Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Simple... (Score 2) 190

Fortunately, you can usually turn of JUST amber alerts on phones

Unfortunately, they don't have a separate category for "Silver Alerts". Around here they keep sending them as "Extreme Alerts", which ought to be reserved for flash flooding and other things which put large numbers of people in danger, not just one Alzheimer's case.

Comment Re:questions about use (Score 1) 58

The semi-qualified human will at least understand the context of the paper and hopefully not inject his own lack of understanding into it. He won't modify your maths because he thinks you meant something else. If you send him a message saying "do x" he won't do x and y and also delete a chunk of your paper. If he doesn't improve much he at least won't foul it up.

Comment Re:Add to the power cost of AI (Score 1) 33

You need a problem which is difficult to compute, with predictable difficulty, where the answer can be quickly verified. Few real-world problems meet all of those criteria. Most scientific calculations have to be completely re-run to verify the result, which would make it easy to DoS the server by submitting bogus answers.

Comment Re:questions about use (Score 1) 58

LLM use is unacceptable for use in copy editing unless it's reviewed very carefully by someone who knows both the material and English very well. In which case there's no point in using the LLM in the first place. One problem is, it doesn't know which, if any, modal verb is appropriate. Is it "this data may indicate the confounding factor increases the error rate by..." or is it "the confounding factor increases the error rate by..."? You certainly can't tell by guessing the next most likely word. Another problem is a complete lack of understanding of the material at hand. Did the material undergo a conversion or a transformation? And another is math. LLMs may be able to solve a large number of math problems, but they absolutely cannot be relied upon to output a novel math statement between translations without being copy-edited.

Comment Labor (Score 1) 94

Mechanization of various kinds, including AI, has been eating the American job market for decades. It's only just coming to a head in the form of wages being reduced for people wealthy enough to be listened to. Now we're facing the crisis more head-on.

Even productivity-reducing measures like the reaction to the pandemic can't stop the inevitable march of progress. And I don't even know what the Trump cadre think they're doing by reducing cheap goods for the whole economy, but only long enough for it to raise prices and hurt the standard of living even more, while transferring trillions MORE to the top. It's like the whole American economy was supposed to crash and didn't and now they're trying to help it along. And people on both sides are cheering on one or the other side of the destruction because it's their team doing the destroying. But I digress.

Mechanization will continue, and it's not physical work that's being cut into anymore but intellectual work all the way from how to know what boxes go where or how to navigate a busy road all the way up to composing appropriate messages for each of ten vendors to negotiate lower prices, and what to bargain for, and how. And that's okay. Work is a necessary evil. We need to drop the idea that a man's worth is measured by how much money he's making or whether he's working at all. We need to reduce involuntary employment -- a measure of how many people are working because if they don't, they'll suffer -- to zero. We can accomplish this by encouraging mechanization, by clawing back the wealth transfer from the top and reducing income inequality (How about the six hour work day?) by UBI, by hanging the next person in power who says "trickle down" works, by creating the first-ever "unemployed and that's okay" class as opposed to the current "unemployed, barely surviving and looked down on constantly" groups, and by encouraging companies to be more efficient instead of pushing for "jobs". Oh, and I want a pony.

Comment Give fish to them (Score 4, Insightful) 73

The point at which some environmentalism reveals itself as misanthropy is where "don't feed the animals" is commanded because it's "unnatural." This stance overlooks that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Barring legitimate safety concerns, like habituating bears to human sites, there is nothing inherently wrong with developing relationships, even co-dependencies and forms of partial domestication, with wild animals. Such interactions can represent a form of interspecies mutualism, a concept well-documented in biology, where different species form beneficial partnerships. History, too, offers examples of co-evolution, such as the relationship between humans and the ancestors of domestic dogs. The argument that animals "don't understand what humans are like" is paternalistic. They understand what they like and, as the orca study suggests, are capable of initiating interaction based on their own complex social logics. To deny them this agency is to deny their intelligence and autonomy. They can choose to interact or not, to the limits of their abilities; let them make that choice. This aligns with philosophical arguments for animal autonomy, which posit that sentient beings with preferences should have those preferences respected. The appeal to "naturalness" is a flawed premise in the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by human alteration of all ecosystems. There is no longer a "pure" nature to which we can defer. The insistence on a hands-off policy often stems from a puritanical, almost religious, reverence for a "Sacred" nature that must remain untouched by humanity. This view secretly frames humans as a blight, a contamination from which the world must be cordoned off. It is a philosophy of alienation, not of responsible cohabitation. The fear that a friendly whale, offering fish as a gesture of friendship, might suddenly attack boats is not just unfounded; it actively dismisses the animal's observed intent. It is a projection of human fears onto a situation that the animals themselves are defining as peaceful. This is not to ignore all risks, but to challenge a risk-averse dogma that precludes the possibility of positive, unprecedented relationships. The real debate should be about fostering a more nuanced ethic of interaction, one that respects animal agency and acknowledges our shared and entangled future on this planet, rather than one that capitulates to a deep-seated misanthropy that ultimately desires a world with fewer people in it.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1, Flamebait) 163

>What am I missing?

Musk's hype and overambitious promises, people who hate his politics and are therefore looking for any reason to call anything he does a failure, the fact that most of the early Super Heavies so far went boom (this is not a surprise, but some people don't remember how many Falcons went boom before they developed into one of the most reliable rockets available) and possibly a few launch and moon landing failures.

Comment Re: Welcome to the new reality (Score 1) 33

>I see a future where we end up like the humans in WALL-E... just fat blobs who can't walk

You say that like it's a bad thing. The entire history of human innovation has been a relentless drive to eliminate toil.We replaced farmhands with tractors and are now replacing tedious coding with AI. This is the endgame we've been building toward. The WALL-E scenario shouldn't be seen as a warning about technology. It's a critique of what humans might choose to do with an existence free from mandatory work. The problem isn't the chair, it's the person sitting in it. A future where survival is automated could just as easily unlock a renaissance of human creativity, philosophy, and exploration as it could lead to mass lethargy.

Slashdot Top Deals

Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle? -- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program

Working...