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Comment YouTube Sponsors (Score 2) 39

Ouch. They sponsored probably half the YouTube videos I watch. They must have dumped a ton of money on those sponsorships. Who's going to fund all those channels now?

(Well, maybe not half, but I did see them mentioned often, though only when watching something just posted, as Sponsor Block skips over those sections most of the time.)

Comment Re:Perfect world (Score 1) 27

No, I expect the opposite to be the problem. People who have moved to streaming will drop off their old DVD collections, leaving the box overflowing with DVDs people aren't borrowing.

We have a "buy nothing" group in our town, and people are giving away DVDs all the time. The library does monthly book sales of donated books that they aren't adding to their collection, and they also have tons of DVDs.

Also, in areas with good libraries, you can get most movies on DVD or BluRay there.

Comment Re:Oh, I see (Score 1) 247

Yeah, I have trouble seeing how the other companies failing to compete shows that Apple did something wrong. Now if Apple had put pressure on app developers to not support competing platforms, then that would be different, but there's nothing like that in the summary, and I'm too lazy to look up anything more (at least I'm being honest about it).

The only obvious monopolistic issue with the iPhone that I'm aware of is their app store. Not allowing competing stores while charging excessive commissions certainly looks like an anti-competitive practice. If there were real competition with multiple app stores, I would guess that commissions would be driven down from 30% to 10%, which sets out a lot of unfair profit that Apple has made. On the other hand, Google charges the same rates while allowing other app stores, so maybe they can defend that rate as fair.

Comment Re:That's it? (Score 1) 42

Yup, they're way off. I'm thinking $1K/month/address not served from the time when service was claimed to when it is established.

The worst part of all of this is that you also hear stories about people spending $30K and up to get fibre service to their homes that are near the service area (and then they offer it at regular rates to everyone else on the street).

I'm guessing that the $10K fine is the most they're allowed to charge under the regulation in question, which is ridiculous.

Comment Disable bloatware (Score 1) 56

You can disable bloatware apps, even ones that don't let you disable them. The trick is to connect with ADB, and then use 'disable-user' for the app, which will disable it for just one user, but you only have one user on the phone, so it's effectively the same. I used that on a Samsung a while back to disable all the Bixby junk, among other things.

Google should really crack down on making it impossible to disable apps. OK, maybe they'll insist you have a web browser, but only block disabling the current default app, so you can kill the preinstalled app once you've switched to another. And if you try to disable an app that you can't, it should say something like, "Sorry, you can't disable Bloat Services because it is required by 'Phone,' which is the default app for receiving phone calls." Once you change that default app and disable the apps that depend on B.S., you would be able to disable it.

Comment Re:Not quite operational... (Score 4, Insightful) 104

Nonsense. They knew this wasn't the final design, and they were looking for problems. They found them. That was the point. The booster did every test, even though it failed the last one. That means they got data on every part of the booster's operation. I'm sure there were a good number of suboptimal behaviors we don't know about that they'll also fix.

Starship made it much further than it has before, so again, lots of data on parts of the flight that they didn't have previously, and lots of things to fix for the next flight.

Yes, they're still not ready to try to recover the booster or Starship, but they're a lot closer than they were before this flight. The data was the objective, and they got a ton. Mission successful.

Comment Training (Score 1) 35

The hard part with AI is training. Once you've trained the neural network, it's relatively easy to run it, but training can take massive clusters that can run into the millions or even cross into billions in extreme cases.

If course, everyone is hyping this now, but there isn't that much out there that people actually want to run on their local computer just yet. Too much is web based where your don't need any new resources, and the companies gathering the data would like to keep it that way.

Comment Re:What? Fuel inequality? (Score 1) 93

Standardized tests can include unintended biases. Anytime there is a cultural difference, there will be vocabulary differences including subtle meaning differences that can skew responses in standardized testing. I haven't looked into the details, but it makes sense.

I know there are studies that show what the correlation levels are between college performance and standardized test scores, but I don't know if that data is broken down by different groups; I wouldn't be surprised if the correlation is the strongest among well-to-do white students and the weakest among poor students of color.

Should an admissions office use all the available data to generate the best possible calculation on a potential student's probability of success? That might include standardized scores, grades, data on the school they come from, their economic conditions, and their race and ethnicity.

And then there's the question of whether they want to be completely fair. There's a good argument that minorities are disadvantaged by generations of discrimination, so efforts to reverse that are still needed. Whether college admissions is an appropriate place to work towards that goal or not is a matter of debate.

I'm not sure what the right answers are. Having several years of not using standardized test scores should help give more data on what does and doesn't work in admissions.

Comment Re:the free market (Score 4, Interesting) 267

The free market inherently produces surpluses or shortages in the short term as the market forces push production to react to demand. That's fine if you have some consumer product that gets sold out before Christmas or tickets for a concert that get pushed to crazy prices, but that's not so good if it's something like food or electricity. With food, the government has all sorts of farm subsidies that are like pushing the demand line up so that the production swings shift high to generally have a surplus. And for something that is a natural monopoly like electricity distribution, you at a minimum need strict regulation to keep the companies from price gouging, which ensuring that there is sufficient investment in long-term maintenance and infrastructure planning despite publicly traded companies being hyper-focused on the next quarterly results.

Comment Implementation or Architecture? (Score 1) 31

Any insight on to whether this is an implementation bug or something more fundamental from the architecture? If the latter, it's more likely to have the same issue in other hypervisors like KVM. I would assume the relevant teams are looking to see if related issues exist, but I hope those "relevant teams" aren't just on the dark side of things.

Comment Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score 2) 244

Actually it's usually pretty good in road construction. Night driving is also fine. It saved me from hitting a deer on the NY Thruway two years ago (technically Autopilot, not FSD), and I never would have seen the deer until it was too late. I think the new version avoids road debris, but I haven't encountered any recently. It's also usually fine in weather conditions unless it's so bad that a human would also be having trouble. The biggest problem is near sunset when the cameras have trouble with direct sunlight.

There is a list of things it doesn't do, and some situations it's not great at, but that list is getting quite small. Most of it is around road signs that it doesn't read, and I haven't tried V12 yet.

Now if it can ever figure out whether a parking spot is legal in NYC, it will have proven itself smarter than a human. :)

Comment Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score 1, Offtopic) 244

Almost.

Highway driving is where it has always been the strongest. Even with just Autopilot from 2015, it would handle most of it just fine. Now FSD handles the lane changes, exits, and all sorts of local driving.

It doesn't handle finding a parking space yet, so it will go to the charging stations, but not park at a charger automatically. And of course, you need a human to plug it in (but that's not driving).

So apart from that, it could likely do it without any driver interventions.

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