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Comment Re:Developing AI to research biology is good (Score 2) 28

A six billion dollar plan to end hunger is wildly optimistic. What you might be able to do is feed everyone on the planet for a time, but it wouldn’t solve future problems. It also likely ignores that some countries (e.g. North Korea) would be unwilling to participate and their people would still be starving.

I suspect this figure is wrong based on a quick search that reported global spending for this problem during a a five year span was over $60 billion. In other words the world is already collectively spending twice as much and not solving the problem permanently.

Musk has enough money that he could throw away $6 billion on something like this without suffering much from it. I can already guarantee it wouldn’t work work whatever it actually was. If it were actually that easy (and inexpensive) it would have been solved. If it's the little you could probably crowd source the funding. Start a fund to accumulate the $6 billion and implement the plan. You'd only need 60 million people to kick in $100 each, which is a lot of people, but there are easily that many who could.l contribute that much without missing it. I can already tell you everyone will be as skeptical as Musk when it's their own money.

Comment Re:that's what happens (Score 1) 52

Is that what happened here? If not, it's as irrelevant and off topic as complaining about terrorists hijacking planes and intentionally crashing them into buildings. The original comment gives the implication that this is exactly the sort of improper maintenance that was done on this plane and responsible for the failure and crash.

Comment Re:How stupid are Mozilla? (Score 1) 49

I could understand if they had a massive backlog of things to be translated that was constantly growing because the volunteers couldn't keep up as having a mediocre machine translation is often better than none at all, but there's no reason to replace the completed human translations. This is even more stupid when one stops to consider that the were getting this for free.

Comment Re:Icons (Score 1) 43

That's the problem with UI and UX designers. Even when something is already good they're looking to change it to something else if for no reason other than for the sake of change itself. Design something good and leave it the hell alone. The icons can change when there's a major revision to the OS. Otherwise it's pointless wankery.

I can't think of one meaningful change Apple or Microsoft have made to the look and feel of their respective operating systems over the last two decades that was absolutely necessary. Most of it has been shuffling stuff around or trying to make it look new and shiny. Invest that time in making it faster and more stable instead. I don't need major changes more than once a decade. It's unlikely there are many things actually worth changing anyway.

When they die I hope that they have to spend a minute in purgatory for every minute of someone's time they wasted with pointless UI changes over the years. I can think of a few who will be stuck there for a small eternity. Some might even be beyond redemption. I can easily imagine them trying to rearranging the circles of hell.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 72

These sound like they're being used to build and test software. That's an important part of development, but it's not critical infrastructure that the business absolutely needs to be up 24/7. If they buy the cheapest Mini, it's $600 each and that's $120,000 in hardware costs. They may have some replacements over the life of the hardware, but they'll be able to use those for another five years at the least. Someone needs to wrangle those machines so add another $120,000 for that. Apple's chips are quite efficient so while they will need to pay power and cooling costs to host their own hardware as well, it won't be that bad. All in all it's going to be a lot less expensive for something that doesn't really need to be in the cloud or gain much from being there aside from easy scaling of resources.

Comment Re:no international jurisdiction (Score 1) 38

This is an article about the FBI. If it were the CIA they would've already overthrown the Canadian government and installed puppets to do their bidding without openly asking. The FBI is too busy entrapping retards into committing terrorist acts in the U.S. to have time to go after Canadians, retarded or not. Canada should ignore them. They're probably more harmless than the ATF that would shoot their dogs and possibly even their moose. Just tell the FBI to send any requests through a respectable and fearsome agency like the BIA or USDA if they want an actual response.

Comment Pointless (Score 1) 34

Does is matter much if you lose a job because of AI instead of offshoring or any other reason? What prevents a company from eliminating jobs because they've contracted with a third party that provides the services for them that may be done in let or whole by AI and not reporting it because they're not replacing anyone with AI themselves? They may not even know to what extent AI is being used by that third party to even be able to report it. Maybe they hired a consultant that's actually an AI masquerading as human.

If the government wants to do something actually useful it should try to find ways to make it easier for people lacking jobs to find employment. This just sounds like a shakedown signal whereby politicians alert companies that they'd better open their pocketbooks and contribute to the reelection fund lest they find themselves the target of legislation designed to shit all over them. Fortunately for these companies, politicians are stupid enough that they'll play themselves and wind up with yet another case of regulatory capture where the companies make rules to their own benefit even beyond what politicians can extort.

This will probably die in committee or somewhere else along the way after someone pays up, but it won't do anything useful. Unless it also measures jobs created because of AI or productivity gains in other workers resulting from its use, it's a one-sided look at the problem. They may as well require similar reporting on all of the negative impacts of electric vehicles that ignore any benefits they bring.

Comment Re:Micro dramas and micro attention (Score 2) 59

Just wait until they get old and start bitching about the gammas (or whatever they wind up being called) that can't sit still long enough to watch a microdrama and spend all of their time consuming nanoquickies in VR-space while macrodosing on LSD. Maybe one of them will buy /. and vibe code support for Unicode, so it won't be all bad.

Comment Cognitive dissonance (Score 3, Interesting) 41

One of my state's Republican senators is all-in on chemtrails and "Solar Radiation Modification" lunacy. It's curious how these are the same people who think humanity isn't capable of affecting the climate by burning fossil fuels and pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Comment Re:Bubbles are strange. (Score 1) 83

I've found that the ones being used by the search engines are generally quite good now. Google search fell off a cliff, but the AI does a better job at pointing to relevant information than their search results do. The problem for Google is that everyone else has an AI that's about as good. There's no reason to use Google's when competitors now give results just as good.

My productivity has improved because I'm spending a lot less time hunting down information on the web about some API or error code. The rest I don't care about. Even dumb chatbots have been decent at frontline customer service for a while now.

Comment Re:We went through this with cable TV (Score 1) 72

The beauty of this is that they didn't specify much beyond that it had to be local content. There's nothing stopping Netflix from producing a show using local talent about how the local politicians are a bunch of horsefuckers. I'm not even Australian, but I might even be interested in watching an Australian show that shits all over their stupid politicians. Or since I'm an American Incan just wait for the inferior American remake.

I'm more curious to see how other posters react to this and to contrast it with their opinions on tariffs.

Comment Re:When your product doesn't sell.... (Score 1) 72

If people wanted it wouldn’t they be buying it of their own volition? Maybe you're interested is some uniquely Canadian cultural art, but most Canadians don't seem to care, just like most American consumers don't actually care about buying American products because they'll gladly purchase the cheaply made Chinese version instead when given a free choice.

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