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Comment Re:EV sales in *USA* plummet (Score 1) 281

School buses only work if you don't have after school activities

What are you talking about? I took a bus after school activities in the 1960's.

A *school* bus? Or a city bus? Because nowhere I've ever lived had school buses that took people home except at the end of the regular school day.

Public transit is provably not cost effective at rural densities.

That isn't actually true. There is all sorts of public transit serving rural areas. Whether its "cost effective" or not.

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled. Zero buses, zero *taxis*. You drove or you didn't get there. So I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is, but it sure as h*** doesn't match up with the decades that I lived in a rural area.

There are places that you have to go, e.g. work, school. If the amount of time it takes is too long, it completely breaks your ability to function

No, you just have to make different choices. Which you are already making. You can't live in San Francisco and go to work every day in New York City and school in Los Angeles. Is a 45 minute commute acceptable? For some people yes, for some people no. I wouldn't live somewhere I had to drive to work.

WTF are you talking about? You're talking about huge cities here. I'm talking about small town USA. So unless your idea of "different choices" means not living in a rural area (and good luck finding food on your table if everyone did that), you really don't know what you're talking about.

you're still kind of missing the point, which is that not everybody lives in cities.

I think you are missing the point. Most people do live in cities because it is far more convenient. Its not realistic to demand the same convenience if you live a long way from other people.

Sure. But my point was that trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas, and doesn't work well even in suburbs. That first part is not solvable by moving everyone to cities, because we still require food, and you can't grow that in a dense urban areas, because there's not enough arable land. And people live in suburbs precisely because they don't like living in cities, so eliminating cars in suburbs isn't going to fly, either.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

Comment Re:Possibly valid (Score 4, Informative) 43

Not just possibly, but absolutely valid. This is exactly the kind of thing trademarks exist to prevent. They aren't claiming the word "automatic", they're claiming that naming a framework that's meant to work with their product (WordPress) a name that differs from their own by only 1 letter, particularly such a non-obvious difference (many people won't notice the existence of an extra 't') is meant to cause confusion an think it's an official part of their offerings. Because it is. If the other company doesn't change the name they will be destroyed in court. And frankly they'll deserve it. Whoever chose that name was either a total idiot with no concept of the law, or a scammer who meant to prey on Autmattic's good name.

Comment Re:Was this relevant to the theft? (Score 1) 76

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

If their IT security was this halfassed, then their physical security probably was too. They could have solved the IT security problem by hiring someone competent to do an audit, and then follow their recommendations. They obviously skipped at least one of those steps. That kind of sloppiness doesn't occur in just one area, it has to be systematic.

Comment Re:Google is Awful Already (Score 1) 84

Google does generate some of its own data, from satellite imagery and Street View images, but it has to rely on third parties for some stuff too

Google used to tell me to drive up someone's driveway and take a bridge that didn't exist in Kelseyville CA. What's frustrating about this is that one of their street view cars had passed by that driveway, so they had enough information to know that it wasn't a valid route, but they didn't bother to process it in that way and kept recommending a route that didn't exist and which would have saved maybe one minute if it had.

Google spent a lot of money gathering the data it needs to dramatically improve their routing information, but doesn't bother to do so.

Comment Re:They dont care about debris (Score 1) 24

(The climate change industry) has proven time and time again they don't care enough to mitigate the debris they create. From lithium batteries

Lithium batteries are extremely recyclable.

to massive growth and production,

Of what?

their actions speak louder than their weasel words.

What about your missing words?

Americans used to ruin the US just because it was cheaper

???

You need an editor even more than Slashdot.

Comment Re:What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 1) 138

I only use Steam (The software, as opposed to the store, which can be used through the web) because I'm forced to do so. I'd rather not. While it's possibly the least crap of the game store apps, it's still crap. It shouldn't even have a browser in it. It should be calling out to your browser. AFAICT the Steam updates still don't resume if the download is interrupted, which is weird AF to say the least. This isn't a problem on a healthy modern connection but if your connection is flaky then you can't even get Steam installed, or updated. Game downloads resume so once you get it installed you can do game updates over even a poor connection, but not a Steam update.

Comment Re:EV sales in *USA* plummet (Score 1) 281

I'm thinking about my rural hometown in west Tennessee, and imagining middle school kids biking to school for up to an hour each way

And I from personal observation see that many/most middle school kids have been taking the bus to school for at least the last 70 years. In fact, that is almost the only way kids in rural areas get to school. No imagination required.

School buses only work if you don't have after school activities. Band, sports, theater, etc. are all fundamentally incompatible with a carless society unless you have high enough density to warrant a proper city bus system. Same with AP classes before school.

Some people will do all those things just as they do today. But in fact a lot of people will reduce the range of places they shop, recreate and work because its too far to drive. Almost no one considers "too far" in terms of distance. Its "too far" in terms of how long it takes.

Potato, potahto. There are places that you have to go, e.g. work, school. If the amount of time it takes is too long, it completely breaks your ability to function. Whether the reason for it taking too long is because of distance or because somebody thought it would be fun to make cars go horribly slowly to convince you to bike for an hour is mostly an implementation detail.

There are plenty of people who regularly both walk and ride further than a couple blocks.

I bike two to three hours every Saturday and Sunday. But there's no way I'd be willing to accept an hour of biking each way as a minimum requirement to get to work or school. Life's too short, and I'd be too exhausted when I got there to do anything.

Most people don't actually travel "long distances" very often unless they have to. They arrange their lives to avoid it They move close to work and live where there are places to shop. That's why cities have more people than empty spaces.

True, but you're still kind of missing the point, which is that not everybody lives in cities. Public transit is provably not cost effective at rural densities.

Comment Re: I'd love to use GOG more (Score 2) 138

I buy games on Steam and then do all this stuff to make them work better on Linux. But I also buy games on GOG. And I have games on Epic and EA too, and Lutris does all those too.

I initially got ProtonUp-Qt specifically for use with Steam, because it is the best (easiest) way to install steamtinkerlaunch.

Comment Re:What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 1) 138

Steam is definitely not literally a monopoly. Most people don't seem to know either of the most important things about monopolies, which is 1) what one is and 2) that it's not necessarily relevant whether they are, because antitrust doesn't require a monopoly. It only means you're abusing a somehow dominant position in a market.

With that said, I've been using Steam for a lot of years. I've had many technical problems with it, but I'm not aware of any way in which they are abusing their position. I haven't exactly been looking for this information either, though, and I do see that the article mentions a lawsuit I seem to remember something about.

I think 30% is a lot, but I don't think Steam is really doing anything to prevent anyone from releasing anything else anywhere. They also allow a whole lot of content that is frankly surprising for a mainstream game site, they are ultra-liberal about permitting whatever and I think that's pretty amazing. I do worry about the whole thing packing up one day, but that's a whole other discussion. Are there really any complaints about Valve that have legs?

Comment Re:I'd love to use GOG more (Score 3, Informative) 138

I hate to be a broken record about this lately, but Lutris is a great interface to your GOG library. So far it's successfully installed and run everything I've tried. I'm gonna have to try this Heroic thing that seems to be more popular than it is now, but last time I looked everyone was telling me to use Lutris — when at the time I was happy with PlayOnLinux, which was then being maintained. On Linux you can very reasonably use the web for GOG (and it's easy enough to get Steam reviews there) and then install the games with Lutris.

While I'm advocating for software you want for playing Windows games, you will also want ProtonUp-Qt if you don't have it already.

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