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Comment Satya must worship the royal anus (Score 5, Insightful) 86

by abulafia (#66368410) Attached to: US Bars Microsoft, Adobe, and Major IT Firms From Green Card Program
Tim Apple was smart enough to gift a gold plated whatever.

Sam Altman is a grifter himself and knew how to play this.

And now that we know communism is actually defined as anti-bigotry and has nothing to do with the means of production, I guess it is not communist to take ownership in Intel.

But Satya won't pucker up for Piggie. And so Microsoft gets to be the face of an attempt to gin up anti-Indian bigotry before the midterms.

Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

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 + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Comment Re:Perhaps of interest (Score 1) 90

Republicans cannot be elected here. Just won't happen any time soon.

So Republicans join the Democrats. Local media calls these people "moderates" - no, it doesn't make much sense, just the accepted code word. Most of the current batch are funded by more or less reactionary tech billionaires. (The older set are less, the newer ones more.)

So yeah. You have to read past the label. Democrats here are such a big tent that we let Republicans run things a lot of the time if they wear a fake mustache and mumble something vaguely progressive-sounding now and then. But they do whatever's good for AirBNB and Salesforce when they're not servicing commercial real estate.

Comment Perhaps of interest (Score 5, Interesting) 90

The SF Democratic machine is all in on Flock. That might have something to do with the Flock being in the SF Democratic Party.

Mar raised another concern: Two of the committee's current members -- Lily Ho and Trevor Chandler -- work for Flock. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that a prior version of Mar's resolution was removed from the party's agenda by a subcommittee chaired by Ho. Neither Ho nor Chandler offered to abstain from voting on Wednesday. The committee does not have rules related to conflicts of interest for issues like this one, Tung told Mar. They then proceeded to count both Ho and Chandler's votes.

Comment Correct. And oh, no. (Score 4, Interesting) 54

This looks like the final cell-phonification of the Mac. I'm bummed.

But they're right - if you assume that a significant fraction of Mac users are going to install some sort of third-party interface with an LLM, it is either significantly extend and harden the security perimeter deeper into the OS or your customers will routinely have everything exfiled as a matter of course, and it would just be cheaper to make iCloud into an anonymous FTP site.

And given Zuckerbook's demonstrated willingness to brazenly, actively subvert OSes, I'm willing to bet they're going to go Russian on their subjects, er, customers, anyway. ("You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push.")

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though. I'm old, I spend a lot of time at the shell. I like Macs because they're great unix workstations, still. But I don't see how you can accommodate both people like me and people who need to be protected not only from themselves, but from Zuckerbook and worse.

And they're a much bigger market than people like me. And "AI is the Footure."

Submission + - New Ai-Powered "America.gov" Government Website Uses Gemini and Grok (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CNN is reporting (and others) that President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief.

The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.

The administration’s new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people’s interactions with the federal government.

Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job — the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site — or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government’s vast umbrella.

“Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service,” said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government’s National Design Studio.

But the reality is that the most advanced actions won’t be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government’s websites. The current version of America.gov can only do “answers.”

In related news, Variety notes that America.gov confirms, for now anyway, that Biden won the 2020 election.

Submission + - Microsoft Makes Linux Containers Native on Windows 11 (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving Windows 11 developers a built in way to build, run, and deploy Linux containers through Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The release includes wslc.exe for managing containers, GPU support, networking improvements, health checks, storage mounts, and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. Microsoft also claims up to twice the performance when Linux environments access files stored on Windows.

Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Rancher Desktop are not going anywhere, but developers who only need basic container functionality now have another option built around WSL. One notable feature is still missing: Compose support. Microsoft says adding it is now a priority.

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