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180649372
comment
bymattr
026 @06:34AM
(#65946332)
Attached to: When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click
Maybe the service should offer a full export before deleting all files. Something tells me it was not obvious they would be deleted. Yes backups, non-commercial account, fafo, etc. but now a lot of people are starting to depend on these things which have horrendous UI and operated by aloof companies.
180605208
comment
bymattr
026 @05:09AM
(#65931010)
Attached to: AI Has Made Salesforce Engineers More Productive, So the Company Has Stopped Hiring Them, CEO Says
According to our rep at Salesforce the ticket system for submitting support requests is down because they switched to AI and now it will not work until we migrate to Hyperforce. Pretty skeptical about about how much their Agentforce and Einstein products sell too..
180572476
comment
bymattr
26 @04:25AM
(#65920220)
Attached to: China is Geoengineering Deserts With Blue-Green Algae
They have been working on crusting for years. I a video documentary about the antidesertification effort in China in Spring 2025 and I came up with my own idea and even a business plan as an intellectual exercise to try out Claude, this was May 2025. It was coming from the angle that dust devils lift the sand from China into Japan where millions of people like me suffer from the sand allergy. Well I found the chat and let Claude summarize it for you here.
That was from May 2025 — titled "Aerial Deployment of Aerogel and Moss to Mitigate Kosa Dust." Your proposed solution was an aerial drop system combining biodegradable hydrogel matrix with moss spores/seeds and an albedo modifier (calcium carbonate or kaolin clay) to bind the soil and disrupt the thermal conditions that create dust devils.
You're right that biological soil crust approaches aren't new — China has been working on various desert moss and algae-based stabilization techniques for years as part of their anti-desertification efforts. The novel angle in your proposal was the scalable aerial deployment method combining multiple mechanisms (moisture retention, reflectivity, biological binding) in a single drop, rather than requiring ground crews to manually establish vegetation. ... so anyway, not to take away from respect for the people who have put so much labor into it. Even on the off chance I had any smidgen of unique idea in that exercise I know it is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of long term effort real research and terraforming requires. So props to those guys and gals. As Claude summarizes:
The Shapotou station has been working on biological soil crusts and cyanobacteria for decades — the 2022 ScienceDirect review paper I found shows this has been published research since at least then, and the CGTN article references work going back years. What's "new" is the scale-up announcement: Ningxia plans to treat 5,333-6,667 hectares over the next five years using the hexagonal "solid seed" blocks.
180557416
comment
bymattr
6 @10:21PM
(#65914080)
Attached to: Ultimate Camouflage Tech Mimics Octopus In Scientific First
Paywalled, but this article (Stanford report) has an image. It quotes Nicholas Melosh who is a senior researcher on the paper.
New material changes color and texture like an octopus
https://news.stanford.edu/stor...
180462537
comment
bymattr
25 @09:46PM
(#65883789)
Attached to: Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos
will be individually addressable LEDs on a wire driven by a local LLM!
180458255
comment
bymattr
25 @02:07AM
(#65882439)
Attached to: Nvidia Buying Groq's Assets For $20 Billion in Its Largest Deal on Record
Shit, that Groq stuff looks sweet. Would have been cool if Apple bought them. The interconnect alone.. though they have their own 1:1 ultra chip interconnect it doesn't go to 100s of chips as far as I can see.
180458219
comment
bymattr
25 @01:59AM
(#65882437)
Attached to: Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAM
I picked up a fantastic "like new" souped up 2023 mbp to replace a 2016 model as a buffer at 40% what I would have paid, while waiting for an m5. If yours works for you fine, I couldn't wait but didn't want to get something I would have buyers remorse over. I am greatly enjoying this machine so far and can hang on to it or sell for half off. For Mac mini I would guess in March the M5 should be out.
180458187
comment
bymattr
25 @01:48AM
(#65882433)
Attached to: Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAM
Maybe, but I hear we will be able to boost memory (slowly) via Thunderbolt. I don't think they would have done that while also riding the psychopathic road you illustrated of intentionally forcing swap to run down SSDs. My battery failed before my SSD did.
180458171
comment
bymattr
25 @01:43AM
(#65882429)
Attached to: Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAM
That's all well and good but how will I pay for my 256GB M5 Max MBP? 128GB M4 is over $6000 so who knows what it will be in 6 months. Eyes are bleedin here, not sure how cornering the market using speculative investment and government money is all that valid an argument. From someone who is not buying into hype but sees some actual value in AI personally day to day, I *need* my RAM fix more than sammy.
180439317
comment
bymattr
25 @11:49AM
(#65874831)
Attached to: Google Launches CO2 Battery Plants for Long-Duration Storage of Renewable Energy
It seems so elegant, wonder why it didn't arrive earlier. Google says Energy Dome (Italian co.) actually invented it in 2019 with a test in 2022 so I guess it is pretty new but still it seems so simple compared to stacks of lithium or whatever. Though gravity batteries are even simpler it seems.
180421993
comment
bymattr
25 @05:55AM
(#65868611)
Attached to: Apple Opens iOS To Alternative App Stores, Payment Systems in Japan
It is totally byzantine if you need an app that is only on one App Store or happen to travel. Actual case that happened to me. United app for boarding pass, mobile roaming app from another country's phone company. Media subscriptions from U.S. App Store which was my default. Apple had me cancel my media subscriptions, create another id with an iCloud email address I don't otherwise use, and every time I need to spend time to make sure something I need will work in advance. Apple PLEASE let us use multiple app stores at the same time without forcing such destabilizing kludges. Even now I never know if what I need to work will work, or if my subscription or billing will work.. The billing screen also has issues like that.
180421365
comment
bymattr
25 @03:35AM
(#65868469)
Attached to: Judge Hints Vizio TV Buyers May Have Rights To Source Code Licensed Under GPL
What if you forked it and it is an exact copy of what they used, would that change your standing? Just theoretical for me.
180409013
comment
bymattr
2025 @03:10AM
(#65863483)
Attached to: Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
Apparently they did nightly runs and then reviewed them.The baseboard took 27 hours of compute time, the SOM took 15 hours of compute to get to 98.7%. The human effort of 38.5 hours replaced 428 quoted human-only hours. It's apparently a cloud service, so I guess you can't rent your own machine and speed it up.. though if it is a physics heavy simulation maybe they were running an A100 or something? At any rate, it took a *lot* of compute but saved a *lot* of time. Based on Claude finding and digesting this blog article for me: https://www.quilter.ai/blog/co...
180374105
comment
bymattr
25 @10:19PM
(#65855107)
Attached to: New Kindle Feature Uses AI To Answer Questions About Books - And Authors Can't Opt Out
I like them too, family even is an antique book dealer. But.. I am allergic to a lot of old books. And now I need bigger print and more interested in new books with option to find old ones. So even though it has drawbacks, my kindle PaperWhite has some killer features: big text, instant purchase, and kindle unlimited. Big e-ink tablet (Daylight Computer DC-1) is also useful. The AI feature? Haven't seen it yet but people who buy cliff notes or my family member who had to give a talk about a difficult book to a book club recently could make use of the feature.
180355905
comment
bymattr
2025 @12:30PM
(#65848993)
Attached to: Meta's New AI Superstars Are Chafing Against the Rest of the Company
On the one hand, Meta made openllama right? So maybe these guys will do some similar things. On the other hand, maybe the world is safer if they focus on ads and we can just trade up on potential hellscapes.
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