fidzu : computers

"AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time..." says the Verge's AI reporter. But AI systems "are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math... even the days of the week." If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won't see numbers... So they're still terrible, but they're now also very good at this other part. As to why, at some point you reach a critical mass of what these systems can do. We saw it with writing, we've seen it with programming. They're very good at forging connections between different areas, applying old methods in new ways, those kinds of things. It appears that the newer models they're training have apparently reached that level where it clicks, and now it can do math... There are areas now where it seems to be producing work that is on par with good mathematicians, alongside other parts where yeah, it can't count. All caught up in that is whether it's going to rewrite employment structures or funding structures... One would hope [math researchers] would branch out into all of these new exciting areas or pose new questions. But AI won't do that, and that's the concern. And then that would leave the field quite sterile, and it will have all of these things that have been done, and maybe nothing left to pursue... [A] lot are scared that it's closing off the field. So by definition, those breakthroughs that lead to something surprising and new that you can say, "Oh, this works here," may not be happening anymore... There were some bleak responses from graduate students I saw in essays posted online. Where's their place in this as future researchers? Do they have a place in this? Is it as glorified AI proof checkers? That will be quite an unsatisfying career, I imagine. Or maybe not, I don't know. We will see. I think anything used properly will be a net boon. They also had an interesting response when asked if AI democratizes access to high-level mathematical proofs: A lot of the mathematicians I spoke to were almost quite weary of this, actually. They love the idea, in theory, of democratizing access. They're also quite fed up with AI-generated or -assisted papers that are flooding every publication imaginable, as well as the pre-print servers that they use in these fields. Some of those I spoke to said things like, "Oh, I got three emails this week alone with people being like, 'Hey, is this legit?'" Because they thought they'd solved something with ChatGPT or with Claude, and they also don't have the mathematical skills to check whether they've actually solved something. On the flip side, there are parts where they said, "Well, we've got a talented undergrad who's done something that a talented undergrad would probably have never managed, and here they are doing grad-level work and they've produced a paper that is legit." And in the bigger scheme of things, a few I spoke to said, "Well yeah, a lot of these are in the ivory tower. Having access to this kind of thing globally could really boost access to the kind of things here." On the flip side, the cost. These things cost a lot to run.

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22 Aug 2026 10:39pm GMT

Remember that rush rescue mission for NASA's $500M space telescope? It failed, reports CNN, and the LINK satellite won't be able to boost the telescope's orbit. NASA says its decades-old Swift telescope will now continue losing altitude, until it reaches Earth's atmosphere later this year and burns up. CNN reports: Just weeks after LINK lifted off on July 3, it started to spin out of control. [Satellite designer] Katalyst was able to regain control of the satellite, but the company acknowledged that the issue cost it time, which would delay LINK's rendezvous with Swift by about a month. However, that postponement - at least initially - did not seem to be a deterrent to the mission. Now, NASA and Katalyst have announced that LINK's mission will not capture and boost Swift to a higher orbit "due to ongoing attitude control issues," according to statements Wednesday. "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future...." The mission team is forging ahead with its plan for LINK to rendezvous with Swift - but as a demonstration rather than a rescue. "We are going to learn everything we can from LINK's rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow," Isaacman said... Swift wasn't designed to be serviced in space, which means that insights from the demonstration could be used for future missions... "We have already learned a tremendous amount," [said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space Technologies], "and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable - building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

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22 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT

Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired: [Flock] has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned... Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description... The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country... An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit... One prompt Flock preloaded into the system reads: "Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles)." An officer would fill in the blanks and submit it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense," exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and "do a workup on the top three individuals." The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. A "workup," in Flock's terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department's records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. Wired shares this reaction from a law professor at George Washington University. "It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing,"

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22 Aug 2026 8:00pm GMT

"We probably need another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability."

21 Aug 2026 11:32pm GMT

Thunderstorms make seismic waves that can be used to find sub-surface features.

21 Aug 2026 8:26pm GMT

Renters say hidden Zillow listings make it harder to afford living in New York City.

21 Aug 2026 8:10pm GMT

When I wrote about using Windows 11 for a month as part of the ongoing OSNews fundraiser (keep donating to get me to do the same for macOS!), one of the things I mentioned was that "the modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu". This is, in fact, a long-standing complaint I've repeatedly used as the perfect example of just how chaotic and low-quality Windows has become. Thankfully, and naturally I fully attribute this to my repeated complaints (*), Microsoft has been working on a brand new, faster, configurable context menu, and Neowin actually reviewed it. If you ask me, this revamped context menu addresses just about the biggest problem users had with the one in Windows 11, and that is the need to click through more buttons than necessary to do simple things like renaming a file or opening its properties. That problem is now basically gone. I have no issues with the new design. It looks modern, it feels more consistent with the rest of Windows, and even though all the new sections can still make it look a little busy, you now have the option to make it as simple or as button-packed as you want. That should cover most use cases and preferences well. I'd even say that when the new context menu becomes available to everyone, my guide on how to bring back the classic context menu might become obsolete. ↫ Ivan Jenic at Neowin The biggest reason I'm linking to this is not because I care about whatever monster of a context menu Windows users are having to deal with. No, I'm only linking to this because I never in my life imagined I'd be linking to a review of a context menu. I mean, at least it's not the chess application icon. That would be embarrassing. I get a perverse sense of joy out of this.

19 Aug 2026 9:58pm GMT

A great and concise history of the run-up to MS-DOS 2.0. Yet, there was a nagging feeling that a single-tasking CP/M clone was inadequate for the new generation of personal computers. Digital Research released multi-user, multitasking MP/M-86 in September 1981 and announced the single‑user multitasking Concurrent CP/M in early 1982. In response, Microsoft came up with a plan for tiered approach to its operating systems: single-user/single-tasking MS-DOS at the bottom; multi-user/multitasking XENIX at the top; and in the middle, something called XEDOS: a single-user version of XENIX. This "pyramid of upward-compatible operating systems" was announced in a Byte Magazine editorial in January 1982. ↫ Nemanja Trifunovic I've always found this tiered approach fascinating, and the world surely would've looked quite different had Microsoft been able to make it work. I doubt Windows NT would ever have existed, and most of the world would probably be running a XENIX-based Windows today (all else being equal, which is of course unlikely and silly). Regardless, MS-DOS 2.0 contained a few UNIX-like utilities to deal with its brand new support for directory trees and other new features, and even had a /dev directory.

18 Aug 2026 9:59am GMT

If you thought pervert glasses weren't bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods. Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate. In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later," says the voiceover text. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors AirPods are tiny. I've seen people use them at the gym. I've seen them on playgrounds. I've seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They're used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert's wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this? All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley's complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this? How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone - regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning - want even more cameras around them?

18 Aug 2026 9:41am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT