Comment Re:Farewell, Gurney (Score 1) 62
"You young pup!"
Now I'm sad.
Comment Re:Not only SciFi.... (Score 1) 62
He used to do a one man show of a Christmas Carol on stage. I never got to see it, but I always imagined it being amazing (based on the fact that it happened more than once... if it were ass, it would not have recurred). While the source material is relatively friendly to the idea, one man shows are hard to do well.
Comment Re:Honey pot (Score 1) 22
If the relationship ever gets into blowjob territory or beyond he is doomed
I doubt that. This isn't the nifty fifties and we don't moral panic over blowjobs anymore. Clinton was poking girls with cigars in the Whitehouse and the Bezos beams dick pics around to women. Jenson could handwave this, and she can't "Me Too" him because she's a spy that did it for her government.
Comment Amusingly (Score 5, Interesting) 82
If you ask Gemini why Google's search results have gotten so bad, it will give you an honest answer and suggest you use DuckDuckGo instead. Not exactly sure how you monetize "our service is telling our customers to go to our competitors instead" unless you're Macy's and you're in a Christmas movie.
Comment Re:Is any company managing to make AI anything pay (Score 1) 82
<rainier_wolfcastle_thats_the_joke.jpg>
Comment Re:Gives Ukraine an alternative? (Score 1) 16
alternative to StarLink
There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.
Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.
Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.
Comment Re:Globalstar is so different (Score 1) 16
The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?
No. Just no.
Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.
Comment Why bother then? (Score 1) 140
There are many less precarious ways to make a living.
Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 2) 75
There have been some interesting threads on Twitter recently where they discovered that by flipping two bits in a local AI model they could convert it to full "KILL ALL HUMANS!" mode where everything it generates looks like posts from the deep, dark depths of Reddit.
Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 3, Funny) 75
Build what, exactly??
If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.
Comment Re:Bad metric kill projects and sometime companies (Score 1) 59
But its not a total failure.
It's supposed to be a benefit: better competitors that aren't governed by shiny-object leadership are supposed to take advantage and punish such clowns. That's the real cost of centralization, IP law and regulatory balkanization: the clowns rely on these to insulate themselves from the wolves that would otherwise end them.
Submission + - Bank of America kindly asks that you don't share your password with your AI asst (techcrunch.com)
schwit1 writes: In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, “including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.”
You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.
You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.
Comment Re:"reversing a position" (Score 2) 72
Makes me think of the "bad faith" trope we see with some frequency from certain folks.
Recently some blowhard Reddit mod(s) went ham on AI in open source, and essentially outlawed discussion of any open source projects that are not purely organic from their little Reddit sandbox. When it was pointed out that this is pretty unworkable since significant open source projects, including Linux, Mesa and others are allowing AI generated code, they backed up. And that's all fine I suppose, except they characterized the response to their stupidity as deliberate "bad faith" misunderstanding of their original announcement. It wasn't that at all; it was exactly what you should expect when get all chesty with the world and can't handle the blowback, but they've adopted the cop-out of calling these self-inflicted episodes as some sort of "bad faith."
I see this often enough now that anytime I see someone claiming "bad faith" I assume I'm dealing with another nasty little shit-bird trying to cry-bully their way.
Submission + - New Discovery Reveals Shakespeare Co-Wrote Play With His Famous Rival Marlowe (greekreporter.com)
joshuark writes: Nisha Zahid of the Greek Reporter writes that new research has found that William Shakespeare collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on Edward III, a historical play published anonymously in 1596. The findings suggest Shakespeare was the main author, while Marlowe contributed several sections. The discovery challenges the long-held belief that the two playwrights were primarily rivals.
Dr. Rory Loughnane, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Kent, said the research establishes Shakespeare’s leading role “beyond any reasonable doubt.” The findings could settle a centuries-old debate over the play’s authorship. Scholars had previously linked Shakespeare to several scenes but remained uncertain about how much of the work he wrote.
The researchers used computer-based text analysis to compare Edward III with confirmed works by 10 playwrights active between the late 1580s and mid-1590s.
In one test, the analysis attributed 23 sections of the play to Shakespeare and nine to Marlowe. The results suggest Shakespeare wrote most of the work, with Marlowe contributing a smaller portion. The findings build on earlier research into the play’s disputed authorship.
A 2016 study had already identified Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. Combined with the new findings, that research suggests Shakespeare and Marlowe maintained a working relationship across several plays during their early careers. Their collaboration on Edward III, believed to have been written around 1592, suggests the two writers worked together while both were in their 20s.
The findings add to scholarly understanding of Shakespeare’s early career and the collaborative nature of Elizabethan theater. The research is expected to appear in the winter issue of the academic journal Shakespeare Quarterly.
Dr. Rory Loughnane, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Kent, said the research establishes Shakespeare’s leading role “beyond any reasonable doubt.” The findings could settle a centuries-old debate over the play’s authorship. Scholars had previously linked Shakespeare to several scenes but remained uncertain about how much of the work he wrote.
The researchers used computer-based text analysis to compare Edward III with confirmed works by 10 playwrights active between the late 1580s and mid-1590s.
In one test, the analysis attributed 23 sections of the play to Shakespeare and nine to Marlowe. The results suggest Shakespeare wrote most of the work, with Marlowe contributing a smaller portion. The findings build on earlier research into the play’s disputed authorship.
A 2016 study had already identified Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. Combined with the new findings, that research suggests Shakespeare and Marlowe maintained a working relationship across several plays during their early careers. Their collaboration on Edward III, believed to have been written around 1592, suggests the two writers worked together while both were in their 20s.
The findings add to scholarly understanding of Shakespeare’s early career and the collaborative nature of Elizabethan theater. The research is expected to appear in the winter issue of the academic journal Shakespeare Quarterly.
Submission + - Rubin Telescope discovers a new solar system planet (behindtheblack.com)
schwit1 writes: Using data from the Rubin Telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered a new planet in the outer solar system beyond Neptune, joining Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake as the five known large Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) so far discovered.
On the evening of 13 October, [Matthew] Holman was running data collected by Rubin earlier in 2026 through a search code he developed with CfA colleague Kevin Napier. The code is built to look at billions of detections of moving objects, compare them, and find the detections that correspond to the same object. Using this method, Holman uncovered ED138, and he immediately noticed that its brightness and distance indicated that it is unusually large. “My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” says Holman. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”
To remove any doubt, a detailed search through the data began in the hopes of uncovering more observations of ED138. Juri searched Rubin’s catalogs and images and found 20 more observations, going back to 4 March 2026. In all, Rubin observed ED138 30 times on 20 nights between 4 March and 11 July. Additional archival images from the DOE-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), and uncovered by the Asteroid Institute’s ADAM Precovery service, provided data going all the way back to 2016. These data allowed the team to trace more than 10 years of ED138's orbit. DECam is mounted on the NSF Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab.
ED138 is currently at a distance of about 46 astronomical units (au), where 1 au is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. For reference, dwarf planet Pluto has an average distance of 40 au. This classifies ED138 as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) — objects that orbit the Sun at a distance greater than Neptune’s.
The data suggests this new planet is the largest TNO object so far discovered, though at present the size estimate is very uncertain, from 350 to 1400 miles in diameter.
