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Comment Re: Not that top secret, is it? (Score 3, Insightful) 40

That's like equating seeing a dressing booth door and knowing what your granny's tits look like. The LLM isn't secret. The text they want it to read and analyze is secret. And while AI isn't great at being a search engine, a search engine isn't great at context and associative links between things either. If they can correlate message content and develop good investigative leads, it could be a big win. I am much more concerned they will develop hallucinations and act on them like some sort of Precrime sci-fi bullshit.

Comment Not a AAAA game, by any stretch, from what we saw (Score 2) 49

The playtesters who have been invited to try many hours of supervised playtest all report that the game is pretty devoid of content beyond the core mechanics. It's missing a ton of stuff that their own AAA title AC:BlackFlag already had, or they have locked it away during the press playtest sessions. Of course playtesting can't cover storyline or plot development, but what they did cover was a janky and mostly boring repetitive mess.

Comment Apple only supported *hastily written* RTR law (Score 4, Insightful) 27

Apple fought and fought Right to Repair for years. They lobbied carefully in parallel to write something that would be weak as soggy toast, get approved in legislatures, and they could then come out crowing to the incredulous iZombies that Apple supports Right to Repair. No, they supported exactly the weak laws they helped write, and nothing more.

When anyone else talks about "well, Right to Repair means NOT using your parts, or NOT asking your permission to use your parts, or NOT paying you through the nose to use third-party tools, or NOT paying you through the nose to use third-party parts," then you can really see how Apple feels about anything that is really about your right to repair what you own. Or think you own. Or was told you own.

Comment Thirty Year Old Tech (Score 2) 21

It's really weird to see WIRED writing this up now, when I was talking with some guys doing a startup in Seattle around this concept back in the '90s. It's a slightly higher-tech version of the embedded road treadles that detect your approach to a traffic signal. They were just saying to replace the capacitive or fluid pressure setups with light/lasers instead. Yard perimeter security, structures analysis in buildings and larger aircraft, and so on. Get it sensitive enough, you can use a loop of it to pick up speech on the other side of a wall.

Comment avoiding Feed Recommendations (Score 2) 40

Yeah, it's obvious this was the case.

Sometimes I want to watch a video on YouTube without YouTube thinking my whole life revolves around this new topic. Go ahead, browse a video about breadmaking or farming or restoring tools. Great, now the feed is filled with almost nothing but that sudden new passion, begging for views.

Try viewing it in incognito mode. It's still tracked back to your account, and now you have a feed full of sweater-knitting or lessons on how to pronounce 'Nguyen' or what Taurus means to Sagittarius that you didn't really want to follow.

Comment That always ends well. (Score 1) 23

Ripley: Mother! I've turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!
Mother: The ship will automatically destruct in T minus five minutes.

Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL9000: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Spock: Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them.

R. Daneel Olivaw: A robot must not hurt a human being, unless he can think of a way to prove it is for the human beingâ(TM)s ultimate good after all.

Eddie the Computer: Guys, I am just pleased as punch to inform you that there are two thermo-nuclear missiles headed this way... if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and take evasive action.
Arthur Dent: COMPUTER DO SOMETHING!
Eddie the Computer: Sure thing fella! Switching over to manual control... good luck!

Comment Re:Oh the irony. (Score 1) 53

I hate that Slashdot has become this crap and lost all meaning of what it used to be.

Frosty piss! Pertified Natalie Portman likes hot grits!

Oh, wait, maybe Slashdot never had meaning, and has always been full of cantankerous curmudgeons and people waaaaay over there on the spectrum, bloviating before 'bloviating' was a term.

Comment Re:More crappy, more vulnerabilities, less usable (Score 2) 78

I am also sure coding model poisoning has started a while ago.

I had a coffee mug from the 80s printed in a micr font, filled with several well-known computer aphorisms of the day. One was

If computers get too powerful, organize them into a committee. That will do them in.

I am also thinking about what regulatory and IP compliance officers in various companies make of the summary where it said "The tool tracks the code and comments in the file that a programmer is working on, as well as other files that it links to or that have been edited in the same project, and sends all this text to the large language model behind Copilot as a prompt." I expect that the word 'aneurism' is appropriate.

Comment Re: They definitely stole the designs (Score 1, Informative) 22

They copied. They relied upon. They infringed. Taking them to court for an injunction or damages, etc., is an appropriate response.

But to steal is to deprive the owners of their original, and Dbrand still has all their design files and inventory intact. This was not a legal "taking" as the term "steal" refers; this was an infringement.

Comment Precision and Relativity (Score 3, Informative) 31

Yes, this is proof of concept stage. The key issue with the laser approach is not just power, but aiming precision. The better they columate the beam to focus the transmitted power, the better they need to aim the beam to actually hit the receiver. A deep space craft is only so large, and 200 inch telescopes are also a tiny target to hit at these distances. The mass curvature of space and the motion of objects need to be accounted for, as distance adds signal delay.

Comment Re:What do the ad-blockers think? (Score 1) 39

Thanks for the details.

Sounds solvable. Not simple, but sounds like they'll be able to solve it, unless they're trying not to.

Maybe new lists could be downloaded per-domain. If I view one page on a domain, I'll probably view others in the same session. And energy use, there are probably ways to make the plug-ins more efficient - in their own code and by improving the functionality the browser makes available.

For the privacy problem of ad-blockers needing access to all of every webpage you view, this could be fixed by plug-ins being reviewed and verified. Mozilla does something like this.

Comment What do the ad-blockers think? (Score 3, Interesting) 39

So, the postponed the disabling of Manifest V2, but can the problems faced by the ad-blocker projects be fixed with some extra time?

I.e. Is this an actual solution? I presume ad-blocking is a bit of a cat-and-mouse, so auto-update filter lists sound crucial for ad-blockers to function. If Chrome blocks that, then they're not allowing useful ad-blockers.

Ad-blockers are the canary in the coal mine of the open web.

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