News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

DoctorOetker

Re:Nibnib: Image compression with extreme decompression speed on Sunday November 01, 2026 @06:59PM (#50331265)
1) it may seem pointless until you realize it may allow targeting platforms which can't decode JPEG real time under certain situation
Obviously train safety systems should be formally verified and eliminate human error (only permit safe leeway to humans).

But apart from the safety mechanisms, there is also the concept of securing passengers.

What we know so far is that originally, cars weren't equipped with safety belts, until they were.

Imagine a thought experiment: the trains are equipped with safety belts, on a voluntary basis. Initially everyone scoffs at them, except for a minority. Time passes until an accident happens. Then everybody learns that the forward facing passengers that were facing forward had the lowest casualty reports, next are the people facing backwards, since a decelerating train mostly just pushes them harder into their own seats, and their safety depends on the discipline of any occupant who happens to sit on the forward facing seat. People start preferring the safest seats forward facing with belts (you only depend on your own discipline). People sitting in a forwards facing seat who refuse to put on the belt will be asked to find a different seat or put on the belt. In many places it will turn out a lot of passengers are standing upright "by necessity" even though no law of nature or authority mandates or permits railroad operators to sell more tickets than they have safe seats. But first that would require figuring out what new lucrative job prospects can be opened for insurance companies, and any population around the world may think out loud why insurance on offenses appear to be legal and often even encouraged by court systems!

It turns out its never really possible to draw an objective line between accidental and intentional offenses, so at a fundamental level we should either permit insurance that covers you when caught committing murder, grand larceny or what have you (done); OR we should ban all insurance from covering offenses (accidental and intentional). Insurance "allows the system to stably continue without shocks reverberating through the economy in the face of adverse events" is a poor justification for permitting the insurance of offenses, especially since it typically results in the wrong questions being asked, and instead of figuring out who paid the least to insurance scams, perhaps some real questions could delve up real solutions that save lives instead of defend the income streams of lawyers profiting on the misery of civilians.

different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.

from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.

Suppose a clear moniker could be chosen rationally what would it be? (auto)regressive intelligence?
I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.

Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...

But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.

I think nobody was justifying what happened, just pointing out more than one party did unjustifiable things.
Re:Physicists trap a single antimatter particle for a month on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:08AM (#50219760)
whats up with all the comments making analogies with AI torture repository?

One might measure the "amount of computation going on" as a proxy for consciousness, but "number of dissipative logic gates" can't be right since one can construct larger reversible circuits containing the same computation (and hence dissipation is a poor measure), although one could then use the total number of bits (including trash bits) as the measure.

but I don't understand why particle physics?

having all other comments (at the time of writing) be about consciousness of individual particles, seems to indicate these commenters specifically believe particle physics or antimatter to directly describe consciousness?

Or is this some kind of "disinfo inoculation campaign" to render us immune to "sentient rights propaganda"?

Re:eMudhra to Exit Global SSL/TLS Certificate Business on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:50AM (#50197070)
a high quality set of FOSS, community inspected "freemium clones" may do more for national security and individual privacy compared to yet another crypto library with zero novel mathematics just another reimplementation of specs...
Re:Making Solar Panels with a Microwave [video] on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:23AM (#50180536)
I don't think eugenekay's reply is helpful, unless in the pedantic sense:

yes every microwave oven eventually fails.

yes it is good practice to dedicate a microwave for food and a microwave for science experiments.

Re:Making Solar Panels with a Microwave [video] on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:19AM (#50180476)
As long as there is a good resistive microwave absorber in or on the inside of the kiln, and as long as the kiln insulating properties suffice, why would the magnetron burn out?
Is it 50 deaths or $1B cumulative (then it will unconditionally happen, just a question of when)?

Or is it 50 deaths or $1B in a "single event" (let's ignore the obvious problems with defining a "single event" would be; to kill 8.3B people in 49-death events would take ~170M events, since no timing or rate information is used those could be spaced arbitrarily close to each other).

No matter which way I look at it, the proposal seems nonsensical, max 50 deaths per second? per day? per month? per year? per decade? total?

If AI can intentionally provoke sustained deflation or succeed in dollars to appreciate in value, the value of $1B can appreciate systematically while continuously ramping up damages as long as it remains below an ever increasing value bar of the $1B. "justice can be bought"? a proposal to set the price for LLMs to absolve their sins? "just crank up the value of the dollar system and we will look the other way"?

More explicitly, the AI could misbehave up to $500M (without having to pay), but somehow double $ value, then misbehave the same level of misdeed with same damages being worth $250M of the double-value dollars, double the value of dollars again, then misbehave the same material damages worth $125M, double $ value again, etc. without ever violating the $1B limit, not even cumulatively (due to Zeno's paradox)

@DeepSeek teams, why not train your next series of LLM models with source-aware training?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01019

LLM's would be able to answer questions, delineating exactly which facts/assumptions/reasonings are prior work and from where (this URL, that book, etc.), and which parts are it's own deductions, or the user's.

Re:What on Earth Is Dekton? on Saturday October 17, 2026 @12:10AM (#50127849)
I think it would gain toughness, but lose hardness by annealing.
Re:What on Earth Is Dekton? on Friday October 16, 2026 @09:37PM (#50127001)
Is there a reason they don't just anneal the slabs to remove the internal stresses?
Re:Using AI to reverse engineer hardware on Thursday October 15, 2026 @01:21PM (#50106984)
The only solution is reputation and selling to the public domain, instead of to individuals:

if people like your stuff, you'll have a reputation because of what you made in the past, then you can offer to release your next project to the public domain if some crowdfunding goal is met.

I wouldn't attach it to the neck, when the head moves with respect to the neck the nose guard pushes, slides, pulls on the sensitive area.

Better to have some part hook at the back of the head or any bony protrusions on the sides or back of the head, perhaps in the vicinity of the ears.

Re:Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @07:43PM (#50097214)
Easy to say when drones & ballistic missiles aren't dropping left and right whereabouts you live...
I too would associate "Bouba" with the rounded and "Kiki" with the sharper figure, but to me this is just a relatively universal sense of continuity vs discontinuities:

the local curvature is continuous for "Bouba", every point on the curve has a single tangent, which evolves continuously as you walk along this presented curve.

For Kiki: the local curvature is discontinuous: at the inward or outward points, there are 2 tangents, so the tangent abruptly switches value when passing through this point when walking along the curve.

similarly the "B"s in "Bouba" are voiced plosives, while the "K"s in "Kiki" are unvoiced plosives.

I think people would similarily classify "Titi, Pipi, Touta, Poupa, Kouka" like "Kiki" but "Didi, Douda, Bibi, Gigi, Gouga" like "Bouba".

The vowels are obviously voiced by the vocal chord carrier wave "voice".

So when we pass through the unvoiced (T/P/K) plosives, we notice discontinuity like the discontinuously evolving tangents along the boundary curve of the figure.

Obviously mammals like dogs have a concept of continuity, topology, distance, they might get spooked by "open" stairs, because they can see between the planks, etc.

And when we hear voiced (D,B,G) plosives, the voice while muted still evolves continuously.

Re:Star Is About to Explode – Sixty Symbols [video] on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @02:08AM (#50083059)
The Blaze star will flare up soon
I'm not saying its impossible to achieve technically, just that there is a whole fleet of installed equipment and the comment I responded to made no mention of unsafe temperatures...
Aren't water tank set to a recommended minimum temperature to ensure no Legionella or comes in your pipes?
you can see a list at the bottom, they appear to be genuine reality based community folks
Re:Ledger Nano X: the spy implant on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @06:53PM (#50080076)
It doesn't demonstrate the security of cryptography, just that entities exist with sufficient skill and knowledge for supply chain attacks but lacking cryptographically relevant mathematics.

It doesn't prove the hardness assumption, if it did we could trot forward any toddler and ask if it knows the factors to some RSA product, and "prove" hardness assumption for factoring integers...

Caesar should accept the crown, reluctantly.
Re:Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs on Sunday October 11, 2026 @07:22PM (#50049129)
ignore the sibling comment by amelius

for a laser the intensity in the wavelength / frequency domain is very high, because it is coherent radiation

it just means you can use a (low power) laser to produce nonlinear optical effects.

Re:Decade-old RAM is making a comeback on Sunday October 11, 2026 @04:28PM (#50047487)
personally I think we should look at 12 km tall floating balloons piping a suitable vapor at ground temperature up, dumps the heat a bit above the tropopauze, condenses the vapor so it rains back down (perhaps in a loop, perhaps as a naive thermosiphon).

I believe we can generate baseload energy by cooling the planet... nearly everywhere, no fuels needed.

Re:LineageOS 24.0 on Sunday October 11, 2026 @03:24PM (#50046886)
I was secretly hoping I didn't misread and Linaro wiki would be up again, I really wish we could just install mainline linux on those Android phones...
Re:Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help on Sunday October 11, 2026 @08:17AM (#50042464)
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.

So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.

It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.

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