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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment AI (Score 1) 68

"When we go down, we want to take down every market with us because we're a bottomless-money-pit and are chasing a dream that we can't achieve with all the world's computing resources, the training data of the entire Internet from billions of people, and excruciatingly overburdening several utilities to try to find something that we think will just magically happen if we keep throwing stuff at it. And we've used up every available money source but are still hundreds of billions in the red without any sign of profit, so we just need to tank everyone so that we can succeed"

Comment Re:ffmpeg (Score 1) 106

All that would happen is that the companies would take the last version, continue using that in privately-patched versions that they never distribute (they don't need to, they only need to provide source if they're providing binaries and YouTube et al don't give you their binaries), and wait for someone else to start up a fork.

Additionally, they can't. If they change the licence, they can't build on what's already there as its GPL. It's literally in the design of the licence that they deliberately chose. You'd have to get the sign-off of thousands of previous contributors (some dead) or rebuild all the pieces of the software that they touched without any reference to their original code. It's not going to ever happen, same as the same argument for Linux etc. that people keep thinking they're being clever when they push it, not realising that it's designed deliberately so that it's forever open-source.

Sorry, but the only reasonable solution is to block their ability to submit a bug unless it comes from a human maintainer at Google, with a full patch and no AI slop inside it. And if they work around that ban them again. And if they work around that, stop accepting bug reports / patches as here.

Comment Re:Sigh. (Score 1) 62

I studied AI 25 years ago, thanks.

The consumer-grade technology being available clearly came about in the last 5 years.

Additionally, it's a technology which is going to - inevitably - significantly increases its costs. Being given away as a loss-leader against hundreds of billions of dollars or generation costs is going to come back to bite once you're reliant on it and have abandoned other things.

P.S. abandoning 60 years of traditional computer science for 5 years of ONLY MODERN AI (unless you're intending to teach kids about neural networks, etc.) is a dumb thing for an educational framework to do.

P.P.S. I work in schools. I work in IT.

P.P.P.S. We don't teach kids any real computer science at this age, what this is use COMPUTING - i.e. using a computer. Same difference as between literature and literacy, or maths and numeracy. Teaching AI as a base core subject intending to replace higher-level CS is... dumb.

Comment Citations (Score 5, Insightful) 134

The real solution would be a citation system.

Something like LexisNexus has every court case that happens in the country.

So... why not have an official version of that, tied in with the official court transcripts and when you cite a case, you need to give that citation number from the official database. If you're citing only a few lines, you link to those few lines.

You wouldn't be able to cite a non-existent case, at best the case you cite wouldn't match what you claim it does, and with individual statement citations (HTML literally does it already), you could prove in one click that that series of words actually appears in that cited case.

You want to stop this? Then open-source the law instead of hiding it behind stupendously expensive private commercial services like LexisNexus.

Comment Re:Not a fan od Zuckerberg (Score 2, Insightful) 139

Sorry, but ruining your kid's future by sending them off to an unlicenced school where any nonsense could be taught as fact by entirely unqualified people, without even so much as basic child protection assurances is not a thing in any civilised society.

That's how child abuse happens, that's how religious indoctrination occurs, that's how kids get to adulthood and realise they have zero useful qualifications or skills and their best opportunity for education (and quite literally "learning how to learn") has been squandered through no fault of their own.

Yes, sure, what's wrong with a closeted billionaire running a unannounced secret school for children and not licencing, meeting child protection obligations, or even telling anyone that the school exists, let alone who's teaching it, and keeping the whole thing hush-hush and off the record books? Can't imagine THAT going wrong at all...

Comment Re:just sit there (Score 1) 120

It is absolutely incredible how people are unable to just... stop... and do nothing... and think to themselves... and just sit and enjoy the scenery nowadays.

I live in a quiet rural town precisely because it allows me to do that. But during lockdown, I heard NOTHING but people saying how they were going insane and "had to" break the law/quarantine in order to go out and do stuff and meet up with people after just a few days. They literally couldn't be in their own company for a few hours without going mad.

When the time comes to choose some Mars settlers, I hope we chose from the people based on their reaction to lockdown. Even supposed scientists went apeshit at each other in those biosphere projects.

You could send me to live on Mars on my own to terraform the place and the only time I'd get pissed about that would be if others came and tried to set up camp near me.

Comment Sigh. (Score 1) 71

Just wait for it.

Headline: "Meta uses AI to replace hundreds of jobs."

Reality: "Meta stupendously over-hired for the AI fad and is only now realising that it has no real profitable value to it and it's all just hype."

Slashdot Top Deals

The tao that can be tar(1)ed is not the entire Tao. The path that can be specified is not the Full Path.

Working...