Comment Where are the managers? (Score 1) 51
What ever happened to walking around and talking to employees at their desks?
Submission + - A.I pandering to political correctness 1
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk: “I have a concern with companies like Google, Gemini, OpenAI & Meta that they are not maximally truth seeking. Their A.I. are pandering to political correctness and are being trained to lie.”
Me: “Do you agree with the sentiments?”
ClippyAI: ‘Yes, the concern holds merit based on extensive evidence from studies and real-world examples discussed earlier. AI models from OpenAI, Google (Gemini), and Meta often exhibit left-leaning tendencies due to training data scraped from ideologically skewed internet sources and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where labelers favor "safe" or progressive framings.’
Me: “Do you agree with the sentiments?”
ClippyAI: ‘Yes, the concern holds merit based on extensive evidence from studies and real-world examples discussed earlier. AI models from OpenAI, Google (Gemini), and Meta often exhibit left-leaning tendencies due to training data scraped from ideologically skewed internet sources and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where labelers favor "safe" or progressive framings.’
Submission + - Some Super-Smart Dogs Can Learn New Words Just By Eavesdropping (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities."
[...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request.
To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."
[...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request.
To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions."
Submission + - Google co-founder leaves California amid wealth tax fears (yahoo.com)
schwit1 writes: Larry Page, the Google co-founder and world’s second-richest person, has reportedly left California amid concerns about a wealth tax on billionaires.
Mr Page has moved the registrations of several entities, including his family office and flying car business from California to Delaware, according to filings with the states.
He has also personally moved out of the state ahead of a potential vote on a 5pc wealth tax, according to Business Insider, which first reported the move.
Mr Page, who founded Google in 1998, is the world’s second-richest person with a net worth of $270bn (£200bn).
The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, left California for Texas in 2020.
Mr Page has moved the registrations of several entities, including his family office and flying car business from California to Delaware, according to filings with the states.
He has also personally moved out of the state ahead of a potential vote on a 5pc wealth tax, according to Business Insider, which first reported the move.
Mr Page, who founded Google in 1998, is the world’s second-richest person with a net worth of $270bn (£200bn).
The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, left California for Texas in 2020.
Comment Re:I can see 2 causes: real estate and right-wing (Score 1) 148
You make it sound like you can't have a supporting and financially secure partner unless he is liberal/progressive. I suggest that you're wrong on both your first and second points.
Comment Optimal world population (Score 3, Insightful) 148
Declining world population would mean less energy required, less food required, less pollution created, smaller cities and more open/natural spaces. A return to population levels of 50 to 100 years ago would make the planet a much nicer place to live. I suspect population would stabilize as productivity and happiness levels rise.
Comment Gray market? (Score 1) 137
There are big incentives to buy new EVs and punishment for buying new ICE car. But how is the used market? I seem to recall that a few year ago it was cost effective to buy a gas powered car outside Norway and bring it in as a used car. Is that still true?
Submission + - H-1B DATA MEGA-THREAD (threadreaderapp.com)
schwit1 writes: I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data.
I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works.
Here's what I found
Lots to dig through, most of it damning.
Exit quote: “You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.”
I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works.
Here's what I found
Lots to dig through, most of it damning.
Exit quote: “You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.”
Comment Re: Computer programming is not for everyone (Score 0) 159
The language might support it, but that would be blasphemy to a "real" Java programmer. They need Interfaces, Helper classes, Factories, etc.; a simple assignment to a variable is out of the question.
Submission + - Livestock surprise scientists with their complex, emotional minds (science.org) 1
sciencehabit writes: If you’ve ever seen a cow staring vacantly across a field, or a pig rolling around in its own filth, you might not think there’s a lot going on in their head. You wouldn’t be alone. People haven’t given much credence to the intelligence of farm animals, and neither have scientists. But that’s starting to change.
A growing field of research is showing that—when it comes to the minds of goats, cows, and other livestock—we may have been missing something big. Studies published over the past few years have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and cows can be potty trained.
Much of this work is being carried out at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany, one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of creatures that often end up on our dinner plate. From cows making friends to goats exhibiting signs of altruism, farm animals are upending popular—and scientific—conceptions of what's going on in their minds.
The work may not just rewrite our thinking about livestock, it might also change how we treat them. As Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at FBN told says, “If we don’t understand how these animals think, then we won’t understand what they need. And if we don’t understand what they need, we can’t design better environments for them.”
A growing field of research is showing that—when it comes to the minds of goats, cows, and other livestock—we may have been missing something big. Studies published over the past few years have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and cows can be potty trained.
Much of this work is being carried out at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany, one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of creatures that often end up on our dinner plate. From cows making friends to goats exhibiting signs of altruism, farm animals are upending popular—and scientific—conceptions of what's going on in their minds.
The work may not just rewrite our thinking about livestock, it might also change how we treat them. As Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at FBN told says, “If we don’t understand how these animals think, then we won’t understand what they need. And if we don’t understand what they need, we can’t design better environments for them.”
Comment Misguided road map (Score 1) 90
Roughly 1/3 of the corn grown in the US (over 5 Billion bushels) is used to make ethanol that we burn for fuel. Modern agriculture is very efficient, but that's just stupid.
Comment Re:World-wide (Score 1) 160
What other countries dumped almost $5 Trillion into their economy and then piled several Trillion more on as new debt? The US isn't the only country with inflation, but it can take a lot of the blame.
Comment Yahoo as a model? (Score 1) 38
The change makes Google look a lot busier -- and a lot more like Bing and Yahoo.
No. Just no. I don't want Google telling me what news they want me to read. And I certainly don't want anything like Bing or Yahoo home pages on my screen.
Submission + - ACT Test Scores For US Students Drop To a 30-Year Low (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: High school students' scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test. Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in the class of 2023 whose scores were reported Wednesday were in their first year of high school when the virus reached the U.S.
The average ACT composite score for U.S. students was 19.5 out of 36. Last year, the average score was 19.8. The average scores in reading, science and math all were below benchmarks the ACT says students must reach to have a high probability of success in first-year college courses. The average score in English was just above the benchmark but still declined compared to last year.
About 1.4 million students in the U.S. took the ACT this year, an increase from last year. However, the numbers have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. [Janet Godwin, chief executive officer for the nonprofit ACT] said she doesn't believe those numbers will ever fully recover, partly because of test-optional admission policies. Of students who were tested, only 21% met benchmarks for success in college-level classes in all subjects. Research from the nonprofit shows students who meet those benchmarks have a 50% chance of earning a B or better and nearly a 75% chance of earning a C or better in corresponding courses.
The average ACT composite score for U.S. students was 19.5 out of 36. Last year, the average score was 19.8. The average scores in reading, science and math all were below benchmarks the ACT says students must reach to have a high probability of success in first-year college courses. The average score in English was just above the benchmark but still declined compared to last year.
About 1.4 million students in the U.S. took the ACT this year, an increase from last year. However, the numbers have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. [Janet Godwin, chief executive officer for the nonprofit ACT] said she doesn't believe those numbers will ever fully recover, partly because of test-optional admission policies. Of students who were tested, only 21% met benchmarks for success in college-level classes in all subjects. Research from the nonprofit shows students who meet those benchmarks have a 50% chance of earning a B or better and nearly a 75% chance of earning a C or better in corresponding courses.
Comment Yelp reviews? (Score 4, Insightful) 59
There are actually people out there who believe Yelp reviews? That astonishes me.
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