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Comment Re:How things are decided in 2025 (Score 2) 31

The argument for Hyperloop is that there is a "cool" web site in Holland.

I saw that line in TFS and thought "what are we, 10 years old?"

As far as the arguments against hyperloop goes - we've hashed those out ad nauseum before. The only thing that's keeping the hyperloop hype train going is that, somehow, there are still a few Musk fanbois in existence.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 0) 87

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 87

But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feels like a fairly small amount of data. My best guess is that it's some insane formulas that it struggles with more than the number of cells.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Comment Re:Those who cannot remember history (Score -1, Troll) 227

When in the last two centuries have the French, or the British, or the Germans, or the Belgians, or the Italians moved in a way to unify that continent to stand up to this kind of genocide?

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

Comment Ha ha Russia yeah right (Score -1, Flamebait) 227

The only reason anyone would even think about adding "Russia" to that list is because the current elderly resident of the White House has a hard-on for Putin.

Militarily, Russia has demonstrated it has a hard time defeating a country 1/10 of its size.

Technologically, Russia is so far behind, it's had to rely on equipment being manufactured by Iran and North Korea (neither of which is "first world").

Economically, yeah I'm not even gonna bother with that one, even their sycophants know Russia is a basket case.

Comment Re:And show what? (Score 4, Insightful) 51

Then why do they have to force non-Australian companies to produce shows if there's a healthy Australian tv-industy? Is this one of those "Australia has an army!" things?

Because it would get swamped out with the sheer amount of foreign content. Canada has had a similar law for decades and it works rather well.

Personally I'd just make a few hours of AI generated aboriginals spouting hate speech at the Australian government as a middle finger for each day.

You would really benefit from some self reflection.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 4, Insightful) 110

automated image pattern matching has been around for decades

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Comment Re:Big, BIG companies should know better (Score 1) 87

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

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