News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

HexPhantom

Re:Attention Is Not What You Need on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:19AM (#50240719)
I think there's a middle ground between "attention is obsolete" and "this proves nothing"
What I find funny is that Babbage was already dealing with essentially the same misconception over a century earlier
Re:Using Blu-ray M-Disk as Backup of Last Resort on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:21AM (#49975296)
My understanding is that the original M-Disc pitch mattered much more for DVD because it replaced the organic dye layer, while BD-R already uses an inorganic recording layer
Re:Using Blu-ray M-Disk as Backup of Last Resort on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:19AM (#49975279)
For something explicitly meant to be recovered in a worst-case scenario 10–20 years from now, optimizing for boring, widely available readers seems more valuable than squeezing another 50GB onto each disc
Re:Using Blu-ray M-Disk as Backup of Last Resort on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:18AM (#49975264)
I guess the practical strategy is to treat migration as part of the backup plan rather than something you deal with in 15 years
Re:Using Blu-ray M-Disk as Backup of Last Resort on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:17AM (#49975257)
I can see this making a lot more sense for photo/video. The Holocron approach is neat when your truly irreplaceable data fits on a handful of discs, but I would not want to burn and manage dozens of them every year
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:13AM (#49975237)
Thank you :)
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @03:12AM (#49975233)
I just do not indertan why is it an issue sorry../
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Saturday October 03, 2026 @09:22AM (#49944041)
Pretty much. One day your cartilage wakes up and goes "I've done enough cartilage work, I'm a fibroblast now"
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Saturday October 03, 2026 @09:19AM (#49944022)
So the mitochondrial part of the "reset" is less like rejuvenating an old population and more like starting from a maternally inherited population that was largely kept out of the metabolic action in the first place
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Saturday October 03, 2026 @09:17AM (#49944011)
An adult therapy has to rejuvenate the cells you already have, in place, without breaking tissue function or creating cancer. Much less room for error
Re:Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging on Saturday October 03, 2026 @09:15AM (#49943990)
Embryos are probably the clearest proof that at least some of what we call biological aging is reversible rather than simply accumulated irreversible damage
Re:Winning the Visa Lottery on Monday September 21, 2026 @02:08AM (#49783574)
I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?
Re:Winning the Visa Lottery on Monday September 21, 2026 @02:04AM (#49783543)
I’d push back a bit on the idea that they simply missed it. They actually test something very close to this in the appendix: whether losing the lottery changes the competitive environment firms report facing. They don’t find a statistically significant competition effect
Re:Winning the Visa Lottery on Monday September 21, 2026 @02:01AM (#49783523)
The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.
Re:There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:32AM (#49609480)
Search used to feel more like infrastructure: put something useful on the web, link to it, and eventually people could find it
Re:There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:31AM (#49609468)
The really perverse bit is that this rewards exactly the kind of consolidation Google's anti-spam changes are presumably meant to fight
Re:There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:29AM (#49609437)
Though weirdly it makes the subdomain result even more interesting: presumably those wikis are rewriting their sitemaps too, yet Google manages to index them normally
Re:There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:28AM (#49609415)
The sitemap issues are definitely worth fixing, but I don't think they explain the most interesting part: the same kind of wiki seems to behave very differently depending on whether it's on a fresh root domain or an established subdomain.
Re:There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @08:26AM (#49609400)
The most interesting part here is that this isn't really an SEO problem anymore, it's a dependency problem
Re:Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:16AM (#49562646)
This is what makes me wonder how much additional benefit an explicit carbon signal actually buys you over normal dynamic pricing
Re:Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:13AM (#49562628)
Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
Re:Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids on Friday September 04, 2026 @06:12AM (#49562620)
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
Humanoid robotics has been optimizing for the wrong benchmark this whole time. Forget dexterity, we need executive presence.
Funny that we're reached the point where perfectly normal rhetorical habits can trigger the "AI wrote this" alarm... (or not funny, just ironic)
Re:Why Aren't Smart People Happier? on Friday August 21, 2026 @09:28AM (#49387785)
A lot of culture is basically accumulated trial and error
Re:Why Aren't Smart People Happier? on Friday August 21, 2026 @09:23AM (#49387719)
This is painfully familiar. Being able to coast through school can actually delay learning one of the most important skills school is supposed to teach: how to struggle with something for a while without interpreting the struggle as a verdict on your ability
Re:My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @01:44AM (#49341716)
I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem
Re:My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @01:37AM (#49341671)
Yep... pen, paper, books and a good teacher are annoyingly hard to beat because they force the student to actually do the cognitive work
Re:My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @01:35AM (#49341652)
The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss

Older »