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Comment Re: should forced ESPN to be an add on package and (Score 1) 93

They could do it like Sling, which has two basic tiers: Orange and Blue. Blue has the limited basic channels and a bunch of channels from programming providers other than Disney. Orange has limited basic and Disney, fewer channels and fewer simultaneous streams than Blue, with an "Orange & Blue" add-on tier that adds the missing channels from Blue.

Comment Technology (Score 1) 35

The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.

Comment Re:Tax slaves (Score 1) 61

The IRS steals your lottery winnings in the US? 40%?

There is a mandatory 28% witholding on lottery winnings above $5,000. You will receive a W-2G form.

You can at least claim expenses against this "income" such as costs of tickets, gambling losses , etc? No? What a scam!

Your ability to claim expenses or gambling losses on a lottery win is restricted heavily. Most likely those deductions will end up being disallowed if you try to claim them without getting a CPA and making sure you document and can follow the IRS rules to a T.

The payor is required to withold the amount regardless. You will need to file an income tax return for that year in order to receive a refund for any portion of the witholding you end up not owing as taxes.

Comment Re:Bad Move (Score 1) 61

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

A cash donation to charity is capped at 60% of your AGI for the year the donation is made. So 40% of that donation would be not deductible from federal taxes - let-alone state income taxes.

If you win a $150k lump sum; the Lottery doesn't give you the full amount. There is a federal mandate requiring 25% to be witheld from the payout for taxes, so you'd walk away with $112k MINUS any witholdings required by your local state government as well. Also, MINUS fees.. because if you won the 150k lottery and choose to go for the lump sum instead of the annuity that adds up to 150k over time-- your total amount is going to be less Based on the present amount of those future cash flows minus fees.

Comment Sling Blue and Sling Orange (Score 1) 93

Disney requires specific channels to be at the basic tier of a multichannel video provider's offering, not a "sports" tier. Last I checked (today), multichannel IPTV provider Sling worked around this by offering two different basic plans: "Orange" with ESPN and other Disney properties and "Blue" with more channels but no Disney. Orange subscribers can add the extra Blue channels on a second "Orange & Blue" tier.

Comment Re: Remember when... (Score 1) 93

You obviously spent those days watching Pat Robertson because CBN was literally the only ad free channel on cable that anybody actually watched in the earlier days. And as far as I know, it's still ad free.

CBN operated from 1977 through 1997, showing ads starting in 1981 and taking the name The Family Channel in 1988. Beginning in 1997, CBN was reduced to a paid programming arrangement to show The 700 Club on what is now Disney's Freeform channel. There are, however, numerous other religious channels under a viewer donation arrangement like what you describe, such as EWTN. And in 2008, CBN started a second channel called CBN News, first online and then with a handful of broadcast affiliates.

Comment Re:You can shoot the messenger all you want (Score 1) 64

But everything I said was a fact.

You wouldn't know the facts if they hit you on the head. This is the source:
https://searchepsteinfiles.com...

From this you somehow manage to infer the following:

"So apparently Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump sucked Bill Clinton's dick and Vladimir Putin has the pictures.

Stop, read that again, Google it, and just Jesus fucking Christ what the hell is wrong with our world?"

NONE of the shit you spouted above is anything even remotely resembling a "fact". FFS you even manage to get the speaker wrong. It was Jeffrey's brother who made the statement.

If that makes you uncomfortable what the hell does that say about you?

What makes me uncomfortable is coming to obviously absurd conclusions based on shit information and then proceeding to wonder "what the hell is wrong with our world".. Look in the goddamn mirror.

Comment Re: If Trump hadn't won (Score 1) 64

So apparently Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump sucked Bill Clinton's dick and Vladimir Putin has the pictures.

Stop, read that again, Google it, and just Jesus fucking Christ what the hell is wrong with our world?

What the hell is wrong with YOU? Get some mental help or something dude... your rantings are completely unhinged.

Comment Re:This lays bare one of the problems with LLMs... (Score 1) 63

What too many people do not seem to understand with LLMs is that everything it spits out is simply a probability matrix based on the input you gave it. It will first attempt to deconstruct the input you provided and use statistical analysis against it's trained knowledge base to then spit out letters, words, phrases and punctuation that statistically resembles the outputs it was trained to produce in it's training materials.

LLMs are simple feed forward networks run in a loop. They make no use of "statistical analysis" nor is there a "knowledge base".

The just statistics statements are as useful as saying just autocomplete or just deterministic. These are completely meaningless statements that in no way address capabilities of the underlying system.

Until this version, ChatGPT obviously suffered from a lack of training materials within it's trained neural network to have it overcome the English language's typed grammar rules for it to be able to discern that em dashes are not typically used in everyday conversations and/or that the input to not use them needed to change it's underlying probability network to be able to ignore the English language's grammar rules and adopt it's output without the use of the em dash.

It's is shorthand for "it is" ... "change its underlying probability" not "change it is underlying probability". "adapt its output" not "adopt it is output".

This is a very difficult concept to train into a neural network as it needs to have been training on specifically this input/output case long enough to have that training override the base English grammar language model, which is a fundamental piece of knowledge a LLM requires to function and one of the very first things it is trained to handle.

This is gobbledygook. You are guessing and have no actual clue how the technology works.

Comment Wrong conclusion (Score 3, Interesting) 63

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

Comment Re: Popular mod - disconnect cars (Score 1) 49

Someone should start a website allowing car buyers the option to be pre-warned about the level of exploitation they'll experience for each make and model of car.

Mozilla did this....and unfortunately, it's worse than useless.

Strictly speaking, Toyota's privacy policy is pretty liberal in terms of what is involved, and has been for years...and that's what their rating is based on. And, credit to Toyota, their "we can do whatever we want and you can't sue us" policy goes pretty far back, so Mozilla ranked my 1999 Camry as pretty not-privacy-centric. That's useless, because it got the same ranking as a 2024 Tesla Model S.

Now, regardless of what the paperwork says, the practical difference between the two could not be more different. The 1999 Camry had an ODB2 port, which meant it *did* do some tracking...but it kept it on the computer, and Toyota only got their hands on it if I brought it to their shop and they dumped the memory. A 2024 Tesla sends audio and video data, driving data, mapping data, and remote lock/unlock/disable commends to Tesla, in real-time.

Any list that puts these two things on the same level is worse than useless. 1999 Toyota's data is as opt-in as data sharing could possibly be. Tesla's data sharing requires lots of skill to implement, and functionality tradeoffs as a consequence. The paperwork may reflect that Toyota can share their data dumps if they get them, but Tesla's data collection is not just a default, it's a warranty-voiding engineering problem.

So, yes, I would *love* such a list...but when the privacy advocates are as useless as the privacy violators, the only list that *might* make some traction is an ad-hoc, opt-in list that either manufacturers or users create for vehicles where the owners enumerate the intrusiveness.

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