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Comment Not that surprising? (Score 1) 34

My roof gets ~150-250F for 8 hours a day direct UV exposure and we regularly go 9 months without rain here. There's no atmosphere to filter the UV and the ISS can reach 300F worst case so it's worse but not an order of magnitude worse. ISS has a true vacuum but i'm not sure if that helps or hurts above water's boiling point. Every winter before the rainy season comes I have to go on the roof and brush off the thick carpet of moss that has started forming in the shadiest parts. So clearly nature is working as intended.

Comment Re:Does this mean it'll stop sucking? (Score 1) 27

Gemini is one of if not the top model, but I intentionally avoid using it as the other models are within a few percent as good as it, and I'm not at all eager to feed the google machine this time around. Now that google search is irrelevant I have no incentive to "help" google along. Goodbye and good riddance.

Comment Re:AI/LLMs and language translation (Score 2) 100

I wonder how TIOBE would measure this sort of work. As activity in the source language (C)? Editing language (C#)? Or both?

It wouldn't. TIOBE is bullshit, I don't know why anyone uses it. Look at what it is: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...

It's just searching various engines for "$LANG programming" and applying magic fudge factors. It searches multiple languages versions of Google as well as for some reason Amazon and Ebay. And it relies on the "$NUM results found" provided by those sites.

So at best it's a vague indicator of the language's presence. It doesn't say much of anything about whether it's in use. If a popular documentation site goes down it will note a decrease, and it's trivial to cheat by encouraging the insertion of keywords in websites.

Comment Re:No (Score 4, Interesting) 129

There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
 
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.

Comment This particular safeway (Score 5, Informative) 195

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

Comment Re: Microsoft Store is the monopoly (Score 1) 164

Anybody could vibe code an online video game store backed by s3 in about 20 minutes, where is the monopoly? Before steam existed people distributed games on floppies and CD/DVD. Nobody is stopping you from selling your video games mail order, or on your own squarespace store or whatever. There's zero economic moat here. I routinely pay a premium to buy my games on steam because I don't trust the developer to keep track of my account or even keep their store up in 90 days.

Comment I don't think so (Score 4, Interesting) 47

I don't think it does, at least not currently.

AI currently doesn't generate whole big projects, just smaller snippets of code. You can't just go "Make me a non-GPL VLC" in VSCode. You can have AI write smaller things, like "Create a skeleton for a Wayland program", but in such usages it's not all that different from copying stuff from Stack Overflow and random snippets from Google.

I'd say in general anything where one would worry about licensing is too large for AI yet.

If we do get to the point where we can just have a LLM spit out a full video decoding library that actually works, then it's fair to say that we're living in the future and any concern about licensing is probably obsolete. If AI gets to that point it's probably now able to do projects of almost unlimited size and the world is being turned upside down.

Comment English dominates vs Tamil && Hindi (Score 2, Insightful) 49

> English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide.
 
English dominates because not only are there a lot of speakers, but it is the modern business lingua franca and most anyone who owns a desktop computer today can probably grumble out a handful of statements or questions in english. Hindi and Tamil on the other hand, use completely different writing systems and beyond a couple of clever words have zero vocabulary overlap with "western" languages. Simply due to inertia of 2 billion speakers Hindi/Tamil etc will continue on forever, but I can't see them being targeted by western technology. Americans and Europeans already struggle with cyrillic and it's at least recognizably sorta phonetically similar about half the time. Tamil just makes my eyes glaze over when I see it on street signs in Malaysia or whatever.

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