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Comment Not just jamming (Score 1) 29

There are some systems that are sending valid looking signals with apparently valid ephemeris and almanac data. The signals should have been digitally signed decades ago. I had two different GPS receivers revert to valentine's day over the black sea. The one started seeing sats that were 10db stronger than the real ones and it got the time but never could get a position fix.

Comment Re:In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score 2) 71

The old images were from radars that did 6 elevations with a sweep time of a minute per elevation. So rather than put the data in a continuous 6 minute buffer, they throw all the data away every 6 minutes and start over.

They could have bought a system from a number of groups for far less money. There are even TV stations that would have sold them a world class system for a few million dollars. That would be a turnkey system that can take feeds from all the existing radars plus any of the newer coastal radars that also collect weather data as well as the mobile research radars.

AI

'AI Can't Think' (theverge.com) 289

In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today's AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. "The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language -- and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own," writes Riley. A user shares: The article goes on to point out that we use language to communicate. We use it to create metaphors to describe our reasoning. That people who have lost their language ability can still show reasoning. That human beings create knowledge when they become dissatisfied with the current metaphor. Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research. He developed it as thought experiment because he was dissatisfied with the existing metaphor. It quotes someone who said, "common sense is a collection of dead metaphors." And that AI, at best, can rearrange those dead metaphors in interesting ways. But it will never be dissatisfied with the data it has or an existing metaphor.

A different critique (PDF) has pointed out that even as a language model AI is flawed by its reliance on the internet. The languages used on the internet are unrepresentative of the languages in the world. And other languages contain unique descriptions/metaphors that are not found on the internet. My metaphor for what was discussed was the descriptions of the kinds of snow that exist in Inuit languages that describe qualities nowhere found in European languages. If those metaphors aren't found on the internet, AI will never be able create them.

This does not mean that AI isn't useful. But it is not remotely human intelligence. That is just a poor metaphor. We need a better one.
Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture to improve understanding of human cognition and generative AI.

Comment Re:Sure, do this instead of better tech (Score 1) 69

Given I haven't used Firefox for that long now, do they finally have the ability to select input and output devices for audio?

I use speakers for normal audio, but Teams / Discord etc on a headset only.

Yet the feature request to be able to select audio streams has been around for at least a decade and never implemented... I gave up caring in waiting for an outbreak of common sense - but you wanted to know what 'tech' is missing...

Comment Re:Universal fix (Score 1) 215

This is what the numbers look like:

https://trends.builtwith.com/S...

Sadly, it seems the quality of Fedora is going down the gurgler too.

If they ever finish debian to use a single init system and actually have some consistency, it'd be soooo much nicer to use. I've been saying that the last 5-6 versions though.

That's the problem with debian - there's no central leadership for anything - so it only really seems to get 80% of the way there. If they could just get that extra 20% completed, it'd be a complete, hands-down, no brainer to use for just about everything.

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It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming. -- J. Sammet

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