All-optical switch device paves way for faster fiber-optic communication
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    Womble
    8h ago 100%

    It is, it confused me too. It is refering to an optical only on/off switch which can also be used as an xor gate. Many levels down from a network switch.

    11
  • Self-documenting Code
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    Womble
    10h ago 50%

    Good code is not “elegant” code. It’s code that is simple and unsurprising and can be easily understood by a hungover fresh graduate new hire.

    I wouldnt go that far, both elegance are simplicity are important. Sure using obvious and well known language feaures is a plus, but give me three lines that solve the problem as a graph search over 200 lines of object oriented boilerplate any day. Like most things it's a trade-off, going too far in either direction is bad.

    0
  • What beliefs or hypotheses do you hold strongly despite not feeling confident that you can necessarily prove or evince it?
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    Womble
    5d ago 91%

    If you take standard cosmological assumptions (the universe is infinite and homogeonous) then the odds are 100% as everything that is physically possible happens infinite times.

    unless you mean the observable universe, in which case we dont know, but given the vast scale of it is likely very close to 1. We cant calculate it without knowing how likely life is to form in the first place.

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  • ‘AI-Mazing Tech-Venture’: National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees
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    Womble
    5d ago 83%

    Given that photocopiers can do a scribes job (copy the text on this page onto a new page), more quickly and accurately to boot, I presume you are part of a pressure group to pay them pensions.

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  • South Korea fires warning shots after North blows up roads
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    Womble
    6d ago 100%

    I'm not even sure if that is a joke. If they've sold a lot to Russia and are paranoid about the south exploiting their relative weakness, removing road links would make sense.

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  • Reasoning failures highlighted by Apple research on LLMs
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    Womble
    7d ago 100%

    Thats actually quite interesting, you could make the argument that that is an image of "a pure white completely flat object with zero content", its just taken your description of what you want the image to be and given an image of an object that satisfies that.

    2
  • Energy companies told to recharge for AI datacenter surge
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    Womble
    1w ago 100%

    Youve missread that article, it is saying rising demand generally may cause shortages, and that there is also predictions of growing demand fron datacentres, not that the later is the main cause of the former. I fact they suggest growth in electricty demand of a quarter in 2 years, vastly more than the 4% in 6 years growth in datacentre demand.

    1
  • Energy companies told to recharge for AI datacenter surge
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    Womble
    1w ago 66%

    I didn't say anything about how prices work in a shortage, but I also sincerely doubt a 4% increase in 6 years (so 0.7% annually) is going to cause any shortages.

    1
  • Energy companies told to recharge for AI datacenter surge
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    Womble
    1w ago 66%

    The study this cites has data centre (so not just AI but all internet stuff) rising to 300TWh by 2030. Two years ago the USA's power usage was 4000TWh a year. So in about 6 years time they estimate that data centres will be using about 8% of 2022's electricity usage, up from currently about 4%. An increase sure, but hardly one that's going to move electricity prices significantly.

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  • Biden said to call Netanyahu 'a f**king liar' after Israeli troops entered Rafah | The Times of Israel
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    Womble
    2w ago 94%

    Its really not that hard, the US just has to lay demands down to Israel and follow through with them. You stop making things worse by doing X by Y date, if you dont we stop providing you one type of weapon you need least. If you dont do it by Z date you lose something more important. Repeat until they realise you're not bluffing.

    The problem isn't that its beyond the wit of man for the US to figure out how to use its immense leveage over Israel, its that it chooses not to.

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  • Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge
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    Womble
    2w ago 100%

    You could make exactly the same argument for installing software onto your computer, it is an attack vector and going through microsoft's store or your distro's repos gives a level of curation. So should desktop users be prevented/scared off from installing what software they want because it's a security issue?

    6
  • Xi and Mao replace Jesus and Mary in Chinese churches
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    Womble
    2w ago 42%

    replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping.

    Its not saying actually Xi is your god now, its just making churches one more place where you see the dear leader. Still bad but not at the insane level of trying to rewrite one of the world's largest religions.

    -1
  • OpenAI is now valued at $157 billion
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    Womble
    3w ago 83%

    Your grandmother (or great grandmother depending how old you are) had to spend hours of hard labour every day to wash clothes dishes and rooms with just a tub of water a broom and a mop. Now all that takes maybe 20 minutes of light labour with a vacuum, dishwasher and washing machine. Technology absolutely has reduced drudgery

    4
  • Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price
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    Womble
    3w ago 100%

    Lots of people spout this conspiracy theory, but Ive yet to hear a good reason why he had to be sued into making the purchase (after making price manipulating statements) if it was some sinister plan.

    Far more likely he's just a fuck up.

    3
  • Musk’s X blocks links to JD Vance dossier and suspends journalist who posted it
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    Womble
    3w ago 100%

    Thats right in Paypal and Tesla's cases, he bought them and then gave himself the title of founder, but he did actually found SpaceX. Per wiki:

    In early 2001, Elon Musk met Robert Zubrin and donated US$100,000 to his Mars Society, joining its board of directors for a short time.[11]: 30–31  He gave a plenary talk at their fourth convention where he announced Mars Oasis, a project to land a greenhouse and grow plants on Mars.[12][13] Musk initially attempted to acquire a Dnepr intercontinental ballistic missile for the project through Russian contacts from Jim Cantrell.[14]

    Musk then returned with his team a second time to Moscow this time bringing Michael Griffin as well, but found the Russians increasingly unreceptive.[15][16] On the flight home Musk announced he could start a company to build the affordable rockets they needed instead.[16] By applying vertical integration,[15] using inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf components when possible,[16] and adopting the modular approach of modern software engineering, Musk believed SpaceX could significantly cut launch cost.[16]

    In early 2002, Elon Musk started to look for staff for his company, soon to be named SpaceX. Musk approached five people for the initial positions at the fledgling company, including Michael Griffin, who declined the position of Chief Engineer,[17] Jim Cantrell and John Garvey (Cantrell and Garvey would later found the company Vector Launch), rocket engineer Tom Mueller, and Chris Thompson.[18][19] SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Early SpaceX employees, such as Tom Mueller (CTO), Gwynne Shotwell (COO), and Chris Thompson (VP of Operations), came from neighboring TRW and Boeing corporations. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees.[20] Musk personally interviewed and approved all of SpaceX's early employees.[21]

    1
  • www.theguardian.com

    > I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous. > “Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.” > Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”

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    www.bbc.com

    Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.

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    www.technologyreview.com

    In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right. Compton drew a sharp distinction between the consequences of technological progress on “industry as a whole” and the effects, often painful, on individuals. For “industry as a whole,” he concluded, “technological unemployment is a myth.” That’s because, he argued, technology "has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market for many items by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall. The argument—and the question of whether it is still true—remains pertinent in the age of AI. Then Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”

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    www.theguardian.com

    Because Boeing were on such a good streak already...

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