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Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 262

Business drive personal schedules. Bigger businesses won't shift because it complicates internal work. That means smaller, local businesses largely won't shift because they often need to match their customers' hours. The end result is that people who are expected to show up at 8:00 for work now will still have to show up for 8:00 then, even if it's two hours before sunrise.

Comment To actually conclude this (Score 1) 88

To actually make a study conclusion that is truly solid, you would need a RCT (Randomized Control Trial) - this is impossible for such a hypothesis.

A confounding issue issue such as the amount of sunlight a person gets per day has been shown to affect mitochondrial health - 15 minutes per days makes a big difference. If you work inside, there is an observed difference in health outcomes based on the spectrum of the artificial light (full-spectrum being healthier). Did they control for these affects? How could they possibly do so. Did they control for percentage of processed food fiber intake, serum Vit D levels, glucose and sodium sensitivity, liver and kidney function, ad infinitum. We don't even have an accepted gold standard for measuring sodium sensitivity (that I am aware of).

I'm not saying researchers were dishonest, I'm saying that observational studies are very difficult to be coerced into truly clinical significance, much less something that would be considered proved in other areas of science. Human behavior and biology is very complex and messy. A shame considering how nice it would be to develop reliable answers.

Comment Re:So basically... (Score 2) 195

I credit most of SpaceX's success to CEO Gwen Shotwell. She keeps things going even when Musk is off on an irrelevant tear somewhere else.

Unfortunately, Musk seems to be on a path to sabotaging her efforts. The SpaceX prospectus showed that xAI (which bought Twitter, because why not?) was the reason they posted a loss in the last fiscal year. Even with all the expenditures on Starship, SpaceX would have been profitable. Like every other major AI company, it is not at all clear that xAI can reach profitability anytime in the near future, especially since xAI is blocked from so many enterprises and doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the big three at all. As Starship production scales up, the costs are going to increase, and they need payload revenue to offset those costs. There's so much focus now on the Pez dispenser and the lunar mission that I haven't seen any hints of the conventional payload delivery version (aka, "Chomper") in a couple of years. Maybe it's being quietly worked on. I hope so, because the big space station payloads that were talked about a few years ago will need it.

Comment Re:Sigh. (Score 1) 89

It seems like it should be just theming, but there's a separate architecture to it. Even the APIs are different, with new using a GraphQL-based API and old using a more traditional structure. The core data (users, posts, comments, etc.) is the same, but the pathways are completely different. New has links into capabilities that old doesn't have (especially around abuse and scraping), and old has capabilities that new doesn't always have (especially around mod tools, which new apparently breaks on a regular basis).

Comment Re:They just want to get rid of it (Score 1) 89

When they do get rid of old I think that is going to be it for many users, me included.

"Many users" is going to be relative. I saw some numbers recently that only around 1% of users go through Old Reddit, and in many of the largest subs, it's a fraction of a percent. I don't think it will have the impact that some people think. I prefer Old Reddit on desktop, but it's clunky on mobile, so I stick with the new interface (I don't use the app).

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 250

For global energy, that typically includes transportation. As more economies have expanded, there has been more use of cars, trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft, almost all of which are powered by fossil fuels.

Global electricity generation has changed. In 2000, 64.1% of global electricity came from fossil fuels, 16.7% came from nuclear, and 18.7% came from renewable. In 2023, despite overall electricity generation roughly doubling, fossil fuel generation was down to 60.1%, nuclear was down to 9.1%, and renewables were up to 30.23%. Looking at the renewable mixes, in 2000, it was 17.4% hydropower, 0.7% biofuels, 0.2% wind, 0.01% solar, and 0.3% geothermal. In 2023, it was 14.6% hydropower, 2.2% biofuels, 7.75% wind, 5.4% solar, and 0.3% geothermal.

That's still a lot of fossil fuel electricity generation, but it is declining by percentage and their growth curves are flattening. Renewables are up by quite a bit and still growing. Nuclear is declining, and isn't likely to recover in any meaningful numbers. This program is a lot like past programs meant to encourage new nuclear power plants. Odds are that maybe one will get started, and it might not get finished.

Comment Re:We don't need them (Score 1) 250

These are going to be quick and dirty installations in order to power AI data centers for people that bribed trump. It's your taxpayer dollars going to finance AI slop.

Construction isn't expected to start until 2030 at the earliest. From TFA:

Energy Secretary Chris Wright cited “tremendous interest” among developers of data centers that would buy the power, as well as utilities and energy companies. The nuclear plants could begin construction by 2030 and become operational in the mid-2030s, Wright and other officials said Tuesday.

By that time, the AI bubble may have burst, or the grid may have gone even further into renewables, or both.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 4, Informative) 250

We need more power, but nuclear isn't the way anymore. I was a supporter of nuclear until around 2020, when I saw how fast solar and wind were gaining. Both have consistently shown enormous growth because they are not as specific in their land requirements, can be installed in small numbers, and the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for them has plummeted to become profitable even without subsidies. Storage is still a challenge, but we're seeing rapid improvements in that, too, with sodium batteries rapidly catching up in capacity.

TFA says that construction on these won't start until at least 2030, and if they make that, it would be amazingly fast for how reactors are built these days. In that time, wind is expected to expand by almost 50 GW and solar by 40 GW. Battery storage is expected to almost quadruple in that time. By the time the reactors are built, they will be a tiny fraction of the new power generation installed and they will probably be the most expensive part of it.

Comment Re:In the long run it does not matter (Score 1) 30

Most likely the next step change in AI improvement will come from the next generation learning from today's LLMs and diffusion models. But not being trained on their output. More likely they will be evaluated by current AI.

AI advancements have a predictable pattern. First we mimic how humans do something, then we use those AIs to evaluate the next generation which learns how to do it without mimicking humans. LLMs have been trained on human output and work by trying to determine what a human would do in any situation. The next generation will most likely learn how to think and speak without ever seeing a word of human generated text. Now that LLMs exist to evaluate their output we have the necessary building blocks to design the generation of AI that can really produce content far better than any human.

We are living in the era of early-to-mid 90s chess engines, where AI learned from human moves and brute forced its way to barely beating the best in the world. It took 10 years from the point where chess engines could compete with top humans players until chess engines were effectively unbeatable. And those unbeatable engines were trained by other AI, not by looking at human games. It got to the point where looking at how humans played would have just made it worse.

Comment Re:israel builds its own jets now? (Score 1) 184

IAI hasn't build a fighter since the Dagger/Nesher that Israel sold to Argentina after the IAF was done with them. They tried to build an F-16 competitor, the Lavi, but stopped when the US refused to allow any funding to be used towards its development.

Israel likely has the technical capability to build a modern fighter. Whether it has the money to do so on its own is an entirely other matter.

Comment Re:Nothing backs it (Score 1) 110

Price of silver has also dropped about 50% since it's peak in January. Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.
50% drop in the value of an asset is not that unusual.

If you have assets, you are wise to spread them out because anyone of them can underperform or fail. If you want to put 2% of your portfolio into BTC, you can only get burnt by 2% by that decision. If you invest in pre-IPO stock, you should limit percentages because risk of failure is high though returns can be spectacular.

If you think nothing more that betting on a greater fool you're in good company, Warren Buffet said, "Now if you told me you own all of the Bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything."

Personally, I hold no BTC. I do hold some gold and silver, I hold some pre-IPO stocks, but most of my assets are spread around in what is considered low-volatility assets, mostly stocks.

Comment Re:Everybody Hates Documentation (Score 2) 86

I am reminded of some source code for a company-specific program that I saw in the late 1990s. I don't remember why I was perusing it, as I was in IT and absolutely not a developer. But I remember being tickled at one of the comments before a block of code. It was something like, "I have no idea why or how the following code works. But every time someone tries to change it, everything breaks, so please don't touch it."

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