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Comment Re:Wow that's expensive (Score 1) 45

I was thinking the same thing. It must have a whole raft of licensing fees on it. If the price keeps enough people out of the market for it then these will turn out to be some of the most valuable minifigs of all time. I wonder what it costs if you buy the same pieces (less the figures) via parts orders.

Comment Re:Total stupidity on authors part (Score 1) 56

In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)

Comment Re:It's all based on the assumption that... (Score 1) 56

It's going to take more than one more efficient algorithm. OTOH, there've already been improvements in more than one algorithm. Nobody knows how far that could go, but the best evidence is that it could get a LOT more efficient. (Consider the power usage of a human brain...it uses a lot of power for an organ, but not really all that much.)

Comment Re: Imaginary assets like hallucinations? (Score 1) 56

I'm guessing this is a summary:
Banks are legally allowed to loan more money than they have in deposits...to a degree. They've occasionally been found to go well beyond that limit. And they aren't carefully audited often enough.

Whether that's an accurate summary or not, it's true, if a bit shy on details. (I don't know the details this decade. But there probably haven't been any basic changes in the last few decades.)

Comment Depends on what Apple lets PWAs do (Score 1) 18

The right decision would be for a news site and storefront to have platform-agnostic web sites, not applications you have to install.

And the right decision would be for phone operating system publishers to provide functionality in the included web browser to let a website act as a progressive web application. Safari for iOS has a history of lagging behind other platforms' browsers in PWA features.[1] This is particularly evident with respect to what the browser allows websites to do in the background. For example, Apple implemented Push API seven years after Mozilla did, and it requires the user to add the website to the home screen to enable PWA features.[2] Do you want Nintendo Music to pause when you switch to another application? Or if you've chosen to let Nintendo's website notify you when something becomes available, do you want to miss the notification if Safari suddenly decides that your domain's notifications shall be silent (without vibration, without sound, and at the bottom of the list)?

[1] "Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied" by Alex Russell
[2] "Push API" on Can I use...

Comment Re:Very few things are cheaper in the "cloud" (Score 1) 70

But for compute, or storage, or bandwidth: on-prem will always win in cost.

With two exceptions I can think of. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it:

1. For lightweight web hosting, a low-end VPS from a company like DigitalOcean is likely to be less expensive than upgrading a home office from home-class home Internet to business-class home Internet to unblock inbound ports 80 and 443.
2. SMTP is still an old boys' club, with major mailbox providers (such as Gmail and Outlook) blocking connections on port 25 from on-premise IP addresses as likely sources of spam.

Comment Re: What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 1) 162

I think one valid complaint is the use of DRMs.

I am in every way anti-DRM, but it's ubiquitous. A lot of publishers won't publish on GOG for this reason. I agree that Epic is arguing in bad faith. The enemy of my enemy is convenient, nothing more, so I am not delusional about Epic but I still enjoy their actions.

They are basically throwing money to become relevant enough that they can be profitable without having to throw money. If that ever happens, you can be sure that there will be no more free games.

TBH I usually forget to go look at the free games they are typically so underwhelming, though there have been some legitimate greats too.

Meanwhile Steam is sustainable and superior on features.

There are only two features of Steam beyond buying installing games which I care about, and one of them sucks. I like that it handles updates for me, but that is also the bad one, because practically none of the updates are differential. I want them to make that easier so that publishers actually do it. I know that it requires significant support from publishers when they use packed data files, but even that is something that could be addressed. (If the files are compressed individually instead of using compressed archives, then binary patches are feasible.) The other feature is Proton. Anything else including friends, achievements, and even reviews is all optional to me. I enjoy some of those features, but I would still use Steam without them.

Comment Re:Not AI (Score 1) 122

AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.

Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.

Comment Re:lmao (Score 1) 91

Even as someone who votes left more than any other way, I'd be entirely okay with killing the AMT. It is a huge pain to deal with.

The real problem, IMO, is that Congress needs to get off its a** and pass laws requiring brokerages and retirement plans to provide all of the tax data in a fully computed form so that you can fill in the boxes on your tax worksheet and be done, rather than having to look through every single line and figure out which ones were short-term, which were long-term, which had foreign tax, etc. Even with TurboTax, even with basically everything coming from Edward Jones, it *still* takes me two or three hours every year to fill in the information correctly for my taxes. I can't imagine trying to do that by hand on paper.

Comment Re:An opinion - not terrible (Score 2) 42

I love to hate on macs but this isn't terrible at all. The old and new icons are both quite clear and their purpose is most always understandable 'except for the two window icons replaced by an right-pointing arrow, I have no clear idea what either that could be doing), supported by shape and colours (though a more intense contrast could be desirable). These are icons I would enjoy using instead of the current "flat design" trend that exists elsewhere, for example the Breeze style in KDE which is what I would call terrible.

The real problem with requiring icons to be a specific shape is that it makes apps harder to recognize. Just look at how much confusion Google's icon rebranding has been, with every icon looking a lot like a multicolored square, and you'll understand what I mean. Now imagine every app icon on an entire operating system being a rounded square.

Comment Re: So this is actual profit (Score 0) 122

And ammo. Yeah some people have thousands of rounds of ammo. The military has millions of rounds, and enough men to go with them to effectively utilize suppressive fire. If you do get in an old-fashioned firefight with soldiers they can simply outbullet you if for some reason they don't have an armed backpack drone. Which by the way they totally do.

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