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Comment Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score 1) 59

You're mixing up hardware and software.

A better analogy is I want my car, the hardware, to work with my phone. I don't want 50 different phone operating systems that my car company has to build interoperability for so that the hardware I bought, a car, has to support 50 different variations on phones.

Competition is good but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There is value in standardization especially for complex things that require interoperability.

Comment Re:Writing is kinda useful (Score 1) 125

research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type

True, but keep in mind that this is not universal. For me, and for two of my children, writing by hand reduces learning and retention. We have some sort of dyslexia-adjacent disability that prevents us from "automating" writing the way most people do. When kids learn to write, they learn to draw the letter shapes out line by line and curve by curve, but for most people the shape-drawing quickly becomes automatic. Not so for me, or my kids. Writing takes focus and attention, not on the text being written, but on the shapes being drawn. Interestingly, this appears to have no effect on reading; all of us read (and type) rapidly and accurately.

I realized in high school that the common wisdom that hand-written note-taking helped with retention not only didn't work for me, but was actively harmful to learning. I wish I'd had the option of bringing a laptop to class, but in the mid 80's laptops were more "luggable" than portable, didn't have batteries and were far more expensive than my family could afford. So I just listened without taking notes, and studied by reading the textbook. Luckily, school came easily to me so I was able to do well without notes (or all that much studying). In college I learned to ask the professors for their lecture notes to study from.

Comment Re:It has here (Score 1) 84

Then there is wind. There are places where the wind never stops, the Allegheny Front for instance.

Pennsylvania has been getting high winds for the past two months. Sometimes as high as 30+ mph sustained gusts. They should be producing enough electricity for the surrounding states.

You aren't kidding. We just had another windstorm last night. The good part is it blew a lot of leaves from my yard to the neighbors yard. 8^)

Comment It's about priorities (Score 2) 125

The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.

So right now if you're finding somebody on the left our main concern is to teach critical thinking skills that will create the next generation of voters that don't fall for the usual bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The southern strategy, woke dei moral panics whatever the hell. The basic tricks that the ruling elite use to kowtow a population.

If we can't pull that off we would at least like to teach the actual history of chattel slavery in America, who Christopher Columbus really was and maybe throwing some stuff about the labor movement. It would also be nice if we could have an economics course in high school that wasn't just capitalist propaganda. I mean when I took mine years and years ago it was literally slotted between health and driver's ed that's how unimportant it was as a learning opportunity. It was literally just nine weeks or so of me being told how great capitalism was and how supply and demand made my life better.

I'm not saying we go full socialist but I would like to teach children about a proper and functional capitalist system, especially things like the need for regulation and antitrust law.

Now if you want to massively increase the funding for public schools that we can have all of the above and your finer points of education sure let's do it. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're not up for that

Comment Flip side (Score 3, Interesting) 30

Would he actually be more comfortable with our Elected non-tech elites making the big decisions?

I just don't see our legislative process, or administrative state terribly equipped to deal with shaping AI technology.

I think their job is to:
1) Ensure societies existing guard rails are uniformly and fairly applied to all, independent as to if AI has anything to do with the activity or not.
2) Respond reactively. If we identify a specific activity when coupled with AI is in some way corrosive to the society we generally want to have, then enact legislation to curb it in that area. While generally speaking anticipating problems and trying to avoid them is good practice, with something like this evolving this rapidly, I believe you usually create more issues if you go trying to solve problems you don't really know you yet have.

A good example is work force reduction, a lot of people are convinced there is going to be a huge wave of job losses that are directly attributed to AI, we don't really have any evidence of that yet. There are plenty of equally plausible explanations for unemployment rate increases right now. So if you go legislation a bunch of 'things' companies are not allowed to use ML/AI tech for and it turns out the UE uptick isn't ai related all you have done is limited productivity gains and created more economic drag.

It is important to keep in mind this is mostly just computers filling out paper work, taking down orders, and churning out questionable quality music and video clips. Hardly things we can't 'shut off' if need be. It isn't like nearly as destructive and irreversible as all kinds of development projects we often give the private sector a long leash to run with.

Comment Re: Project Kessler. (Score 1) 36

Sand wonâ(TM)t do it. The impact has to fragment the satellite.

Kinetic energy. And it depends on where the sand hits, and how much of it hits. https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/impa.... Impacts by things like paint flecks do interesting things, sand is much larger.

But I wasn't trying for a second to say that sand or ball bearings were going to cause a Kessler event. Although a breach of hydrazine propellent with cause impressive destruction if hits thse catalyst bed. My point was that thinking that your satellites are safe is simply wrong. Doesn't take much technology to break a lot of them.

What makes a Kessler event likely is proliferation of satellites, If 2 collide, that starts the chain reaction.n Now we are talking about much larger pieces then sand or ball bearings. Orbital mechanics and energy transfer takes care of the rest. If you think Kessler is wrong (I do not) use your orbital mechanics and energy transfer savvy to support your claim.

Comment Re: You are not an engineer. (Score 1) 81

I usually end up with a title like Staff Engineer or Software Engineer.

In a courtroom, I'm a software engineer in California. And it is what I report on taxes. What I report on census. And what I report when I apply for a mortgage. My lack of a formal degree in the field makes it very unlikely that my company would call me to act as an expert witness. Even though at one time I was an automotive safety trainer and safety lead for regulated camera. What is good enough for a private company is often insufficient in a courtroom or at least won't stand up to a well placed argument, which is ultimately what an attorney is all about.

So true, I'm not likely to testify in my field, but my employer likes what I do. A lot of experience in different areas, quick on my feet, and very hard to bullshit.

My boss once told a tech guy who was trying to do that with me - "Don't bullshit a bullshitter, you won't win that game with Ol. Do as he tells you." This was in response to a lighting system problem I had diagnosed.

Comment AI code = Public Domain (Score 0) 31

That is how it's been, Those AI tools were trained on open source/public domain content, so any contribution by AI tools must be considered released under public domain. It does not get simpler than that, and current US copyright law has already indicated that any AI created works are not eligible for copyright. So disclosing it as partially or completely AI generated = Public Domain. If at some point someone can prove that code created by a tool was pilfered from a OSS project, then you can re-disclose it as such, but only for OSS projects that previously existed before 2015. As for this cut off point, that's to ensure that no material generated by LLM's is backdated/forked into another backdated project. A hard cut off would be 2019.

Basically if you took every submitted line of code and searched git hub for it, you should not see anything resembling it.

But we need to be honest up front here too, no harm will come to the Linux kernel if it accepts AI generated code, the people doing the code review and the people submitting the patches must be completely honest about the AI use, what AI was used, what model was used and what prompt was used. No automated acceptance of patches. All patches must produce safe code out of the box. No special compiler directives, all warnings must be treated as errors.

Comment Hey remember that PRC is responsible for debris (Score 1) 26

Hey remember that PRC is responsible for debris in 2007 by blowing up a satellite on purpose. They have no excuses.

Everyone launching shit into space better have a goal to clean up space, or any of those billionaires wanting to go to mars are going to ... you know what never mind, let them have launch accidents when they decide to leave.

Comment Re:No! But Greed Is. (Score 1) 68

Also infrastructure dollars spent on data centers are not spent on more useful projects.

It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. It is extremely hard to get the billionaires to allow us to spend any money on infrastructure. They do it begrudgingly and in exchange for huge amounts of free money. The last major push for infrastructure in America was in the mid 1980s when the Democrat party compromised with Ronald Reagan giving Reagan all the military spending he wanted in exchange for 1 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending to build out much needed cities. If you're over 50 that's why and how you are able to afford to buy a house.

I think one of the things that confuses economists is that the economy shouldn't be a zero-sum game and you're taught that it's not but in practice because of the bizarre political realities it is.

Comment Re:"Windows is evolving into an agentic OS," (Score 2) 59

I just really wish that the world could just pick one distro and go with it.

I get that techies like the ability to pick their favorite distro and I get that Ubuntu is gotten close to being the default but in practice it's not.

There really needs to be a consistent way to install and deploy software and a consistent set of tools and libraries for accessing things like audio and video and for programming things like basic UI components.

If Linux could just settle on one distro and maybe two or three desktops (a light one, the heavy one for mainline desktops and maybe one for mobile and tablet) I think it could capture a lot more market share. Sort of like how stuff like ruby on rails and a lot of frameworks get popular because while they might not do things the best they just pick a way to do something and go with it.

Choice paralysis combined with diluting the developer pool creates all sorts of problems at this junction.

And I really really want a good competitor for Windows. Because holy crap Windows 11 is terrible. It is the most user hostile software I have ever seen in my life.

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 2) 44

With the way lobbying works you just can't do that. Especially with the droughts driving up the cost of beef through the roof.

One thing you could do is single-payer healthcare especially in america. Back when I used to work really shitty call center jobs I need people that would take their antibiotics until they felt better and stop because they were saving them for the next time. That was because they couldn't afford to see a doctor.

There's an old saying, it's cheaper to be a good person.

Comment Re:You are not an engineer. (Score 1) 81

Legally speaking, you can not call yourself an engineer of any sort without belonging to an actual engineering license credential system (since there are things like civil engineers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, etc, in the same way you can not call yourself Esquire unless you hold a lawyer license. You can not practice law without a license, but that doesn't stop you defending yourself in a court.

For all that matters, you can call yourself an engineer to other people if you are simply making stuff yourself and not marketing yourself as a licensed one. Nobody can stop you. But you are not getting hired to build/design anything by any company that will be liable for that product.

To circle back to the story itself, Yes C# will overtake Java because C# is primarily used in game development... and cheating tools for games. Java is used by exactly one game. Minecraft. No other game out there is built in Java that has survived the constant breaking of the Java API by Oracle. C# is equally as brittle, but unlike Java, you are not required to recode your game in a newer C# unless the underlying engine (eg Unity) does.

But people should still learn C before they ever learn any other software development language because every single language in use to day either follows C syntax (Javascript, PHP) or C++ object models (Java, Javascript, PHP, Python, etc) so if you learn at the minimum C, you can pick up all other programming languages quite easily. C is the Latin to C++'s Italian and Java's French.

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