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Re:The Claude Delusion on Monday September 21, 2026 @11:34AM (#49788621)
Aren't the recent results in mathematics actually stronger evidence for his point? Although the models may be capable of generating proofs they aren't coming out with the same level of quality of a human discovered and communicated proof. Providing a gobbledy-gook yet technically correct proof (generated at least in part by brute force) lacks the qualities of an expert produced proof because they fail to communicate insight or understanding about why the theorem is true.
Re:The Job Market Is Hell on Monday September 08, 2025 @03:27PM (#45172757)
Re:Essential Coding Theory [pdf] on Friday August 29, 2025 @09:55PM (#45071273)
Coding being the act of encoding/decoding information from one representation to another. The system itself is called a Code and these are designed to have specific properties like making transmission of information resistant to interference, corruption or interception, etc.

"Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error detection and correction, data transmission and data storage." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coding_theory

Re:How to Sell if Your User is not the Buyer on Thursday August 07, 2025 @01:33PM (#44827588)
Situations like this are instances of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

In this case, corporate management holding the purse strings but their workers (devs) using the actual tools. The solution they offer to founders is to make the user your champion and have them sell your product for you.

"The meta point here is that you're not going to talk to the credit card holder; the user/dev is going to do that for you.

Give them the best possible chance at convincing the leadership. Make them look awesome for even bothering the leadership with a choice like this. Make it obviously awesome for them to decide “yes”. These users/devs are your sales people."

Maybe that works for dev tools with freemium models, but in many industries where this problem arises its just not possible to even get your product in front of the users. Take hospital systems and EHR purchasing where Doctors and Nurses are the users of the EHR day in and day out but it is the hospital administration that ultimately gets to decide which EHR is deployed. How do you get users to be champions of your product if you can't even get it in front of them?

Re:Workers Want a Four-Day Week. Companies Should Too on Monday June 02, 2025 @03:17PM (#44162066)
Apparently they did this in Iceland and it's been fine?

https://farmingdale-observer.com/2025/05/31/iceland-approved...

Rodney Brook's keynote at Stanford HAI earlier this month.

Some interesting points right at the beginning relevant to recent on-stage demos by companies including like Nvidia and Tesla.

- Product lifecycle has a realistic timeline on order of decades going from research lab demo to a realized commercial product. He first saw demos of driving cars arriving in 1979, yet we still don't have Full Self Driving in 2025.

- @2:35 "Humanoids they're everywhere and what is it doing. The form of a humanoid is promising that it's going to be able to do everything that a human can do. And it completely fools VCs. A lot of people's pension funds are going into all these robots and its not going to end so well."

Rodney Brooks states he's built 4,500 humanoid robots in his lab.

This arstechnica article is pretty good, but in my opinion the best article covering this study was published by NPR

http://npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/16/g-s1-60...

Well there are now many instances of enforced disappearances.[1] To what the administration likes to call jails in Ecuador, except for the fact jails and prisons are part of legitimate criminal justice systems with judicial review/due process. These can be more accurately described as concentration camps given that they lack the features that would make them legitimate jails or detention facilities.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/wg-disappearance...

" [Enforced disappearance] is characterized by three cumulative elements (defined in A/HRC/16/48/Add.3):

A) Deprivation of liberty against the will of the person;

B) Involvement of government officials, at least by acquiescence;

C) Refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. "

If you think about the administration's unwillingness to comply with the court's ruling to return the individual, who by their own admission, they mistakenly took away due to an "administrative error" there are many open questions. How do we know that the individual is still alive? For that matter, how do we know that all the other people who they say were removed from the country are still alive?

We have no independently verified information as to fates of these people. More likely than not, in the course of these actions by the government, the number of deaths is some number greater than zero. Even if they have not performed outright executions, some deaths as a result of the conditions and or their treatment in custody is almost certain. So is that state sanctioned man slaughter/murder? Does this make ICE a death squad?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_squad

Ok sure but also the number of CT scans has been increasing exponentially (3 million CTs in 1980, 20 million in 1995, 60 million 2005[0] to 93 million in 2023[1]) so you'd need to find some opposing force that is decreasing the incidence of cancer cases exponentially per capita to keep the balance.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2672242/

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

There have been and continue to be technological improvements that reduce the dosage required. There is not a single dosage for all CTs. The dose for a head CT is an order of magnitude less than for abdominal/pelvic CT.

"The current average effective dose of a CT study is ∼10mSv, with the implementation of dose reduction techniques discussed herein; it is realistic to expect that the average effective dose may be decreased by 2–3 fold." 2010 https://www.ejradiology.com/article/S0720-048X(10)00311-6/fu...

It would be neat to see a chart of the average effective dose of CT studies over the past 40 years. And any accounting how much it declined as a result of Moore's law and software improvements for producing the "computed tomography"?

Love that xkcd chart. One thing it doesn't show is that different particle species of radiation have different effects on our biology at different "potencies". Gamma rays released by an atomic weapon being worse than the x-rays utilized in CT scans. A rough guide to degree of risk per species has been given a value in the form of a quality factor (Q) or a modifying factor used to derive dose equivalent from absorbed dose for purposes of radiation protection. A scale where less dangerous alpha particles are given a value of 20 and gamma, x-ray and beta a value of 1.

Here's a relevant moment from the MIT OpenCourseware Nuclear Engineering lecture about ionizing radiation damaging DNA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfRpkTG7Iow&t=30m30s

I can't recommend that course enough if you're interested in radiation physics.

"CT scanning became widespread in the 1980's. Cancer incidence is flat to slightly decreased since then. I'm not sure their risk model matches reality. Many of these models are based on extrapolation from higher radiation exposures and there may be a fundamental issue with how they estimate risk." https://x.com/NathanRuch/status/1911803050857050502

From the paper itself: "We projected future lifetime radiation-induced cancer risk using the National Cancer Institute’s Radiation Risk Assessment Tool (RadRAT) software version 4.3.1, which utilizes risk models from the National Academy of Sciences’ Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) VII report for 11 site-specific cancers ... using a more recent follow-up of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors and pooled analyses of other medically exposed cohorts."

So I wouldn't hang my hat on the claim "that CT examinations in 2023 were projected to result in approximately 103,000 future cancers over the course of the lifetime of exposed patients."

Are CTs without risk? Of course not but quantifying that risk isn't easy with the data and models we have available. We should be glad that the authors are trying to do so but also be cautious about publicizing their estimate as an eye-catching headline. Since most who read the headline will over interpret it as an established scientific fact that meets a higher level of evidence than has actually been met.

Re:Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting on Friday February 28, 2025 @04:33PM (#43211511)
It's like the inverse of Gil Scott Heron's "The revolution will not be televised"

"The Nuclear Holocaust Will Be Televised"

There's even a trailer from the Reagan era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBtu0gr6JqM

But it seems the format is going to be in the style of reality TV shows from 10-20 years ago.

The image maintainer wrote a short blog post in 2021 putting forth the rationale and good faith intentions of the project as a resource for security research.

https://sick.codes/is-hackintosh-osx-kvm-or-docker-osx-legal...

I'm surprised that ~$10 million dollars of GPUs, @ $40k per H100 and excluding operational costs like the energy bill, only rents for $455k per month. Sounds like a really tough business since the amount of time required to recoup the costs of ownership (~21 months) seems like a really long time. A new generation or two of chips will have hit the market in that time, depreciating the recurring rental income. Leads me to wonder how much if any profit can be made renting GPUs.
Wow, it's amazing to me how much anki eventually caught on with medical students. Back in 2008 I introduced my med school classmates to Anki via a web app front end that I scrapped together. Basically it allowed us to crowdsource a shared flashcard corpus but with individual accounts each with their own state for Anki's SRS, allowing us to practice from any web browser without having to have Anki installed locally. Though it had some success among some of my fellow students, the vast majority of the class did not want to engage with a web app for studying back then, so I'm surprised by how much penetration it has now.
Here's what I found about the underlying system https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/the-software-behind-the-hi... and the Hitachi Vantara Press Release: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/news/gl240307

"27 nodes, with 4PB of flash storage for playback within Sphere and streamed in real-time to 7thSense media servers, each streaming 4K video at 60 frames per second"

I would be interested to better understand how synchronization is achieved here. Is that a relatively solved problem for applications such as this or was there significant engineering to achieve it at this scale?

I do not believe there are any restrictions on what 0-days can be sold to or bought by the American government. As far as I know the only thing resembling restriction is regarding export to non-allies which stems from the Wassenaar Arrangement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement

And I'm not entirely certain how codified into law such restrictions are on private citizens and companies. There is always article 3 section 3 clause 1 of the constitution where it outlines the crime of treason as "levying war against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort." Though I don't know that selling a security vulnerability to a foreign government would be considered treason or trigger any related laws. I'm unaware of any prosecutions or civil suits against private citizens or companies regarding the trade of 0-days.

Re:Downpour Is Out on Friday March 08, 2024 @03:28PM (#39645980)
Exciting! V has a knack for making things that let others make creative things with ease. I'm a big fan of their prior work such as https://cheapbotsdonequick.com/ It's to bad twitter shutdown api access sunsetting all the amazing works people made with that. Looking forward to what people make with down pour.
Re:Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @02:51PM (#38775373)
Impressive work. Looking at the presentation slides which accompany the 37C3 talk, the author covers their "Your princess is in another castle" experience. Turns out they fully reversed the firmware for the MIPs cores (one core per port) only to discover the MIPs cores were almost entirely vestigial relics retained from past generations. I think anyone who has done real world reverse engineering can empathize with having spent a significant amount of time and hard work reversing what turns out to be a ton of dead code. In the end, success in reverse engineering is mostly about being relentlessly persistent in your pursuit to understand what is going on and getting back up after big set backs and disappointing dead-ends.
Re:Adventures in reverse engineering Broadcom NIC firmware on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @02:35PM (#38775190)
In this instance, it appears the author's motivation was to facilitate a clean room reimplementation by "producing a natural-language specification for others to reimplement". In other instances security researchers might reverse firmware in order to find vulnerabilities. As the article states:

> One example motivating the production of open source firmware for the BCM5719 is that it's the only closed-source firmware blob found in the Talos II, a high-performance POWER9-based system otherwise wholly free of firmware blobs... Once this is delivered, it will be possible to use Raptor's POWER9 systems with purely 100% free, open source firmware. As far as I am aware, there is no other machine in the same performance class which can make such a claim.

Re:Borges and AI on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @01:56PM (#38712235)
Thanks, I will probably read that collection. Nice to see it includes the stories The Zahir and The Book of Sand which feel just as relevant as the ones mentioned in the paper.
Re:Show HN: Get robocallers and SMS spammers shut down on Monday December 04, 2023 @03:38PM (#38522700)
Wouldn't it be nice if you could give out a revokable token in place of a phone number to various businesses. If you ever received spam through a token just revoke it and move on. Puts the power back into the hands of the recipient rather than having to rely on some centralized service or your carrier.
From the headline, it sounds like one of my favorite Armando Iannucci sketch's that makes fun of management consultants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQcA5CKFl2A

"The Norbrand's management consultancy rule is simple: Give it to your clients straight."

"Ok what's our problem?"

"You're spending too much on management consultants you skuzzer."

Re:Making TV Useful For My 94-yr-old Aunt on Thursday October 26, 2023 @06:43AM (#38023889)
Edit: Please sign-up using this url. I would have posted this before but we had a SSL termination issue.

https://www.stayspry.tv/

Re:Making TV Useful For My 94-yr-old Aunt on Thursday October 26, 2023 @04:14AM (#38023062)
This is adjacent to a project I'm currently working on that makes TV more useful for grandparents and elderly parents. It's a shame that in an era when you can't buy a non-smart TV, the market hasn't delivered much in terms of accessibility features for people who struggle navigating menus and apps.

If this sounds like something you want then please register your interest on this form.

https://form.jotform.com/232982350527156

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