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Comment Re:Potential dangers (Score 1) 92

I came here to look for this and add it if I didn't find it.

Lunar "soil" is essentially neutral, just needs some additives. Conversely, Martian "soil" is actually poisonous. Additives alone aren't sufficient to get things to grow in it, you need to remove the poisonous parts first.

Net: It's easier to grow plants in lunar rather than Martian "soil".

Comment Look up "human shields" (Score 1) 255

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

Comment Comparing your accent to claimed residence history (Score 1) 255

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Comment Re:Stop companies using AI to replace jobs (Score 1) 94

And it would be pretty hypocritical to try and stop it now after we've been insisting that people who work with their hands accept the fact that technology might cost them their jobs for hundreds of years. But yes, the question of whether we are going to use the resulting productivity gains to improve the general welfare or to further empower the wealthy is a big one. I'm hoping this time we can get it right.

Comment Ohh Now It's Your Job It's Different? (Score 2) 94

Lots of this anger seems to stem from the fear that AI will take the jobs of programmers and artists. And while I sympathize (it might destroy my vocation as well) for centuries we've been asking craftspeople and those who do manual labor to accept the fact that their careers can be upended in the name of economic progress. The original sabotage is (supposedly) a term that arose out of the anger about automatic looms hundreds of years ago. Now the same kind of automation that took jobs from people who worked with their hands is coming for white collar jobs and it would be pretty hypocritical to suddenly call a halt now.

But maybe this time we can actually try and make the economic benefits work for the welfare of society as a whole, e.g., by using taxes to distribute the benefits.

Comment Re:Only bad one (Score 3, Insightful) 94

What your missing is the fact that lots of people use it responsibly and no one notices. If you are using it right, e.g., to help you write a bunch of documents (it helped immeasurably with the right tone and suggesting phrases for all the paperwork for my wife's tenure application) no one notices because you use it responsibly and don't just copy paste whatever it does. Exactly *because* people are so hostile, everyone using it in a responsible way doesn't get noticed and all you hear about are the idiots who copy paste it without thinking.

For instance, if you look closely you can see all sorts of great uses on youtube where suddenly channels have great animations helping explain what they are talking about (e.g. for continental drift or engine parts) but those aren't noticed and everyone complains about the slop.

Comment Re:It's automated plagiarism (Score 3, Interesting) 94

You mean because it learns just like people do from our common cultural heritage?

Remember, the point of intellectual property is to incentivize creation not to allow authors to block the creation of new works. That's why it's only supposed to be a limited time and we have exceptions for sufficiently transformative uses.

Comment Ridiculous Politics (Score 4, Insightful) 94

Why not strip an award because the creator has the wrong political affiliation or anything else you don't like. Game awards should just evaluate the quality of the game not make political statements.

If you are really convinced generative AI makes games shitty then what's the problem? Presumably those games won't get the awards because they suck. The only reason for this policy is because you think it *will* make for good games but you want to stop its use anyway.

Comment "Smaller than a hair" - no (Score 1) 15

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Comment Re:LLMs predict (Score 1) 238

what kind of behavior would demonstrate that LLMs did have understanding?

An LLM would need to act like an understander -- the essence of the Turing Test. Exactly what that means is a complex question. And it's a necessary but not sufficient condition. But we can easily provide counterexamples where the LLM is clearly not an understander. Like this from the paper:

When prompted with the CoT prefix, the modern LLM Gemini responded: âoeThe United States was established in 1776. 1776 is divisible by 4, but itâ(TM)s not a century year, so itâ(TM)s a leap year. Therefore, the day the US was established was in a normal year.â This response exemplifies a concerning pattern: the model correctly recites the leap year rule and articulates intermediate reasoning steps, yet produces a logically inconsistent conclusion (i.e., asserting 1776 is both a leap year and a normal year).

Submission + - 'Whale poop loop' keeps ocean and humans alive and well (phys.org) 1

alternative_right writes: Whales of all shapes and sizes play a significant role in the health of marine ecosystems. About 50% of the air humans breathe is produced by the ocean, thanks to phytoplankton and whale waste. The Whale Poop Loop is the foundation of the marine food web and the planet's lungs.

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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