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Submission + - Amid K-12 AI Pushback, OpenAI Named Lead Partner of 'Hour of AI' for Kids

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On the heels of announced AI moratoriums by the nation's two largest K-12 school districts (NYC, LA), tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI (aka Code.org) this week named OpenAI 'Lead Partner' for the 2026 Hour of AI, which has replaced the Hour of Code (RIP, 2013-2024) as the premier event for the nation's K-12 schoolchildren during December's CS Education Week. OpenAI investor and partner Microsoft was named as one of two 'Supporters' for the event/infomercial (the other being U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman).

In August, as it launched ChatGPT for Teens, OpenAI announced a new signature partnership with Code.org to 'prepare the first AI generation', explaining that 'through the Hour of AI, OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly.' OpenAI and Microsoft last year teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers to 'bring AI into the classroom', but that honeymoon is over. For more on the inside story of how Big Tech is applying the same playbook it used to scale coding lessons nationwide to now mainstream their AI tools in schools, check out Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools.

So, much like the Hour of Code that preceded it, will the Hour of AI serve as tech's 'Trojan Horse' (ChatGPT-generated parody cover) in its 'Odyssey' to push its agenda and curriculum into schools?

Comment Re:Safer? (Score 2) 73

by Sloppy (#66367536) Attached to: Chrome 155 Ships Decoding Support For JPEG XL

HEIC is worthless because it's illegal to implement unless you get permission. Maybe in 20 years it'll be usable.

Don't like that fact? Then we need to find and support (oh no, and be?) political candidates who oppose software patents.

You shouldn't need anyone's permission to write a computer program. It's infuriating.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 279

Yeah that changes the context somewhat. There's a difference between "We should remove the bi-annual time change, it's unhealthy" (which I agree with and would like to happen) and the wishful thinking "WhAt iF iT wAs SuMmEr aLl yEaR rOuNd" crap that seems beloved of legislators and others who sort of agree that the bi-annual time changes need to go, but have the worst idea of how to implement it.

This paper isn't advocating for keeping bi-annual time changes. It's advocating for standard time. And I agree standard time is probably a better approach, even if some people get butt hurt about the idea of it not still being light at 9pm in the middle of August.

Submission + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 4, Interesting) 62

by karmawarrior (#66364676) Attached to: Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break

> 2. Democratic voters tend to be more concerned about the environment.

This is technically true but is counterbalanced by the fact rural areas tend to be extremely NIMBY. Unbelievably so. It's hard to get permission to rebuild a dilapidated strip mall, let alone build a data center.

There's a railroad near where I live that was freight only, but wanted to run passenger trains - completely unsubsidized (beyond a tax free loan, and I've never bought the argument "tax free" means subsidized, but that's for another day) - on the same lines. Virtually nothing changed. No impact on the local community. Two trains an hour tying up railroad crossings for a maximum of 20-30 seconds, a minute an hour.

Every fucking "community" North of the Miami-West Palm Beach-Jupiter metropolis raised objections. This was for an existing railroad, with zero impact beyond long sought after safety improvements and quiet zones!

You think rural areas are going to support building actual buildings?

Pffft.

Indeed, I wonder if it'd be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

Comment Anonymous tip (Score 1) 127

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

by karmawarrior (#66363622) Attached to: Firefox Redesign Brings Round Tabs, New Themes, and Compact Mode

Unpopular view: Javascript itself is a decent language, it's the fact it has to be used with the DOM in most contexts that makes it unpleasant. Give it a set of Python/PHP/Java/etc style desktop libraries and most people would have no problem with it. But because everyone encounters it within the context of a web browser as a scripting language for web pages, it gets a bad rap.

That said, I recall the original Eich JS being kinda sucky, with little or no OOPs beyond associative arrays. So there's that.

The biggest issue here is that the bigots managed to rewrite history, and managed to persuade most people that Mozilla "fired" Eich for his opinions, when in fact Mozilla ignored his blatant bigotry when it happened, and considered him worthy of promoting to CEO despite effectively calling 10% of the (blameless) people he'd lead a danger to children, co-funding a political campaign that was promoting that blood libel.

They say Mozilla fired him. Mozilla did no such thing. Mozilla promoted him to CEO. They saw blood libels against gay people as no barrier to leading a massive team of people.

The rest of the world voiced their disgust, Mozilla started to lose users at an alarming rate within days of the announcement, and Eich saw he had to go, so he quit, despite Mozilla's backing.

Mozilla isn't "woke", they're the exact opposite. That's why they've embraced fashtech so enthusiastically despite it being such a danger to the open web. They're gross. The only reason to use Firefox is literally that the alternative is fashtech and at least Firefox is second hand fashtech.

But whenever this troll posts, can we PLEASE set the story straight because I'm so fed up with seeing this bullshit that Eich was fired, when he was actually promoted to CEO. And resigned because of world wide disgust, not because of a single Mozilla employee expressing concern.

Comment Re:Reinstate Brendan Eich NOW!!! (Score 1) 163

by karmawarrior (#66363602) Attached to: Firefox Redesign Brings Round Tabs, New Themes, and Compact Mode

Depends. If they're afraid of heights they probably shouldn't have a job cleaning the windows of skyscrapers. And if they promote the lie that gays are a danger to children, they probably shouldn't be leading any organization sufficiently large enough that 5-10% of their employees are likely gay.

Regardless, Eich wasn't fired by Mozilla, he was promoted to CEO. Mozilla explicitly endorsed his views. It was the rest of the world that voiced their disgust, and Eich resigned after it became clear more than 5-10% of humanity was going to have nothing to do with Mozilla if he continued in that position.

Mozilla should be ashamed of itself, for its blessing of homophobia and endorsement of a blood libel, not for something it never did.

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