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Comment Re:Making this about race, really?? (Score 1) 67

The idea that poor folks are the backbone of Trump's base is a myth. In 2016 Clinton won the under $50k income vote by 12% and tied with Trump in the over $100k income group. Trump notched a modest 3% margin of victory in the $50k-$100k group.

The actual backbone of Trump's base is white people without a college degree who are nonetheless doing fairly well for themselves. This is particularly influential demographic in rural states, which have outsize representation in the Electoral College.

Comment Re:Battery Life, Sleep, Stability (Score 1) 147

15+ hours is the realm of battery anxiety, not a legitimate user requirement. The real acid test is can you get through the work day, and can you get from one airport to another.

Not quite. The real acid test is whether, once you get to your destination, you can do a full workday without waiting six hours to recharge.

Conversely, my Mac's ~14-hour battery life means I've never left the house with the (bulky) power adapter unless I'm traveling overnight.

Comment Re:Another Self Crashing Car! (Score 1) 154

That'd be fine for the people who live downtown, but you're forgetting about all the commuters.

That's probably a long way off, too. Right now, robotaxis are only allowed on a limited range of public roads, which doesn't include highways (and by extension, bridges and tunnels). So while they might be useful to get you from your home in a city neighborhood to downtown, but not much more than that.

(Also, I doubt anybody's really going to pay for robotaxis for a daily commute. Most people buy cars or take the train for that.)

Submission + - Complex Patchwork of US AI Regulation Has Already Arrived

snydeq writes: AI regulation is evolving apace at nearly every level of government in the US, presenting companies doing business across state lines with a challenging number of laws and mandates to keep track of if they want to make good on the promise of AI, writes CIO.com's Grant Gross. 'Sixteen states had already enacted AI-related legislation as of late January, and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the US this year, six times the number introduced in 2023. Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won’t be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. “Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators,” she adds. “There’s obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board.”'

Comment Re:Another one bites the dust... (Score 1) 41

I've been out of IT for many years now, but one question I always have about these ransom scenarios is this: wouldn't advanced journaliing filesystems make recovery from an attack much easier, particularly filesystems where you can mount a shapshot? You could just start serving a past snapshot then make any updated files available as you clear them.

Back in the day I had customers who had incompetent DBAs bork their databases with bad SQL DML and DDL. Where the customer was using Oracle it was pretty easy to walk that stuff back because under the covers Oracle has been making heavy use of COW in their database storage. This allowed me to selectively walk back certain sets of problematic transactions. I could roll back just the transactions made by a certain user on a certain day that involved particular operations or database objects. You didn't have to figure out how to undo the individual effects of the bad transactions, you just waved your magic wand and it was as if those transactions never happened.

There must be some reason people aren't using file systems with COW and efficient snapshotting for general file service, because of on the face of it this seems like an obvious solution to the problem.

Comment Re:Delusional (Score 1) 185

In this case the reasoning is somewhat circular. *If* there are many simulated worlds just like ours and there is only one real world, then it's more probable that our world is simulated than it is real. That's necessarily true, because it's a tautology. The truth of the statement as a whole tells you nothing about the world we actually live in.

As usual, tech bro hype has taken some impressive (to laymen) demos and spun them into a scenario that is far beyond was is demonstrably possible. Sure we can have the comptuer draw pretty pictures, but we actually can't model the world we live in very well. No computer model can tell you the price of Apple stock at the close of business tommorow or the temperature at 2PM in the afternoon a year from now. You can't model a fusion reactor sell enough to get to the point of building a working power station, you have to build many physical experiments to validate your model results. As the statistician George Box famously noted: all models are false; some models are useful.

As for faith, it has its place in science. You do an experiment because you feel confident it's going to tell you something; you usually have a pretty good idea of what you want to happen. That feeling of confidence is important in directing your efforts, but it carries no weight in arguments about results. Faith is only a "sin" (Greek *hamartia* -- to miss the mark) when you demand others share it.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 4, Insightful) 370

For most people some of the time, and for just about everyone some of the time, modern automatic transmissions will perform better than they would with an ICE vehicle. But no matter how good any automatic transmission is, the one thing it will never be able to do is read your mind about what you *intend* to do next. So there will always be situations with an ICE vehicle where you'd rather have a manual or semi-automatic than an automatic.

That doesn't apply to electric motors, which produce nearly peak torque at 0 RPM and then over a wide range of RPMs; so you never have to match the motor's RPMs to what you want to do next. There are corner cases, like towing an extremely heavy load or traveling at extremely high speeds outside the motor's very wide power band, where you'd want to have different gear ratios. There are various ways for engineers to address these cases, but if they chose to give a vehicle a shiftable transmission, there's no reason that a computer couldn't do the shifting; there's no need for it to "read your mind".

As for on snow, regenerative braking can feel a lot like engine braking depending on your driving settings. In a vehicle's maximum efficiency mode the motor will very noticeably begin to absorb energy from the wheels when you let up on the "gas".

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