Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:What are they stealing? (Score 1) 26

Red Bull is at least $3/can.

A trailer full of Red Bull is about 70,000 cans. That's around $200K.

Sell for 1/3rd value and you have a good year's tax-free salary from one truckload.

They're $3/can retail. The store pays at most $2 each. Most likely $1.50 from Red Bull but there are many variables. So a trailer full of cans is around $140k if it's $2/can.

Grocery store margins are thin - the $1 margin is used to pay for transport, storage, store operations (utilities/etectricity, staff wages, etc), so the actual profit per can will fall down to 25 cents or so.

Comment Only 8 years and 12%? (Score 1) 52

Logically only 60 or so years remain before AI can take over 100% of jobs. Assuming that we're all replaceable cogs where every job and every worker are equivalent.
The other factor, a constant rate of growth in AI's capabilities, is probably less of a hand-wave than you might think because we're going to be constrained on the sizes of the models, computational power of the servers, and of course electricity to run it all. We'll probably see a very brief exponential growth of AI then a slow as physical constraints kick in, we're already see exponential money burned on the problem with a likely linear pay off. Jensen's "The more you buy, the more you save." will probably work out as "The more you buy, your more you spent." for most AI bets.

Comment Re: Linux as a kernel, yeah, it's everywhere. (Score 1) 66

/bin/bash is still installed, so people's typical shell scripts like command-line installers and whatnot still work.
I think the default being zsh is that it's less buggy and has some nice interface features.
The real question we should ask is not why Apple includes zsh by default, but why Ubuntu makes you install it before you can use it.

Comment Re:LLMs cannot replace human thought (Score 1) 32

Check TFS. LLMs aren't in there. Engineers were using AI to find better shapes for rocket nozzles years before anyone had ever heard of ChatGPT. Hell, I toyed with using genetic algorithms to make extruded parts better nearly twenty years ago.

Don't fall for the marketing; there's more to AI than LLMs. Most of it actually works.

Comment Re:Corruption (Score 1) 37

He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.

That not even close to true, that Africa is somehow more a "victim" than anywhere else.
It is a rationalisation, or as the kids say these days, "cope", where observed reality does not match up with ideology.

Like anywhere else in the world, historically most of the "fucking over" was by your own rulers and neighbours, not distant nations until very recently.
Sure, living on the coast might get you raided by Arabs in East Africa, or Viking in Europe. But perhaps the most unique aspect of sub-Saharan Africa's collective (pre)history has been its isolation from the bulk of humanity, who lived in North Africa, Europe and Asia - all connected.

Sub-Saharan Africa, like Australia or the Pacific Islands, remained primitive because of lack of connection, quite the opposite to your assertion.

Comment Re: If your replacing programmers with today's AI (Score 1) 52

That is just Slashdot bug. It cannot handle even common Unicode characters. Posts from phones frequently get those character substitutions.

Just iPhones with smart quotes turned on. I assume iPads are the same, but macOS doesn't use them in text fields like this one.

Comment Good luck (Score 1) 182

Starting your career as a barely literate dumb ass isn't going to be stacking the deck in your favor.
I managed to get pretty far in life that way, but I have spent years playing catch-up and reading like a fiend because everyone around me is better educated, more knowledgeable, and often smarter than me.

Slashdot Top Deals

The typical page layout program is nothing more than an electronic light table for cutting and pasting documents.

Working...