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Submission + - Popular Tech Site Caves to AI $, Starts Serving AI Popups (slashdot.org) 2

An anonymous reader writes: Popular but greying tech site Slashdot succumbs to commercial pressure, allowing AI-serving popups "Create AI Apps with Mongo DB!"

Long held to be a bastion of 'old tech' linux advocates and crusty DOS command-line devotees, they were widely representative of the cutting edge of the golden age of desktops and still regarded highly for their knowledge of kernel lore and deep protocols fundamental to modern computing. Fading in relevance since its heyday of the 1990s and 2000s, conventional wisdom would still have suggested this should have been the last bastion to fall to the idea of letting LLMs "do the coding for you", but Slashdot admins, alert for commercial opportunities (on a site that remains relatively ad free), clearly have a different opinion. "Our users need to understand what an opportunity this was for us" they are imagined to have said, "there's a TON of cash sloshing around the gigantic shamconomy of OpenAI, NVidia, and ChatGPT — why can't some of it splash our way? As they say: 'carpe pecuniam'!."

Comment Feminization is the issue (Score 1, Informative) 93

Most HR personnel are women, and some might assert this is the problem, they are the vanguard of the overwhelming feminization of workplaces.

https://www.compactmag.com/art...

"...Everything you think of as âoewokenessâ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. ..."

She presented it a little more compactly (not a great public speaker, ngl) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:It won't last. (Score 2) 40

The objective is to purchase "sustainable" aviation fuel, and thereby increase the demand for same.

That will require investment in the construction of additional capacity to create that fuel, unless there's a large surplus of unused fuel laying around somewhere. If there is, I'm not currently aware of it.

Comment It won't last. (Score 2) 40

'Carbon tax" generally faisl to stimulate a lot of investment in so-called renewable technology because there's no long term assurance that the tax will continue "forever". So an investment with a long term payback potential that could suddenly become a loser if the government changes or someone overhauls their tax policy has to provide a premium return to make investors take on the additional risk.

Comment Re:Why does THE STATE have to pay for all this? (Score 1) 235

You can lament all you want, Ken Fluffernutter, but I will not work to pay for your vacation. That's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

No amount of definition twisting and and grandstanding will change the fact that no, I will not pay for your plane tickets and parcel deliveries.

The taxes I pay are extracted from my income. And my income is compensation for the time I spend working away from my family, breaking my back or numbing my brain and a return on the the skills and education I spent years and many thousands of bucks to get. With the costs of living and housing rising sharply, it's difficult enough as it is. I will NOT spend a single dime on taxes to pay for the vacations of other people.

Not happening, Ken. Pay for your own stuff.

Comment Re:Why does THE STATE have to pay for all this? (Score 1) 235

Where did you learn to use a calculator? I didn't even check your sources and values, because the math, logic and subject area knowledge alone are terrible enough.

First, maths: you're off by one order of magnitude. 26,8 billion dollars for 16,4 million flights is 1'634 USD per flight. So it's 1,6k per plane, not 16k.

Second, logic: you've duly noted that only 55% of those 16,4 million flights are passenger flights, but calculate them as if they're all passenger flights with 104 pax average per flight, even compounding rounding errors as you go, omitting the 45% cargo-only flights and pretending that shippers for cargo don't need to pay for air traffic security.

Third, subject area knowledge: there are no true scheduled "passenger-only flights" in commercial aviation. What laypeople call "passenger flights" are actually only flights where some air cargo capacity is used by passengers and their luggage. Especially on transcontinental and long-haul flights, "passenger planes" carry an extraordinary amount of air freight and their profitability is hugely dependent on that as well. Making the airline passengers pay the entire flight security tax of that flight would mean the cargo shippers ride tax-free. That's not what we're after.

Cargo shippers, commercial operators, producers, assemblers, too, have their choice of using long-haul trucking, trains, air freight, boats, pigeon carriers or switching to localized production, bulk transport, to and from just-in-time logistics etc.. If company A wants to avoid setting up a warehouse near their production facilities to store all the bits and pieces they need on-site and with sufficient stock to allow for bulk transport, that's their prerogative. Only they can know if the capital assets locked in raw materials are too much compared to just-in-time logistics buying and transporting only the part that's actually needed right now. And air freight costs and air traffic costs play right into that. If company A wants to do just-in-time logistics and company B and C optimize their logistics, localize their production, keep reserves on site? Guess what, A pays the air traffic safety tax, B and C don't.

Same thing. And we can't count the number of boxes or metric tons of cargo vs. passenger counts and the number and weight of their luggage to even properly estimate the actual cost per passenger.

To re-use your simplification to get the absolute upper bound of that tax: if all those 16,4 million flights were passenger-only, air cargo didn't exist like you pretended, and all the flights had 104 passengers on average, then the cost would be 1,6k per flight or 15,71 USD per flight per passenger. Fifteen bucks per flight, at the very maximum, if air cargo didn't exist or was tax-free. And 104 passengers per plane is an absolutely ridiculously low number that applies only to the US domestic market. It doesn't even include the transcontinental flights coming and going to the US, because those are wide-body twin-aisle aircraft that have a LOT more than 104 seats. The top 10 current wide-body aircraft models for long-haul routes have over 200 (737) or over 800 seats (A380). Except these two extremes, most other types carry between 300 and 400 people. They're not flying 70% empty for that "104 passenger on average" number. If airlines actually allow to fly their planes half-empty, that's not a problem for the taxpayer to fix.

No taxation without representation. No taxation to correct or support voluntary and luxury decisions by others. You want it, you pay for it. End of story.

Comment Re: All I can say is duh! (Score 0) 83

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

The only thing that meaningfully matters to a cargo ship is size.
Vessels are already slow sailing to artificially constrain bandwidth and prop up rates, and have been since COVID.

Nobody on earth is trying to build FASTER cargo ships, and haven't for 50 years. Jesus Christ. If only slashdot had a "doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about" filter.

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