News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

isolli

Re:European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:18AM (#50350584)
I've been wondering the same since the scandal that hit the French literary world a couple of months ago [0]. Until a journalist (anonymously) accused the author of having written his novel with AI, literary critics and fellow writers were fawning all over the book, and the book was set to grab most of this year's literary prizes.

Then people like you and me, who read AI prose all day long, went and read the book, and we all immediately knew the book was, at the very least, heavily AI-generated. For a few tragicomic months, people were in denial, going on TV to defend his book and defiantly proclaiming that "a machine could not have written this", only exposing their insulated ignorance.

Hence the question: do we dislike this style because we read it all day long? Was it originally pleasing (it probably arose out of RLHF), but then used excessively? All while famous French writers and critics had nothing but the highest praise for the book...

Note: after the author could not prove authorship, his editor officially declared that he had, indeed, used AI to write the book [0].

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

Re:European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @01:50AM (#50348867)
Indeed:

"RVA23 silicon has arrived. The industrial computer built on it has not."

"Until recently it lacked what industrial systems need. That has changed."

So tiresome...

Very, very distantly related to the topic, but it reminded me of the Cosmo Phase watch from Casio (CGW-50), released in the 80s [0]

Having stars and planets at your fingertips...

[0] https://www.casio.com/us/watches/50th/Heritage/1980s/

Re:Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:00PM (#50261237)
Why for free? Wikimedia is very well funded, and I'm sure that Pangram could use a leg up...
Re:I Don't Understand Quantum Physics (2018) on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:11AM (#50219770)
In a podcast, Alain Aspect (Nobel Prize winner) explained that he does use the power of visualization and his imagination to generate new ideas, but that he always needs to check them with actual calculations because no mental picture can be an accurate representation of quantum physics.
That's a shame, because the Withings Scanwatch 2 was of great help for us when a family member was waiting for heart surgery after a pulmonary edema. Having the watch reassure her every day was a big boost to morale. Thankfully, we did not have to test this, but it may also have been very useful had it picked a problem.
Crows reach fabulous levels of (animal) intelligence with a brain that is a fraction of the size of the brain of great apes. I wonder what progress has been made in studying the differences in organisation between the two.
Re:Creating a Garmin "MCP" on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:40AM (#50101336)
Re:Sound – Bartosz Ciechanowski on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @07:24AM (#50085934)
My 10 yo son just spent an hour clicking through the widgets and, frankly, learning quite a lot, with just a few additional explanations from me. Another hit from Bartosz!
Thanks, I came here to challenge this too. I cannot find any tweet supporting the OP's second assertion.
Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:56AM (#49966575)
I agree. The precautionary principle applies to novel actions we take, not to leaving the status quo in place.
Re:Mosquitoes Are a Choice on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:38AM (#49966282)
Hm, rather, as soon as (some) mosquitoes became resistant to DDT, eradication became a lost cause.
Re:Attention is all you have on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @04:17AM (#49798060)
Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.
Re:An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem on Monday September 14, 2026 @07:44AM (#49695213)
It's also not computable, as in chaotic. Small differences in initial positions will lead to unpredictably large differences in trajectory (with small and large having specific meanings to match the formal definition of a chaotic system).
Note the disingenuous framing.
Which did not stop the FDA from approving a useless anti-amyloid drug, leading to the resignation of several experts, one of whom called it "probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history" in his resignation letter. [0]

I can't think of a good reason why this happened.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005567149/3-experts-have-res...

Re:Atomic Clocks on Friday August 07, 2026 @02:04AM (#49206427)
What are these atomic clocks measured against?
Re:98% Isn't Much on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @12:45PM (#48820317)
It reminds me of when people argued against covid restrictions saying that the virus had a 99% survival rate. A disease with a 1% infection fatality rate is a terrible disease!

Full disclosure: I also argued against covid restrictions, but not with this terrible argument.

Re:Kids Act Would Require Age Checks to Get Online on Monday June 29, 2026 @03:08AM (#48715827)
It would benefit adults too...
Question:

The conjecture was about an upper bound for the maximum number of pairs. It has been disproven.

Was the Erdos problem the conjecture itself, or was it about the actual maximum number of pairs? (In which case it will probably never be solved.)

The problem is defined in the narrow version here: https://www.erdosproblems.com/90

Re:The vi family on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @04:06AM (#48119118)
I, for one, am happy that every terminal I've ever used still supports Emacs shortcuts. Useful, for instance, to cut a whole line and paste it later on (ctrl+k, ctrl+y).
I think it's nice that the watch falls back to effectively unlimited watch-mode instead of shutting down completely because the heart-rate tracker ate up all the battery.
Re:Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price on Thursday April 23, 2026 @01:31AM (#47872537)
Ha ha, that's such a wonderful description, that's exactly how it feels!
Re:Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price on Thursday April 23, 2026 @01:25AM (#47872507)
My father drove one of those in his childhood. Now retired, he has bought a used one and uses it to maintain about an acre of land (and his grandkids love helping him).

Once, it broke down, and I was astonished to see that there are forums dedicated to this tractor. If I remember correctly, it was a problem with the fuel line that is rather common, and we managed to fix it thanks to these communities.

As I was researching it, I read stories of MF135s found abandoned in a ditch and starting immediately again. A robustness that makes this and other models popular in Africa...

Re:Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors on Monday April 20, 2026 @03:45AM (#47831415)
The sample of cheaters that we know about is biased towards cheaters who get caught.
Let me be blunt: the only reason I see not to implement solutions like this appears to be laziness from instructors.

Older »