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180656224
comment
byGideon Fubar
25, 2026 @08:51PM
(#65948936)
Attached to: Washington State May Mandate 'Firearm Blueprint Detection Algorithms' For 3D Printers
What can I say, you're not wrong... It's a really weird approach in a country where it's legal to machine your own gunbarrels on a lathe provided you don't intend to sell them.
180656106
comment
byGideon Fubar
25, 2026 @08:12PM
(#65948888)
Attached to: Washington State May Mandate 'Firearm Blueprint Detection Algorithms' For 3D Printers
I'm just... absolutely fascinated by the kind of thinking that imagined that this was something that was possible in any meaningful way.
180656062
comment
byGideon Fubar
25, 2026 @08:00PM
(#65948862)
Attached to: AI Luminaries Clash At Davos Over How Close Human-Level Intelligence Really Is
The inverse claim is the one that needs the burden of proof applied.
Technology doesn't spring into existence because of narrative convenience, not even if a lot of rich people have made plans relying on it.
180648152
comment
byGideon Fubar
y 24, 2026 @12:06AM
(#65946044)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
yer all good bud. no stress.
180640696
comment
byGideon Fubar
y 22, 2026 @06:13PM
(#65943006)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
I think I've just gotten used to the idea that some members of the public really do believe that ivory tower academia is the norm.
180636500
comment
byGideon Fubar
y 22, 2026 @12:41AM
(#65941236)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
All I can say is... Nobody has ever seen one.
180636270
comment
byGideon Fubar
ry 21, 2026 @11:24PM
(#65941166)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
This isn't really one of those. This is funded at curio level (that is to say... not at all) and the custodians have all been people who already had senior positions in their field.
These days you sort of need to invent a whole new field for that to happen, at least in my experience... Labs don't tend to outlast their named leader (but conversely, those named leaders literally never retire).
180636262
comment
byGideon Fubar
ry 21, 2026 @11:22PM
(#65941160)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
I do remember it being part of a museum tour I saw as a kid... Science Communicators have been a thing in Australia at least that long, but they tend to be attached to the facility or museum hosting the artifact.
Right now it's on display in the University of Queensland... In the foyer of the Parnell building, which is an active lab facility. Anyone can view it but I don't think it's specifically attended.
This is pretty normal in Australian universities. I've sort of lost count of the amount of long term experiments, notable artifacts from experiments and casually very expensive pieces of art that have just been lying around at places I've worked... in many cases I simply didn't realise what they were until it was pointed out.
180635214
comment
byGideon Fubar
ry 21, 2026 @06:13PM
(#65940648)
Attached to: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
I see.
I have this nice bridge over here for sale, and you seem like a canny investor.
180618352
comment
byGideon Fubar
20, 2026 @01:37AM
(#65936386)
Attached to: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
what?
No I think it's much worse than that. I think by volume the average active use is somewhat literally the act of pushing pixels around a bitmap so that it looks more like a naked lady.
I understand that a functional positive use of LLMs is to enable people to grapple with ideas they wouldn't necessarily have access to... And as such my net experience of them has been that I have undergraduate researchers trying to log into HPC systems with cursor and wondering why there's a problem, and also my friends who have an entrepreneurial angle all ask me for small bits of disparate technical information that an LLM has failed to explain to them.
I do see a potential path forward here, but it's not to a world where AI does all the important tasks.
180617782
comment
byGideon Fubar
19, 2026 @10:09PM
(#65936162)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
Mostly it's a teaching tool/exhibit these days.
This is the experiment that was actually used to determine the relative viscosity of pitch, and there are some other actual materials science findings that were produced from it... admittedly quite some time ago.
180617710
comment
byGideon Fubar
19, 2026 @09:47PM
(#65936124)
Attached to: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
with respect
I think you have missed my point. What you're saying isn't wrong, but what I mean is that any operation performed by an LLM will necessarily be orders of magnitude less efficient per watt than just doing it directly. Necessarily.
This is what computer science is about, and no amount of business guys trying to rewrite the (spoken, purely semantic) language will change that. No amount of token generation or discarded hashes will ever be necessary to perform basic, defined, known arithmetic... let alone somehow more efficient.
180617690
comment
byGideon Fubar
19, 2026 @09:41PM
(#65936108)
Attached to: The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old
It's kinda fun. There are events that run when they expect another drop to fall.
180617538
comment
byGideon Fubar
19, 2026 @08:48PM
(#65936028)
Attached to: OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
They're explaining that they don't understand why flops were important before, they were just big number go up.
They don't understand that there might not be a fixed or linear relationship between flops and watts. They don't want you to think about it either, and I'm not joking when I say that I've had several supposedly notable people in the AI space have claimed to be unfamiliar with the term 'computational complexity'. I still don't know whether they were serious or being rhetorical to preserve their paychecks.
180505827
comment
byGideon Fubar
y 03, 2026 @12:13AM
(#65898365)
Attached to: 'Foreign Tech Workers Are Avoiding Travel To the US'
I'm trying to work out what you mean.
How does this have anything to do with what I was saying?
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