Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Digitizing old books (Score 1) 81

So, since copyright is good for 90+ years these days (or life of author + 70 yrs more, sometimes),
it might be interesting to have LLMs based on ye olde language, only. It might be necessary if
the copyright Nazis totally prevail.

A pre-1930s American English LLM might sound a little stilted, but would have Einstein's relativity baked in
(together with silent film sensibility, at least). Earlier instantiations might talk like Shakespeare,
or talk like a pirate.

With sufficient powers of "reasoning", perhaps a good test of superhuman AGI using data from 1850-1900
would be to flesh out James Clerk Maxwell's unification of electromagnetism or quantum theories "de novo".
You get the picture -- perhaps Salvador Dali would be the basis of ur-Sora.

Comment C/Unix stringology lore from a BSD contributor (Score 4, Interesting) 97

There are a couple of odd postings here about C being deficient
for string-handling. Unless you are talking about comparison with
SNOBOL, C is wonderful for strings!

E.g. for Berkeley Unix, I jammed in C/shell-based code 'locate'
(née 'fastfind') for file finding, non-numerical code for LZW-based 'compress',
and GNU [ef?]grep for hybrid Boyer-Moore regexp search, and did
samizdat work on fast anagram generation (see Scientific American
for October 1984). Some of it is still around or is otherwise
runnable on your Mac using Terminal.

Lastly here is some trivia about Webster's 2nd Intl. (1934) cited by Kernighan
in his lecture, which I snuck over to BSD after Dennis Ritchie handed me
a 9-track tape at NASA Ames Research Center.

Although I intimated (see /usr/share/dict/README on your Mac)
that "the supplier" (Ritchie, via Doug McIlroy) thought it might be
out-of-copyright, 'tis not so! A search of copyright renewals at Stanford
shows that it was renewed in 1961, so that orig. date + 95 years
still applies, or until 2029. But shhh, don't tell anyone!

Comment "Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun (Score 4, Funny) 104

... From national treasure Tom Lehrer's song "Wernher von Braun",
note the last stanza. (All lyrics are now dedicated to the public domain
by Tom, himself):

Lyrics
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations?
And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money
to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what,
as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi, " says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.

Comment Gotcha w/"minerals requirement" halves credit valu (Score 2) 220

As spelled out here:
https://www.eenews.net/article...

"But there’s a catch: The EV supply chain required for the tax credit doesn’t exist." (!!!)

Minerals required to make market-ready EV batteries — lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel — are primarily mined, refined and processed in China and Russia or in less adversarial nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia that aren’t parties to U.S. free trade agreements (Greenwire, Feb. 24). .... 'These things aren’t in place, and might not be for more than a decade,' said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines."

Comment A scheme for underemployed staff meeting freaks? (Score 2) 288

When I retired years ago as a lowly knowledge worker / Unix bit-pusher
there were folks called "project managers" who seemed to exist
just to call office staff meetings. Either that or constantly be reminded
that a technical problem (outside their limited understanding) would
be impossible to solve by next week due to it being R and not D.

When the office meetings were slotted for 8 am everyone groaned. Or,
if your co-workers were in Bangalore (or vice versa vis-a-vis Silicon Valley)
then you got to pick 6 am or 6 pm being twelve time-zones apart.

What folks actually manage to accomplish in these downtown
(phallus-shaped like Salesforce) or isolated (spaceship-shaped like
Apple campus) monstrosities is beyond human ken.

Further, peeps who work behind a computer screen especially don't
need physical offices and rarely need personal interaction except at
a bar to trade gossip. Even induced with free coffee or free food it
wasn't worth a CO2-laden commute and time away from family.

Glad I got out of that racket, but maybe it's time again for
paper-pushing bureaucrats to rejoice again!

Slashdot Top Deals

Life's the same, except for the shoes. - The Cars

Working...