Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. LastPass Says Hackers Stole Customer Support Case Data During Klue Breach
  2. Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack
  3. Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Fails To Preserve Expertise or Train Juniors
  4. Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years
  5. Google Starts Lowering Play Store Fees, Making Good On Epic Games Settlement
  6. New Study Shows That Tall Vehicle Hoods Cause Hundreds More Deaths Per Year
  7. NASA Rover Detects Potential Signatures of Ancient Microbial Life On Mars
  8. Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI Are Backing Effort To Stop Respiratory Infections
  9. Slate Auto’s Radically Simple Electric Truck Starts At $24,950
  10. Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak
  11. GTA VI Is a Worrying Sign For the Future of Physical Games
  12. OpenAI Unveils First Chip As Part of Broadcom Deal
  13. Walmart’s First Nuclear Deal Shows Demand Beyond AI Data Centers
  14. Bob Iger’s Disney Wanted Apple, Twitter, and 007
  15. Boffin Claims Microsoft’s ‘Quantum Leap’ Is Invalid Due To ‘Basic Python Errors’

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

LastPass Says Hackers Stole Customer Support Case Data During Klue Breach

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
LastPass says hackers stole customers’ personal information, support case records, and sales data by breaching market research partner Klue. The password manager told TechCrunch that its own systems and password vaults were unaffected. However, the hackers used their access to obtain “reams of data about LastPass customers,” the report says. From the report:
In a blog post that shared information about the incident, LastPass said the hackers took customers’ names, phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses, as well as customer support case data and sales-related data. It’s not yet known what was in the contents of customer support tickets, although they likely contain fragments of potentially private or sensitive information. Customers typically contact customer service when they are having a billing issue or need assistance in gaining access to their accounts. Past incidents involving customer support tickets have included credentials and government-issued identity documents.
The last data breach LastPass reported was in 2022, when hackers stole the company’s entire store of customer password vaults.

Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic’s leading model following Mythos’ release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on “AI and the American Dream.” In the letter, Anthropic shared “new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities we have ever measured.”

The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when “operators afliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab” allegedly generated “more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Anthropic said. Violating Claude’s terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign “targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks.” According to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by “using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks.” As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there’s already “a growing circumvention economy” to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks. […]

“Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation,” Alibaba said. “Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology — not weapons, defense, or intelligence.” Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn’t working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will “help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner.”

To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can’t train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs’ “bad behavior” so that it’s “more difficult and costly” to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.

“Working with the government”

By darkain • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Yeah, they are. We know they are. That isn’t magical knowledge. It happens in every country, and is mostly public knowledge. Guess who the US Military works with? Just look at publicly disclosed contracts. BAM, not that hard. Hell, AWS openly advertises its “Gov Cloud” region. Who the fuck do you think the “gov” is? Yeah. You think Alibaba doesn’t do the same domestically? Of fucking course they do. Governments don’t operate in vacuums, they have contracts with vendors to build shit, even if its the same shit a normal consumer can get.

World’s Biggest Raccoon

By bistromath007 • Score: 3 Thread

“Don’t touch my garbage! I stole it fair and square!”

Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Fails To Preserve Expertise or Train Juniors

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
After Ford’s automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. “Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.” Bloomberg reports:
Those engineers were “at the heart” of Ford’s efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen. “We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems” and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We brought back technical specialists” and “they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom — and fear — that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn’t replace experience. “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said. But “we recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals.”

As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power’s bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.

…Doofus execs given bonuses

By abulafia • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Sure hope those engineers held out for a nice salary bump that should come out of the executive compensation pool, but won’t.

Ford, if I may make a suggestion

By gtall • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Take every idiot manager that had a hand firing those engineers and put a shadow AI right along side them. Let them compete against the AI for why they should continue to work at Ford rather than having a bot take their place.

Truth behind doublespeak

By SouthSeb • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I understand Ford is trying to gloss over this story, like they’re some sort of humble and benevolent company, but the reality is transparent:

“We fired senior, experienced engineers, tried to substitute them with AI and it didn’t work. Now we’re rehired some of them to train AI more, so we can fire them again in the near future.”

Re:Shows you what they were thinking

By 0123456 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The surprising part is that any of the engineers went back after the company had treated them like that. I guess they’ll just be saving money until they get sacked again.

Same Ford asking for bills to outlaw repair

By AcidFnTonic • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Same Ford asking for bills to outlaw repair. Don’t forget they really could care less about your ability to repair your own vehicle.

Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Micron has signed 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.” Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron’s revenue. The Register reports:
Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.

The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it’s worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. “Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve,” he said. “Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand.”

Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren’t much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories — and when they come online there still won’t be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. “Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply,” he said.

Don’t assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue — meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron’s DRAM output in 2026 will “grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook.” He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.

Raping users is back on the menu, boys!

By JustAnotherOldGuy • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

“Raping users is back on the menu, boys! Now get out there and change all the prices!”

Not necessarily bad for consumers

By Petersko • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Sure, it’s not great for anybody looking to build a new box, but there is an upside. If you’re a gamer, your current kit got a life extension. And developers just got a reprieve from having to chase new tiers of hardware performance. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the consumer world to just hole up, take a pause for a couple of years, and mature what’s already in place. Look at what happens to console game performance on year 1 vs year 5. The hardware doesn’t change, but everything gets better.

Of course all of the other things that have ram may become problematic… but a lot of those don’t use cutting edge ram. They use old shit because it’s plentiful and cheap.

Of course it’s a mixed bag. I’m not claiming it doesn’t irk me to see prices like this. I’m just saying it’s not 100% bad.

Morons

By CEC-P • Score: 3 Thread
If your customers can’t buy PCs because there aren’t any, nobody can but dumb AI bullshit. Also, most dumb AI bullshit will be bankrupt in 5 years regardless. I suggest they make some fucking DDR5 instead of HVM before they regret it.

I feel like this signals something.

By nightflameauto • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

If a company is announcing that they’ve locked 16 bigger customers into historically high pricing, while locking themselves out of rising to meet future potential prices, is that a signal that we’ve about hit the peak of the memory demand / high-price cycle? Something tells me if they went out of their way to get these price floors in place, someone in the company saw the potential for that floor to be pierced in the next few months. I mean, you’d think the signing companies would consider this possibility too, but it’s entirely possible that FOMO on AI is keeping them at the peak of the wave during negotiations.

Something about this situation just strikes me as a tell. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like it’s a predictor of something changing.

Google Starts Lowering Play Store Fees, Making Good On Epic Games Settlement

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Google spent the last few years locked in a legal grudge match with Epic Games, which claimed that Google’s stewardship of the Play Store was anticompetitive. Now, the companies are thick as thieves, and Google is beginning to implement app store changes as agreed in its settlement with Epic. The lower developer fees and new payment options that Google promised are rolling out in select markets this month before expanding. […] Starting on June 30, developers in Europe, the UK, and the US will have access to the new fee structure. This system will split the commission into two components: billing and service fees.

The biggest win for small developers is the new flat 10 percent service fee for the first $1 million in earnings every year. Above that, the rate for various transaction types may reach 25 percent on existing installs. Apps installed after June 30 will top out at 20 percent. Developers will finally be allowed to send users outside the Play Store to complete a transaction, too. Google says they can design a choice screen “in accordance with our UX guidelines” to direct users to these external options. Devs pay the standard service fee on these purchases, but they’ll avoid the billing fee. All transactions that run through Google’s Play Store platform add a 5 percent billing fee — even the base rate for publishers earning less than $1 million. Google notes that the billing fee is set at 5 percent in the initial markets, but it could be different in other regions.
Google will expand the new fee structure globally through September 2027, while also offering reduced fees through updated developer programs.
Although the changes may let developers retain more revenue, Google will continue controlling Android distribution and collecting a share of sales as it works toward allowing certified third-party app stores to operate more like the Play Store.

New Study Shows That Tall Vehicle Hoods Cause Hundreds More Deaths Per Year

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
joshuark shares a report from Car and Driver:
A new study conducted by the New York Times shows that the increase in vehicle hood height seen over the last two and a half decades, mainly due to the rise in popularity of large SUVs and trucks, has resulted in several thousand deaths that otherwise may not have happened. The study shows that while automakers and regulators have focused on occupant safety, they have turned a blind eye to pedestrian safety, which has fallen since around 2009. Researchers looked at four main datasets in their investigation: crash test data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Crash Report Sampling System (CRSS) from 2016 to 2024; NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS); vehicle measurement data from Expert AutoStats; and vehicle registration data from S&P Global from 2002 to 2024. The researchers concluded that the increased danger to pedestrians is caused by two main culprits.

First, large SUVs and trucks have taller hoods, raising the point of impact above most people’s center of gravity and pushing them to the ground, typically hard asphalt, rather than up and onto the hood, which is designed to absorb impacts. Second, with larger A-pillars designed to protect occupants in rollover crashes, modern cars tend to have larger blind spots than cars sold at the turn of the century (presuming the 21st century). The shift toward vehicles with taller hoods led to roughly 3000 deaths between 2016 and 2024. This number is conservative because it does not include crashes that take place in parking lots, driveways, or private roads, which aren’t part of the federal database.

The data also showed an estimated 2.8 percent increase in the odds of a pedestrian fatality for every one-inch increase in vehicle hood height. Between two different scenarios, one decreasing the hood height of every vehicle in the dataset by 3 inches, and the second using a random sampling of hood heights from 2002 across 10,000 simulated crashes, between 2624 (for scenario two) and 3077 (for scenario one) lives could have been saved from 2016 to 2024.

Re:Taller hoods?

By damn_registrars • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
One does not negate the other.

That said, my own current work car is a 2025 Chevy Equinox. I previously had a 2021 Equinox. The 2025 pushed the top of the hood up a good 3-4 inches compared to the previous, and changed a few other functional angles as well. The goal was evidently the “truckification” of a small crossover SUV. The result was terrible. Sight lines are dramatically worse out of the front of the vehicle. Short people can disappear in front of the hood now that it is that much taller. This is even worse on actual trucks; Chevy Silverado full-sized pickups are leaving dealer lots with hoods that are 5 feet off the ground for no functional reason.

It is fair to point out that such collisions shouldn’t happen often at normal driving speed. However you’re overlooking other places where collisions do happen often between vehicles and pedestrians; namely parking lots and driveways. While the new cars have far more mandatory cameras to help drivers spot obstacles, they don’t prevent every situation. Car manufacturers should be taken to the woodshed over this awful decision, and it’s not just the American auto makers.

Ever wonder why so many new pickups pull backwards into parking spots? I had a new Silverado recently as a rental and I believe I discovered why. Those new trucks don’t have forward facing cameras, but they do have backup cameras. They sit so high the driver can’t easily see the lines or obstacles in front while attempting to park but when backing up the camera shows what’s coming up behind. Terrible, terrible decisions.

Re:Why

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Cars don’t have tall hoods, trucks and SUVs do to ridiculous proportions now. Your average truck sitting at a red light can’t see pedestrians at a crosswalk, especially children. https://lloydalter.substack.co…

I’d like a new rule. If you drive truck and the hood is taller than your shoulders you should require a CDL.

Re:So do people who don’t raise their seats

By DarkOx • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Belt-lines in cars got really high because that is how you achieve that roll over safety rating.

As a driver I hate that every sedan and SUV has these super high belt lines and wide as my head A-pillars now. Every time I get in my 80s classic on the weekend it reminds me how much my visibility is in fact impaired in my daily.

Do and realistically am I much safer in my 2020’s car - yes, do I also belive I am more likely to be involved in some for of accident because I can’t see as much also yes.

Most common case country T intersection with yield on one road and no stops. (Probably the most dangerous type of intersection) There will be a 30 yard long space along the perpendicular road, that is a blind spot because of that thick pillar. Obviously that leads to the only safe driving practice being, be slow enough to come to a complete stop at the intersection until you are near enough to see completely down the road looking over your shoulder. Which by extension forces you to approach quite slowly or subject you and your passengers to uncomfortably short stops, should there be another vehicle approaching.

Meanwhile in the vintage car with A-pilars just bulky enough to hold up the roof, there basically isn’t a blind spot large enough to conceal a vehicle or cyclist for any period of time, so they will be detected on the second look if not the first, and you able to see for miles down the perpendicular road over top of the soy beans..

Modern cars kind of suck for driving..

Re:And water

By allo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Maybe you should prioritize human safety and not cars. Just an idea.

Re:Build stupid cars

By JoshuaZ • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Unfortunately, the people buying or building the big cars are not the people being hit by them.

NASA Rover Detects Potential Signatures of Ancient Microbial Life On Mars

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
NASA’s Perseverance rover has detected complex organic carbon in ancient Martian mudstones. The measurements were taken by the rover’s Sherloc instrument and the organic carbon that was identified was from the Bright Angel outcrop, “a dried-up river that carried water into the planet’s Jezero crater billions of years ago,” notes The Guardian. From the report:
The form of carbon detected, known as macromolecular carbon or MMC, can originate from living organisms. Geological processes can also produce the material, meaning its detection does not amount to proof of past Martian life. Dr Ashley Murphy at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona said MMC can be found in different settings and types of rocks. “It may originate from biological sources such as fossilized organic matter found in microbial mats and coal,” she said, but could also form in reactions between rocks and water or arrive on impacting meteorites.

The mudstone rocks from the Bright Angel outcrop caused a stir in 2024 when the Perseverance rover discovered intriguing surface spots and nodules that resemble features produced by fossilized microbes on Earth. When the scientific details were published last year, Sean Duffy, the former acting head of Nasa, said: “This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars.” […] The discovery means Nasa rovers have now found organic-bearing mudstones more than 2,000 miles apart on Mars. The others were reported by the Curiosity rover which is exploring the planet’s Gale crater. It “indicates that the habitability of Mars, and the availability of organics, may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago,” the authors write in Science Advances.

Alternative headline

By greytree • Score: 4, Funny Thread
“Chemical that can form in reactions between rocks and water found where water ran over rocks.”

Hands off the MC MMC stage name, it’s mine.

By T34L • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

Seriously though, I’m glad they’re still searching, and it’s neat to see that even if we haven’t found life yet, even places as inhospitable as Mars probably had the building blocks of life at some point and another. If life-forming environments are common and life isn’t, it’s positive points towards our chances of being past the great filter; I sure welcome those these days.

Alternative article

By 4im • Score: 5, Informative Thread

https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/did-nasa-just-find-evidence-of-ancient-life-on-mars-perseverance-rover-spots-complex-carbon-in-red-planet-rocks

No need to accept cookie-raping-or-subscription The Guardian, when you can reject cookies from others.

More clarity on Fermis Paradox.

By Qbertino • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

It’s taking shape: Basic life may actually be quite common. Naked apes typing on keyboards on a digital network they built themselves not so much.

The rare earth and rare advanced intelligent life theories just got some extra weight.

It’s never aliens.

By gurps_npc • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

This is about the 5th time I remember someone saying they found ‘signs’ of alien life, and it never is.

Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI Are Backing Effort To Stop Respiratory Infections

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review:
[T]he payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new $500 million nonprofit whose goal is preventing both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual aim is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. The new organization, called Intercept, will use grants and investments to back prevention approaches, including vaccines, as well as large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces. In addition to Stripe, other funders include Anthropic, Flu Lab, and the OpenAI Foundation, as well as Bill Gates and several traders at the quantitative investing fund Jane Street Capital, according to an Intercept spokesperson.

“I think we treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but have really underweighted the burden that they impose on society,” says Nan Ransohoff, the Stripe executive leading the initiative along with Charlie Petty, a venture capitalist who joined Stripe this year. On average, people spend 5% of their lifetime fighting a cold or the flu, according to Ransohoff. Despite that, drug companies put relatively little effort into preventing colds. Part of the problem is that the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses, according to the American Lung Association, with rhinoviruses being the most common culprits. There are so many that it typically doesn’t pay to try to stop any one of them with a vaccine. “When pharma companies look at it, it’s not as attractive as other things they could work on,” says Ransohoff. “So it hasn’t attracted the resources.”

[…] The project takes inspiration from efforts to fight the covid-19 virus, where Veesler’s group was among those involved in the speedy development of vaccines, antiviral drugs, and antibodies. According to Ransohoff, Intercept’s advisors will include Peter Marks, a former top FDA official, as well as Moncef Slaoui, the pharmaceutical executive who led the US coronavirus vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed. A key challenge for Intercept will be coming up with ways to counter many viruses at one time. That accounts for the interest in air-cleaning technology, such as using strong ultraviolet light to inactivate viruses. The idea, the group says, is to remove them from the air in the same way municipalities remove impurities from the water supply before it’s piped to people’s homes.

Just pay your damn taxes

By crmarvin42 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Seriously, I am sick of these vanity charity projects. Just pay your fair share of taxes, and let us, collectively, decide on our priorities. Because this shit will not be evenly applied, and considering the popularity of a antivax beliefs, and the level of international travel, it his will simply not work without a global commitment. And as bad as the cold and flu can be, there are kids who are going into debt with their school over getting breakfast.

Re:Just pay your damn taxes

By Required Snark • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
How about basic affordable health care for all by making the billionaire class pay some reasonable tax rate? Instant increase in well being along with eventual increased life span. No medical breakthrough required.

Re:Backfire

By dargaud • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Because many professionals don’t work for those that try to sell you something. Most epidemiologists or virologues or others actually work for research centers or non-gov entities and have no money in the game. So yes, I’d trust a WHO epidemiologist any day over someone trying to sell me an “instant flu nasal spray vaccine” or similar; but if they say those work, why not…

Re:Backfire

By Powercntrl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Today when they’re programming our own cells to create parts of real viruses…

Tell me you don’t understand how viruses reproduce naturally without telling me you don’t understand how viruses reproduce naturally.

Re:Backfire

By Rei • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Seriously. It will raise a generation who will drop down dead if they catch a cold.

That’s not how this works. Common misunderstanding.

yet we’re supposed to believe that our immune system is a piece of junk which can’t deal with a few viruses by itself.

It’s great that you’re so proud of your immune system - and you should be, it’s amazing! Now, if I handed you a vial of serum from an ebola patient, would you rub it all over yourself, because “You Have An Immune System!”?

Do you understand that the way that the innate immune system attacks pathogens is by attacking / disregulating your body, and that this is harmful? You know how much everyone (rightly) hates “inflammation” and the harm it does? That’s what inflammation is, it’s the activity of the innate immune system.

Do you understand that viruses have evolved specifically to disregulate the body in order to avoid the immune system, that this disregulation is commonly scattershot rather than focused, and its impacts may or may not go away immediately - or in some cases, even ever - after infection? And that some viruses undergo long-term persistent states in the body?

Do you understand how associated viruses are with sequelae (do you understand what sequelae are)? As a random example, read the second paragraph of this article. And that’s just the start.

Do you understand how common autoimmune disease is, and that it most commonly develops as a result to antigen exposure, such as during infection? That frequent and severe inflammation encourages autoimmune disease, and can even cause cancer (repairing inflammatory and viral damage requires cell replication, and the replications that occur as part of the immune response itself can specifically lead to lymphoma)?

No, getting sick is not harmless just because you “got better”. Sorry.

Slate Auto’s Radically Simple Electric Truck Starts At $24,950

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Slate Auto says its stripped-down electric pickup will start at $24,950 before fees, with the base model’s estimated range increased from 150 to about 205 miles. The company has started taking preorders on Wednesday. “The aggressive pricing — half the average cost of a new car in the United States — puts Slate in position to capture a share of the lowest end of the new car market, which has few gas and fewer electric options these days,” reports TechCrunch. From the report:
The price reveal comes more than a year after Slate Auto emerged from stealth. Since then, the company has been steadily detailing the extremely basic, transforming EV, which starts as a two-seater pickup truck, but can be modified into a five-seater SUV. The SUV version will start at $29,950, Slate said Wednesday. Slate has said the conversion can be done by professionals or by owners themselves. On Wednesday, it finally showed off some of the first of its “Slate University” how-to videos, which guide people through the steps for doing everything from the SUV conversion to adding headlight covers.

Everything else about the truck is bare, though it’s customizable. It has hand-crank windows, lacks an infotainment system, and all orders start with the same gray composite material, with no paint options, as Slate plans to let buyers order customizable wraps for the vehicle. That likely helps cut out a major cost center, as factory paint shops can run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The company did not offer more details about the buying process. Slate has said it “won’t have traditional dealerships,” and plans to sell directly to customers, similar to other EV companies like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid Motors.

Pony up

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Everyone bitching and moaning over too much spyware and nanny electronics here is what you asked for.

Re:Pony up

By Sauce Tin • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Just to reiterate: There are no luxury options, you’d have to buy and install those components yourself. This is the base model.

Re:Pony up

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

this vehicle has all the luxury options too

All would be overstating it, the “luxury items” are mostly just decorative. Electric windows, electric adjustable rearview mirrors, heated seats, heated steering wheel, smart cruise control, lane change notification/assistance, automated parking, sun roof or a whole bevy of what people might consider luxury features are not available.

But it’s not lacking in some “luxury” lighting and visual doodads that seem inspired by MTV’s Pimp My Ride though.

After having a GMC S15 in the 90’s that I loved, I was hoping for decent small electric pickup. Some amount of barebones I could handle like the tablet over an infotainment unit, but it’s a couple steps past barebones.

Re:REO Slate

By Powercntrl • Score: 4, Funny Thread

I hope they picked up the rights to use the speedwagon badge.

I was thinking Duran Duran.

Her truck’s a RIO
It gets stuck in the sand
She shoulda bought that Cyber thing
But it was seventy-five grand

Re:Customization more important than price

By drinkypoo • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

These are not actually going to be much more customizable than other vehicles. The sole exception is in the infotainment department, where virtually all modern vehicles have some big overwrought thing that you probably don’t want because it sucks, or it will in the future — which will affect you if you’re the kind of person who keeps a vehicle. But if you are, the auto industry hates you.

A vehicle being “designed” to be customized is really entirely irrelevant because all of the same work has to be done in order to do that customization. There are “upfitter guides” for all of the vehicles you’d commonly expect to customize, especially vans and pickups, which help with that. I’ve used these to aid in doing solar installs in RV conversions. That is, any pickup you’d buy is already designed to be customized.

In order for there to be a significant aftermarket for parts for a vehicle, those vehicles have to be numerous. Then companies find it worthwhile to make seat install kits and such. Such things aren’t generally complicated, so the modularity is really very overblown overall.

I do think the Slate concept has legs, but it’s in the low price and ease of repair areas, and not at all in the customization department, which simply doesn’t matter.

Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Meta has paused its Model Compatibility Initiative that tracked employee mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screen content to train AI agents, after some of its collected data became accessible to more employees than intended. Meta says it has no evidence the information was improperly accessed and will not restart the program until it is confident in its safeguards. Wired reports:
Meta rolled out the Model Compatibility Initiative (MCI) tool in April to US employees. The tool “collects computer inputs such as mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes, as well as screen content,” according to workers who have been petitioning against it over privacy, security, and personal liberty concerns. When MCI launched, employees couldn’t opt out, but that changed to a limited degree after workers protested. Meta executives have repeatedly defended the data-gathering project, saying it was necessary to train AI systems to operate computer software the way humans do and that employees were the best examples for the artificial intelligence to learn from.

On Monday, a Meta engineer issued an internal security notice stating that databases filled with information gathered by MCI had been exposed to anyone inside the company. A former employee actively involved in pushing back against MCI describes the lapse as “a mess” — and one that employees had expected would occur. “When workers raised concerns, leadership doubled down and failed to acknowledge the risks workers raised about the safety and privacy of worker and customer data,” the person says. “Leadership has clearly created an authoritarian environment where workers are no longer respected or heard.”

But after critical comments poured into internal forums on Monday expressing frustration about the security issue, Meta shocked some of its staff by pausing MCI altogether, telling WIRED about the development several hours before announcing it to employees. A few workers told WIRED they were confused in the meantime because the tool was continuing to run on their laptops. Late on Monday, Stephane Kasriel, a Meta vice president overseeing AI research, announced the pause and told staff that the security issue had been discovered on June 18 and addressed within four hours. But the initial fix didn’t stick and access to the data had to be further locked down. The issue made “some MCI-derived data” accessible to more people than intended, he wrote, without elaborating.

Spotlight Accountability.

By geekmux • Score: 3 Thread

Meta has paused its Model Compatibility Initiative..after some of its collected data became accessible to more employees than intended.

When a candle is all that is needed to put a spotlight on your behavior to change it, it says a lot about your fucking behavior.

Those are supposed to be valued employees. Not suspects.

Re:Spotlight Accountability.

By ambrandt12 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Yeah… you’re supposed to think you’re a “valued employee”… the company couldn’t give a *i*s less about you.

And, working for a company like that, you should be expecting nothing less than replacement, at some point.

There’s no such thing as a ‘valued employee’… just an expendable nobody.

Old joke, bad business practice

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Cop sees a guy at midnight on his hands and knees looking under a street light. Asks him “What are you doing?”

Guy says “Looking for my car keys.”

Cops help him look for a while and then asks “Are you sure you dropped them here?”

Guy replies “No, I dropped them over there in the dark but there is no chance at all I could find them there, it is too dark.”

When you track things, you think you make decisions/rules based on what you track. But you can’t really track the good stuff like effectiveness, creativity, or intelligence. Mouse clicks, key strokes etc. are what they track, so they build their AI on that stuff.

It’s no different than looking under the street light - you won’t find what you want, just the stuff that is easy to find.

This kind of thing is an unnecessary invasion of privacy that will result in an AI copying the mistakes of humans, not their best behavior.

Re:Old joke, bad business practice

By allo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

You can detect who’s taking a break, though. But tracking IT worker productivity by activity time is as useless as using meters of mouse movement. The productive part is not typing the actual code, but thinking about it. And this may involve you sitting in front of the machine not touching any part of it, or taking a walk in the park being “unproductive” while thinking about the solution.

Most weirdest fcuked up company in history

By butt0nm4n • Score: 3 Thread

Sorry for any soul who has to work there. Creepy as creepy can get.

Not the last of the boggling paradoxes that these champions of capitalism and liberty end up running their companies like an authoritarian state.

Nope, nope, nope.

GTA VI Is a Worrying Sign For the Future of Physical Games

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Rockstar Games has revealed the price of Grand Theft Auto VI to be $79.99, and confirmed that the physical versions of the game won’t include a disc. Instead, they’ll contain a one-time download code when it launches November 19. “Not only is that a disappointing decision for people who like to own physical games, but given the scale of the next GTA, it also sets a bad precedent for the rest of the industry,” reports The Verge. From the report:
There are a lot of advantages to buying digital. You can start a download from your couch. You can store multiple games on one hard drive so you don’t have to get up to play something else. Storefronts like Steam or the PlayStation Store don’t run out of inventory of the newest game you’re interested in, and you can often get games at a cheaper price thanks to frequent sales.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that digital ownership has significant disadvantages, too. If a game you don’t own digitally is removed from a storefront, whether that’s for things like licensing, artificially limited availability, or even the store eventually closing down, your only option is to hope you can find a physical version. If your account on a platform is banned, even if that ban isn’t warranted, you might be locked out of your digital library with no way to play those games unless you buy them again or hope your account gets restored. You can’t sell or trade digital games you’ve purchased, and while there are ways to share digital games, they require some work and are usually intended just for families.

It’s also much harder to preserve digital games because they only “exist” on the hard drive of a console, PC, or device they were downloaded to. This is an issue across many industries, not just console games; there are multiple examples of things like mobile games and streaming shows becoming lost for good when they don’t have a physical version. Without physical versions, you also can’t find a used version of a game at a garage sale or a local game shop.
It’s unclear whether Rockstar will ever release a physical version of the game. As for why, The Verge suspects the decision was made in part to prevent leaks; “by only being available digitally, Rockstar can ensure that GTA VI unlocks at the same exact time for everyone.”
“The digital-only choice might also indicate that the game has a massive file size that’s too big for PlayStation and Xbox game discs.”

If you buy it, you’re paying to get screwed

By PenisLands • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.

Don’t buy it…

By jefftp • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I know this may come as a shock, but the answer is simply to not buy it.

New?

By Moof123 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I mean GTA V was unplayable with just the disc. Many games in the last decade have not been playable without a MASSIVE download once you popped the disc in, and these days most “Gaming” PC’s don’t have a slot for a disc of any sort anyway.

GOG

By RitchCraft • Score: 3 Thread

I just wait for the GOG release of any game I may be interested in. If it doesn’t ever show up at GOG, oh well, I simply don’t need to play that game then.

“A” physical disk?

By BoogieChile • Score: 3 Thread
> “The digital-only choice might also indicate that the game has a massive file size that’s too big for PlayStation and Xbox game discs.”

Gee, do ya think? GTA 5 Enhanced takes up 96 GB on my PC. I don’t imagine GTA 6 is going to be smaller, somehow.

OpenAI Unveils First Chip As Part of Broadcom Deal

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OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled Jalapeno, OpenAI’s first custom AI chip, designed primarily to handle inference for ChatGPT and other services. It’s a major step in OpenAI’s plan to “build the full stack behind its models and products,” says OpenAI. “By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access.” CNBC reports:
The chip with Broadcom is an ASIC, which industry experts say is less flexible than Nvidia’s GPU, but is also less expensive and can be designed for specific AI tasks. OpenAI said that it designed the chip in nine months, and that it also crafted large parts of the computer system where it will be used.

The companies are calling the chip an “Intelligence Processor” and describe it as the first “AI accelerator” in a platform they’re building “to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.” […] A physical sample of the new chip will be delivered to OpenAI on Wednesday. The companies said they’re aiming for initial deployment of the Jalapeno chips by the end of 2026, “expanding in the years ahead.”

Wait, did you say Broadcom?

By MIPSPro • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Wasn’t Broadcom the pirates who just bought VMware to hold it for ransom over their customers? I mean, not that I don’t think those guys would enjoy working with Sam Altman, but these are some awfully scummy people to stand. Maybe I’ll just give my money to a different or smaller outfit.

Walmart’s First Nuclear Deal Shows Demand Beyond AI Data Centers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Barron’s:
Walmart is signing a long-term contract to buy nuclear power for the first time ever, a promising sign that the industry’s future is supported by more than just the AI data center boom. The retail giant agreed on Tuesday to buy power from a nuclear plant in Illinois owned by Constellation Energy for its operations in the area, including its stores and a high-tech warehouse in Illinois that stores and sorts perishable food.

Walmart will buy 176 megawatts of power from the plant over a 15-year period, or enough power to serve around 150,000 homes. The Walmart deal will allow Constellation to expand the capacity of the Illinois plant by 30 megawatts, a process known as an uprate, which can involve replacing older equipment and improving efficiency. Walmart, which has pledged to eliminate net carbon emissions from its U.S. operations by 2040, will also receive the environmental attributes associated with the nuclear energy, which generates electricity without carbon emissions.
Further reading: Trump Admin Announces $17.5 Billion In Loans For 10 New Large Nuclear Reactors

Re:Not quite immaculate conception

By Burdell • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I expect plant construction (especially lots of concrete) is a much bigger emission concern than mining the fuel (a little fuel goes a long way, although it takes a fair amount of mining and refining to get that little bit of fuel). The further down the stack you go, NOTHING is absolutely carbon-neutral (solar and wind construction require raw materials too, as does all distribution no matter the generation source), but it’s a matter of scale vs. return.

At this point, it’s not clear that the construction emissions of big nuclear makes it a net win over its expected lifetime when compared to solar/wind. And small nuclear is still mostly vapor, and not clear that it’s actually solved the scaling costs that made huge nuclear attractive in the first place. Continuing to operate the nuclear that’s already been constructed for a long time probably makes it a reasonable win (of course, if we ever get a more reasonable way to deal with the waste).

As for the water… big plants are typically built directly at water sources and manage it directly, so they aren’t really “consuming” it in the way datacenters do (where they just want to hook up to municipal water sources and outsource the management costs). Plants are restricted in output water temperature so as not to cause harm to animal/plant life downstream, and while some (depending on design) do evaporate a bunch, it’s still right there where it came from. So I don’t _think_ they have a significant impact in the way datacenters do.

2-for-one SMRs on asle twelve with coupon!

By MIPSPro • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Exactly! They are rolling back prices to three mile island! :-) In other news I remember once visiting a Wal Mart datacenter in Arkansas. Bruh..... Holy shit was it bad. They had regular PCs like fucking eMachines stacked on these plywood shelves that someone had hand built (like… with nails). So, not a server in sight. It also wasn’t a datacenter. It was an old office space they’d just stripped the ceiling tiles out of and let the HVAC treat the whole space as the plenum. Some of the tiles were still there and they’d just knocked holes through them for network cables that were strung over/using the old supports for the false ceiling. I’m surprised the place didn’t have it’s own barn cats.

Illinois does Nuclear right.

By Smonster • Score: 3 Thread
Illinois is certainly blessed with the right geography and access to plenty of water, but they also take advantage of that. They lead the nation by for with nuclear technology used for electricity. And it isn’t close. If they were they own country they we

France 67.3%
Slovakia60.6%
Illinois (clearly a state, not a country; roughly 12,000 MW) 53%

No other country beside France and Slovakia generate 50% or more of its power with nuclear energy. Illinois 12,000 MW puts would put it in 9th place if it were a country. Just below Ukraine (since the war) and Canada with a fraction of both those countries populations. Illinois also allows private companies to burn coals to sell the power to other states. So their energy policy isn’t perfect though.

Need as much carbon free power we can get.

Bob Iger’s Disney Wanted Apple, Twitter, and 007

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In an exit interview with The Financial Times (paywalled), former Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company seriously considered buying Twitter, explored a potential merger with Apple, and pursued the James Bond franchise during his tenure. The Verge reports:
According to Iger, Disney came close to buying Twitter from co-founder Jack Dorsey “at a very attractive price,” sometime prior to Elon Musk buying the social media platform in 2022 and changing its name to X. Iger had plans to turn Twitter into a global distribution platform for Disney, but walked away on the morning of the deal over concerns that it would be “a horrible distraction.”

Disney was also at one point involved in early conversations regarding a potential merger with Apple, something Iger thinks would have been “truly transformational.” In the end, Iger says these conversations “never went anywhere,” and that “Apple didn’t show that much interest.” The two companies have a mixed history — Iger was an Apple board member from 2011 to 2019, and notably a driving force behind Disney acquiring Pixar in 2006, which was led by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at the time. According to Iger, his first call with Jobs resulted in an almost immediate deal to put Disney content on the first video iPod. “All of a sudden, I’m now someone Steve likes and respects,” Iger told The Financial Times. “The old Disney that he knew was lumbering in terms of bureaucracy. And so he thought, this is a new day.”

The Pixar acquisition spurred Iger to find more companies to bring under Disney’s wing, though not every attempt was successful. “We felt unstoppable. We put together a list of acquisition targets,” said Iger. “Marvel was one, Star Wars was another, James Bond was one. We had a list and I figured let’s just tick them off and buy them all.” Iger provides no details about Disney’s attempt to buy the James Bond franchise, but we know it obviously failed — Amazon bought the 007 distribution rights when it acquired MGM in 2022, and later paid more than $1 billion to take full creative control of the franchise in February 2025.

The minnow thinks it can swallow the whale

By Vecna! • Score: 3 Thread

* Disney Market Cap: $180 billion
* Apple Market Cap: $4.32 trillion.

That’s an acquisition Bob, not a merger.

Trust

By JBMcB • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
This is the underlying problem. The CEOs don’t trust their own company. When the studio was churning out hits in the 1990s, the should have thrown everything they had at the studio team. Instead they cut the budgets and strangled wages, so half the people went to work for Dreamworks and Sony. Same thing happened with Pixar. Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, etc…) wanted to direct a live-action movie. Disney eventually nixed the project, so he left for a few years.

If you trust the people working for you, you pay them well and fund their projects. If you don’t trust them, you keep buying other companies hoping to fill in the creative void.

Self serving revisionism by Bob Iger ?

By Mirnotoriety • Score: 3 Thread
Framing it as entirely his personal moral epiphany is classic executive revisionism. Gets to look like a visionary who anticipated the convergence of big tech and massive content libraries.

Thank fucking god

By anoncoward69 • Score: 3 Thread
That Musk got it before Disney could get it’s hands on Twitter and trash it. Twitter / X is just about the only major platform you can post and consume porn

Disney vs Amazon with regards to James Bond

By sarren1901 • Score: 3 Thread

It’s rather hard to say which would abuse the franchise more, but at this point, James Bond is dead as far as I’m concerned. Sure, they’ll say he some how miracles escaped the ending of the last movie but give me a break.

James Bond, Star Wars and at this point Marvel are all overdone and need to be put out to pasture so new ideas can come to the front.

I’d say these days, the graphic adult comic books and books in general seem to make better source material then continuing with dated and overdone IP.

Of course, from Disney’s perspective and most media at this point, it’s easier to used old ideas and market them to teens/young adults that didn’t see all the other content. Much easier to see to a 20 year old with vastly less world exposure then a 45 year old that is picky as shit and has higher expectations. From that perspective, why waste time on the unpleasable when you can pull the wool over the eyes of a child that thinks every “new to them” idea is actually new.

Boffin Claims Microsoft’s ‘Quantum Leap’ Is Invalid Due To ‘Basic Python Errors’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
A peer-reviewed Nature critique argues that Microsoft’s 2025 Majorana quantum-computing breakthrough — and its claim that it could enable “a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years” — is fundamentally flawed. According to Dr Henry Legg, a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, the claims were undermined by omitted data, selective plotting, and basic Python errors that concealed alternative results. Microsoft, for its part, says the bugs were minor and stands by its findings and roadmap. The Register reports:
“Last year they claimed to be years, not decades from a ‘topological quantum supercomputer,’" Legg told The Register in an email. “My feeling is that they are centuries, not decades away. If it works at all — and, based on what I have seen, the most likely scenario is that it doesn’t work.” Based on his analysis of the research Microsoft published in 2025, Legg argues that the company’s claims about finding and being able to control the elusive Majorana particle to build a topological superconductor do not withstand scrutiny.

“I demonstrate that Microsoft’s tune-up software is flawed and that coding errors resulted in incorrect statements to peer reviewers,” said Legg. “Raw data, which was omitted from the original paper, also appears to indicate Microsoft’s devices contain considerable disorder and are not compatible with the existence of a topological gap. In other words, the prerequisites for Microsoft’s claims do not appear to be met, but this was obscured because this data did not appear in the original publication.”

Essentially, Microsoft has proposed a Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) that can be used to detect the phase transition deemed to be a prerequisite for conducting quantum calculations using Majorana particles. Legg argues that based on his analysis of underlying transport data (measurements of particle change) — omitted from the original publication — Microsoft chose to focus on results that supported its thesis and ignored data that could be interpreted as a negative result. As he notes in his critique: “The TGP plotting code was set to highlight only the largest purportedly topological region.”

“The primary consequence was the omission of other regions that passed their tune-up protocol (the TGP),” said Legg. “When peer reviewers asked if other regions existed, Microsoft inaccurately stated that they had investigated the only region passing the protocol within the explored range. This was not correct.” Legg also argues that Microsoft mishandled its code. “The code antisymmetrized bias voltage based on array index rather than physical value,” his analysis says.

In other words, Microsoft’s researchers made a basic programming mistake by evaluating the array index — the number identifying a value’s position in an array — instead of the value to which the index refers. “There were two pretty basic Python programming errors that hid these alternative regions,” Legg explained. “Their plotting software was hardcoded with a filter (zbp_cluster_numbers=[1]) that forced it to display only the single largest region, concealing other successful results from their phase maps. Changing this to zbp_cluster_numbers=[1,2] shows already a second region.” Legg added: “The TGP software transformed the data by simply reversing a Python array (x[::-1]) based on its index position, ignoring the actual physical bias voltages.”

Quantum Leap is invalid?

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Quick! Somebody call Scott Bakula!

“the most likely scenario is that it doesn’t work”

By gweihir • Score: 5, Informative Thread

At this time, this is the only rational stance left. There is no indication that QCs can ever scale to useful size, but a ton of indicators that they likely will not. There is not even solid proof that QCs work at all, because the longest, most complex complex calculation ever done successfully is apparently factoring 29 with a specialized algorithm for 29. That is easily in range for a conventional analog computation by non-quantum mechanisms. Hence while I think it is unlikely, the computation mechanisms that QCs rely on may still turn out to be hallucinations. Also note that even very, very, very minor deviations from the theory (and we _always_ had those in the past as soon as we had equipment to verify theory against reality precisely enough) would completely kill the QC idea. The precision required to do, say, a 128 bit calculation precisely, is unimaginable and a digital computer only reaches it by extreme measures.

Boffin

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

A quick perusal of his published papers seems that boffin would even be understatement, but a well published researcher who is wholly dedicated to this field of research. And whose papers are appear to be written with well respected researchers in the field like this one and several others written with Daniel Loss.

From the Daniel Loss article:

His 1998 paper (jointly with David DiVincenzo) proposing the use of spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots is the foundation of one of the main approaches towards the realization of a quantum computer and (as of 2025) has been cited more than 9000 times.

This doesn’t appear to be a critique that should be easily dismissed, guy clearly knows his stuff.

Re:“the most likely scenario is that it doesn’t wo

By Entrope • Score: 5, Informative Thread

the longest, most complex complex calculation ever done successfully is apparently factoring 29 with a specialized algorithm for 29.

Shor’s algorithm has been used to factor 21, not 29. 29 is prime, and people don’t usually talk about factoring primes because the factors are trivial. But otherwise, yes.

Re:Python ?

By HiThere • Score: 5, Informative Thread

What you don’t understand is the Python is often used as a method of invoking libraries that are written in more efficient languages. And for the layer that it handles it doesn’t introduce unacceptable inefficiencies. E.g., you wouldn’t want to do ray tracing in Python, but it’s fine for calling a library that does that.