APNG replacement), with some optimizations** (it's not just a series of stills), but lacks the full set of optimizations that a proper video codec has.
HEIC: Container naively pairs full HEVC video tracks and audio with video.

** - JPEG XL can store up to 4 reference frames in a buffer, with multiple blending modes from the references (add, replace, multiply, etc); has subframe bounding boxes ("dirty rectangles") for when only part of a frame changes; invisible frames; modular deltas (differences between frames); etc. However, it lacks motion vectors (e.g. detecting a feature drifting across a scene and simply having to encode "move it" (followed by any needed deltas). So it's great for "GIFs", but if you wanted to encode a full movie, it'd be significantly larger than e.g. HEVC.

"We couldn't get a law through congress so we did something questionably legal via executive order" is reinforcing the point being made by the grandparent (which, FWIW, I don't fully agree with. Many of Trump's executive orders are clearly less rooted in law than what's come before).

By the way, funny that you mention Sen. Kennedy in the context of immigration reform, who rather famously said: "This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forth an amnesty bill like this." Yet here we are.