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Comment Re: How this may play out (Score 1) 72

The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of the same thing for a large population. It's likely that the cost for each different sequence will come down if it's worth designing and building equipment that switches every dose, but there's an intermediate time between proving that the treatment is useful and being able to provide it in a cost-effective way.

Comment Yes. (Score 1) 102

I know, distrust the system, but the truth is our 98% disc free reality already has made games cheaper. Browse https://www.xbox.com/en-US/gam...">the XBox Store and there's always going to be AAA games from three years ago for under $10, or indie titles for $6.99, or shit like that. You'd never see deals like that back in the day when games were all on disks, even before accounting for inflation. Much cheaper than used disks from Gamestop, even.

Comment Re:Basic security gets skipped (Score 3, Interesting) 116

Yes, while the article doesn't say I'll guess it's more like a lax, trivial hack. Like somebody breaking into your house when you forgot to lock the door.

But it's still something that AI shouldn't be doing in the first place, especially when it's just done incidentally, and suggests that this nascent technology is capable of worse.

Comment Re:You don't leave Windows over productivity (Score 0) 66

The whole debate it kind of dead. You buy a Mac if you can afford it, they're the best. You get a PC if it's for work and the system administration sets that up for your organization, or because you're a gamer and want to use a $1500 computer to play games on like it's an XBox. Linux desktops are for old, contrarian nerds.

Comment For students (Score 1) 66

What an absurd question. Most of the prompt was about students, so I'll tell you how much time it costs: about three seconds for the students to see where on the boot up screen the web browser is. Then they click on the web browser, and that's it. From there it's all the same and they just go to google classroom or whatever. I speak empirically. I taught at a school that went from Windows to Chromebooks, and the students barely even noticed the transition.

Long time Slashdot reader theodp is remembering his own childhood where maybe people had to actively learn to use DOS, and then the Mac GUI was kind of a strange transition, and etc. Times have changed, grandpa!

Comment Re: Side effects (Score 2) 209

With their COVID vaccine, the first time was the highest dose they knew would have only acceptable side effects, and they reduced it for the next iteration when they saw how effective it was. (If you remember the myocarditis rare side effect, that was only seen with the first version.) I would guess that the next step is backing off on the dosage to reduce the side effects now that they have results on effectiveness, which will also let them make a better case for younger people at less risk from the flu.

Comment Automatic verification (Score 2) 174

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

Comment Re:No subsidy. (Score 1) 143

I'm curious, but suspicious. Tesla Y is the top selling car model by a large margin inside China, and UK reviews I've read of Chinese EV imports has made them sound underwhelming. UK reviews make them sound nowhere near as good as a Tesla, although decently priced.

But if you could post what model you're talking about, and what the cost of that car is vs. a Model Y in your home market, that might be interesting!

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