Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: They have to be (Score 3, Insightful) 113

The job is only dangerous in the big cities.

You have some weird conceptions about big cities. Homicide rates aren't an urban vs. rural thing, they're a north vs. south thing . It's the south that has the high per-capita murder rate. Which is in turn because said areas are the poorest places in the US. The trend holds true even in areas that are relatively culturally homogenous - for example, there's not much of a difference in culture between northwest Texas rural counties and northeast Texas rural counties, but northwest Texas is much wealthier per-capita, and also has a much lower homicide rate.

The TL/DR: crime correlates with despair, and places like the Mississippi Delta are characterized by chronic high unemployment, low wages, and limited access to quality education and resources. This combines with a legacy of racial violence/mistrust and lax firearm laws, and the result is exactly what one would expect.

One could make the argument that, well, okay, it may be the rural south that has a high murder rate per capita, okay, but there's lots of people in big cities, so it's a multiplier. Yes, that's true, but there's also lots of cops in big cities, so it doesn't change their odds of being the one responding to a situation where shots are fired, to the degree that police departments are equally well staffed per-capita.

It's also worth mentioning that the rural crime rate trends in the US are much worse than the urban crime rate trends. I hate to risk derailing this by the meremention of Trump, but he tapped into a very legitimate wellspring of anger; the economic growth in the US over the past several decades has been very uneven, and a lot of people, esp. in rural areas, the rust belt, and the south have felt left behind, with insufficient care from politicians as to their plight. While the ragebait media landscape has tended to try to focus their anger on cities and minorities, as "evil outsiders catered to by elites", US cities are, frankly, doing quite well on average, and have thrived in the US's growing service economy. But people in the rural south, the Mississippi Delta, the rust belt, etc (outside of the "energy belts", like in west Texas, that produce oil, gas, wind power, etc)... their lived experiences of a lack of opportunity and declining communities are very much real. They're just projecting them (wrongly) onto big cities outside of their region.

Comment Re:That's not AI failure! (Score 1) 113

From TFS, there's no indication either way of whether they had seen the picture before, and if I had to argue either way from the wording, I'd go with "yes, they had".

Also, when did we switch from calling weapons detections systems "weapons detections systems" to "artificial intelligence systems"? It's still true, but a much less useful choice of wording, and is probably going to make some readers think they were shoving video feeds through ChatGPT or something.

Also, in the picture, it was clearly their cell phone and how they were holding it that triggered the alert, not the Doritos bag.

Comment Re:Garbage (Score 3, Interesting) 33

Seriously, what's the point of using AI to generate details that even bleeding edge hardware can't run at a decent framerate

I don't know what you're talking about. This is as far as I can tell about the process of creating game assets in the first place - not about generating them in realtime. It doesn't have any impact on performance.

I've used AI model generators (mainly image-to-model), and for game-type assets, they're usually good enough, though you still of course want a human to exert control over them. But it's way faster than from-scratch modeling. For say 3d printing, though, you really need to decompose the image into smaller components, process each individually, and merge, because otherwise too much fine detail gets lost into the texture instead of being part of the actual model. Regardless, they've been improving at a good pace. I haven't tried (as I've not had a need) but I think they now have model generators that even rig the models.

Comment Re:Crazy that they didn't even include a screensho (Score 4, Interesting) 28

IMHO, the most interesting thing they did was with the palette. They were obsessed with getting not just images snapped by the satellite as the sky, but having them actually look good, and even a "smart" mapping algorithm to the in-game palette wasn't good enough for them. So they wrote an algo to simultaneously choose a palette for both the colours in the satellite image and the colours in the game's graphical assets so it would pick colours best for both of them, and then remapped both the satellite image and the game's assets to this new palette. Also, normally satellite images are denoised on the ground, but a partner had gotten a machine learning denoising algo running on the satellite.

One thing they weren't able to deal with was that the game tiles the sky background, which is fine because it's a tileable image, but obviously random pictures of Earth aren't (except the nighttime images, which are all black!). If they had had more time, I imagine they would have set up something like heal selection to merge the edges, but one of the problems was that in order to take images of Earth, the satellite had to be oriented in a way that increased its drag and accelerated its deentry... so ironically, playing DOOM was accelerating the satellite's doom.

Comment Re:Here is the explaination: (Score 1) 112

The primary goal of political campaigns is to turn out supporters because most elections are decided by who turns out.

Don't you mean that all elections are decided by those who turn out? Unless you're suggesting that there's ballot box stuffing and other fraudulent methods of affecting the outcome of an election going on it's rather hard to see how those who don't turn out and vote can have the slightest effect on the outcome.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 99

Long before I worked, briefly, at JPL, MOPS, the Maneuver Operations Programming System was written for an IBM 360, in assembler. When they moved up to a Univac, it was re-written in whatever version of FORTRAN was current and worked very well. In fact, I'd bet money that that package is still running there because, like the old COBOL programs, It Just Worked. I know this because I had the privilege of working with the late Dan Alderson, the last member of the team that migrated the package still at JPL when I was there.

In the almost three years that we worked together, I only saw him presented with a bug in the package once, and it turned out to be a user error. The user was trying to calculate the perturbations on Voyager I caused by 11 of the Jovian satellites, either to calculate their masses, or at least the maximum possible, causing the program to crash. It didn't take long for Dan to find the problem: the data for the satellites was kept in an array, and being written in FORTRAN, the array was designed for a max of ten objects. He suggested that the user edit a copy of the source to enlarge everything and use that instead of the regular program.

Slashdot Top Deals

I am more bored than you could ever possibly be. Go back to work.

Working...