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Comment Re: Are you not into PR? (Score 1) 69

by Gravis Zero (#66374602) Attached to: Game Console Market Craters: Xbox and PS5 Sales Plummet Over 25%

Or maybe take aim at what's making the global economy so fucked up in the first place?

Humanity's egocentric tendencies and selfishness? No?
Humanity's indifference toward the suffering of others?
A society that continues to believe the fairy tale that working harder means you earn more money?
Unfettered greed and legalized corruption named "lobbying"?
Unethical corporations like Sony who get their way using said lobbying?
Both major parties for refusing to shift toward ranked choice voting?
US media corporations for amplifying Donald Trump in the 2016 election because ratings?
The corporate shills that are now hold supermajority in Congress and distance themselves from politicians that globally moderate?

Don't get me wrong, I vote but then entire system has been broken and in decline for decades because people only think about themselves. If you doubt this then just read about humanity's lack of a serious response (both nationally and personally) to climate change.

Comment Are you not into PR? (Score 1, Insightful) 69

by Gravis Zero (#66371570) Attached to: Game Console Market Craters: Xbox and PS5 Sales Plummet Over 25%

We're in a K-shaped economy right now, the stocks are at all time highs, and the purchasing power is at our lowest at the moment, this can't go on for much longer.

"Here at Sony, we know what it's like when times are tough, many of our executives have had to put off buying a fifth home due to financial hardship. However, we also believe in self-sufficiency, which is why we need you to go out there, sell your blood, your children, or your neighbors' car and keep buying vapid games that will never own and will stop working in a couple years. Remember, selling your children will give you more time to enjoy your hallow online experience in fighting losing battles against children (but not yours) who have dedicated everything toward winning meaningless battles. If nothing else, do for our shareholders which own the economy. If you don't, they will make you regret it. Here at Sony we're counting on you to do the right thing(TM) and buy our products, not food."

Comment Mostly (Score 3) 10

Can Artemis II resist 'incoming rocks each no more than a couple of inches wide', coming in at 10K MPH?

* The Launch Abort Stage and Solid Rocket Boosters of Artemis II are securely stationed on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Protected from incoming meteorites.
* The Core Stage is went on a destructive trajectory and the pieces of it are securely stationed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Protected from incoming meteorites.
* The Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (Upper Stage) was sent into a heliocentric disposal orbit but won't make it to Sun, so it will be orbiting for millions of years. NOT Protected from incoming meteorites.
* The European Service Module (lower part of Orion spacecraft) detached from the crew module just before re-entry and burned up in Earth's atmosphere with remnants securely stationed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Protected from incoming meteorites.
* The Crew Module (upper part of the Orion spacecraft) landed in the Pacific Ocean and was retrieved before being transported to NASA facilities for post-flight analysis, data extraction, and inspection. Protected from incoming meteorites.

Your concern for the spacecraft is touching but most of it will be just fine at the bottom of an ocean. Honestly, I'm more concerned about Artemis IV which has parts that actually land on the Lunar surface that's getting pelted by meteorites. ;)

Comment TL;DR (Score 1) 20

I'm just just going to assume that this a new movie about Godzilla fighting all our so-called heroes which get eaten/wiped out along with humanity's prized jewel: Legoland. After the initial attack, we make a bunch of increasing sophisticated humanoid robots to Godzilla down him down and they assist us into our journey into space. After returning to bring space socialism to Earth, we find a bunch of plasma-sword wielding religious zealots have taken power but are now under attack by evolved version of the robots which are now highly modular, being constructed of what appears to be Lego bricks.

I guess some things will never change.

Submission + - LLM-inspired study sheds light on how brain cells encode the meaning of words (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To investigate how the brain encodes the meaning of words, the researchers first recorded the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus of 10 people who were listening to stories. Their recordings were collected using tiny wire electrodes that were implanted in the participants' brains as part of clinical monitoring procedures for epilepsy.

The team then used mathematical models to analyze the language used in the stories and the brain recordings. This allowed them to examine whether information about the meaning of words could predict the recorded neuronal activity.

"We recorded responses of hippocampal neurons while individuals listened to narrative speech," wrote Melissa Franch and her colleagues in their paper. "Using an encoding model approach, we find robust encoding of semantics, even after controlling for phonemics and grammar. Individual words had complex selectivities that included multiple words in multiple semantic categories."

Comment Re: They exist. (Score 1) 75

by Gravis Zero (#66370220) Attached to: First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick

Those diamond batteries were bullshit.

Sir, I am an expert in chemistry having had multiple minutes of experience in searching for information about it. As such, I defer to you because sure, like I would know. :)

It's not that I don't like chemistry, it's just that I think the reality needs to refactor it's lower level APIs, starting with mathematics. I'm not saying it's wasteful but too much computational power goes into Pi. They should make it a simple integer value like 3 and make e like... 2. ;)

Submission + - ChatGPT, Gemini Call BS on Microsoft's PERM Program Ban 'Comment'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Asked to comment on the merits of the Microsoft Comment on Recent Immigration Questions, which was posted without attribution on the Microsoft On The Issues blog in response to the U.S. Government's suspension of Microsoft, Adobe, and IT outsourcing giants from the Green Card program (PERM), ChatGPT suggested it was a red herring defense at best: "The central issue is whether Microsoft has complied with the requirements governing permanent labor certification, including whether qualified American workers were genuinely considered for positions being offered to foreign workers. Microsoft instead emphasizes that 80% of its H-1B applications involved existing employees rather than new hires. That framing encourages readers to think the government's concern rests on a basic misunderstanding: that the government is counting existing workers as new foreign hires. But that is not necessarily the government's argument. Existing H-1B employees can subsequently be sponsored for permanent residency, and their employers must still comply with the applicable PERM requirements."

Asked to provide a second AI opinion, Google's Gemini agreed: "Microsoft’s response is a classic piece of defensive corporate communication. It successfully highlights true statistics—such as its high median wages and the fact that most H-1B filings are internal extensions—to counter the narrative that it is a low-wage outsourcing shop. However, its statement completely sidesteps the central accusation: that its ongoing sponsorship of thousands of green cards via the PERM program ran afoul of labor regulations while it was concurrently laying off thousands of domestic American workers. By omitting this tension, Microsoft's response answers questions the administration wasn't actually asking while ignoring the underlying compliance and fraud investigations that triggered the freeze."

Microsoft is hardly the only tech giant whose PERM program hiring practices have attracted U.S. government scrutiny. In August 2026, the U.S Dept. of Justice's Civil Rights Division announced a $3.2 million settlement involving OpenAI OpCo LLC and its analytics provider Statsig that addressed allegations of "discriminating against U.S. workers" during the PERM hiring process. And in 2023, Apple was required by the U.S. Dept. of Justice to pay up to $25 million in backpay and civil penalties to "resolve allegations that Apple illegally discriminated in hiring and recruitment against U.S. citizens and certain non-U.S. citizens." And in 2021, Facebook agreed to pay up to $14.25 million to settle civil claims by the U.S. government that the social media company discriminated against American workers and violated federal recruitment rules.

Comment They exist. (Score 3, Interesting) 75

by Gravis Zero (#66369460) Attached to: First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick

Chip-scale atomic clocks are a thing. The problem is that they aren't exactly low enough power to be wrist mounted as they need 115 mW constantly. You absolute can make it into a wristwatch (and people have) but it will need regular charging... unless you are using betavoltaic nuclear batteries. However to reach the power output needed with what is on the market, you would need about 120K of them.

The natural reaction to this is "what's the purpose of building up that kind of arm strength if the batteries are just going to die in 50 years?" and the answer is the diamond battery! This is a newer betavoltaic battery which is in the same power output range but lasts for thousands of years because it's based on Carbon-14.

Start doing those reps today because the watch of your dreams is 2400Kg.

Submission + - "Software is over" Developer uses AI builds Adobe clones after cancellation fees (techspot.com) 2

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas is taking on seven of Adobe's best-known applications through Artcraft. The project extend beyond Adobe's famous photo editing program to video production, vector graphics, page layouts, and PDF tools.

In his Reddit announcement, Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to build the replacements in Rust. Photocraft imitates Photoshop, while Vectorcraft and Filmcraft take on Illustrator and Premiere. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft, and Printcraft are the alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro, respectively.

The apps are open source and free, with no subscription required. Users can download the source code, modify it, and contribute fixes. Thomas describes himself as a software industry veteran with 15 years of experience, including roughly a decade working with Rust. He also insists the project has team support and will not be abandoned after launch.

"We're going to reach 100% parity within a month," he said, which is an ambitious claim.

For now, the software remains at an early stage, and commenters have reported problems with basic functionality. They might look like Adobe's apps, but it doesn't sound like they're able to replace the long-established programs just yet.

Thomas says Adobe's cancelation fees helped motivate the project, which is understandable.

Thomas believes other developers will follow suit, predicting a future where free, near-identical open-source versions of popular paid apps will be widely available.

"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."

"Software is over," he declared, somewhat boldly. And hopefully cancellation fees.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Submission + - UK vegetables 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc since the Sixties because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.

'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.

'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.

'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”

'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'

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