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Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 69

The problem today is that China and pretty much undermine any country's economy by subsidizing their domestic production.

No, they don't. The competition in China is cut-throat and the exported cars are not any cheaper than the ones in China. That's really all there is to it.

Comment Re:The biggest mistake (Score 2) 62

Obama tried to introduce universal health care but the Republicans made him change a lot of it.

And it originated from the (R) side. It's actually more properly known as RomneyCare as that was a fundamental pillar of his platform. Obama just adopted it thinking the (R) side would support one of their own proposals.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

No. Like any software, AI requires maintenance, and that maintenance costs money, lots of money.

It does not. Models need nothing more than the storage of some gigs of weights, and a GPU capable of running them.

If you mean "the information goes stale", one, that doesn't happen at all with RAG. And two, updating information with a finetune or even LORA is not a resource-intense task. It's making new foundations that is immensely resource intensive.

Can you integrate it into your products and work flow?

Yes, with precisely the difficulty level of any other API.

Can you train it on your own data?

With much less difficulty than trying to do that with a closed model.

Comment Re:I think it's more about audience (Score 1) 150

The solution is simple - create a competitor. Make it competitive.

Epic? They're not investing in the Epic Games Store. It was just a way to short circuit the process. You can tell their lack of investment because features to the store are slow in coming - like they're just putting in minimum effort and minimum dollars to keep it running.

At least GoG is offering a value proposition over Steam and Epic - their games are literally "you own it". GoG can stop selling a game tomorrow, even be forced to delete it off its servers, but download the offline installer and it's yours to play as long as it still runs.

All those game publishers complaining can easily set up a new game store and make it equal to or better than Steam, and people will flock over. But of course, it will take massive amounts of investment to get there.

So the question becomes - will the game companies do the investment it takes? And there I'm not so sure - it's easy to complain about rent seeking and monopolies but to create a worthy competitor takes time and money, and I'm not so sure the game developers are willing to invest their "steam rent" to creating a new competitor, especially since it likely will in the beginning cost a lot more money to run than paying Valve in the near future.

Epic Game Store would require Epic to do way more investment than they are - they only have one trick and it's a free weekly game. It took years to add a wishlist, and years more a shopping cart. It'll likely be 2030 before they have per-game forums like Steam (which are useful to support issues).

And given developers are paying 12% less on Epic than Steam (Steam takes 30%, Epic takes 18%), games are no cheaper on Epic, which really reduces the value proposition to people - if I'm paying the same price, I'd rather get it from GoG first, then Steam, and then Epic.

Comment Re:Google is Awful Already (Score 1) 89

There are some clear ways in which Street View gave Google Maps an advantage for many years. One big one was recognizing front doors and house numbers, giving them better accuracy than rivals that only knew where an address was to within whatever radius the postal code was. It was also a lot better at taking you to the front entrance of shops and offices, instead of the nearest side door.

For some reason the US seems to have really bad map data. Most countries made it a priority to get accurate GIS and infrastructure data, so it seems to work much better in Europe and Japan.

Comment Re:winning is losing (Score 3, Insightful) 71

Maybe this is what he was talking about when he said there was a lack of optimism.

AI is inevitable. The only question is who is going to decide how it works, and how it affects their population. The choice of US billionaires or the CCP isn't a great one, but it could also be the EU or US government having a big say in it. At least in the case of the EU, that is likely to result in a smoother transition to whatever is the next stage, for us.

Comment Re: The most popular question will be... (Score 1) 89

I recently set up Navidrome for this. It scans your music (and audiobook in my case) collection and serves it all up via an HTTP interface. There are apps for Android and iOS.

For remote access the best option is Cloudflare Zero Trust. I know, the Evil Empire, but they provide a useful and free service where they act as an HTTPS proxy for your home server, via a VPN connection. They support various authentication methods too, so your server isn't exposed to the internet, their proxy is.

Anyway, with that I have hundreds of gigabytes of music and audio books that I have collected over the years, accessible from anywhere, and it costs me nothing.

Comment Re:They dont care about debris (Score 1) 25

CNSA is working on debris removal systems, which also happen to work as offensive anti-satellite weapons.

The US and Russia are working on them too.

The solution to the debris problem might end up being that everyone wants on-orbit offensive capability, under the guise of cleaning up debris.

Comment Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score 1) 119

That's a novel solution, but I think most countries would be reluctant to allow the Navy to own and operate such critical infrastructure.

The fuel isn't the only issue anyway. And as always, it comes back to "why bother?" We have a cheaper solution, available now, with no issues beyond the usual NIMBYism. Maybe if we get to 95% renewable and there is a real problem that nuclear could solve cost effectively, we could look at it again.

Comment Re:ASAT Missile Test (Score 0, Troll) 25

Russia, the US, and India have also tested anti-satellite weapons, creating debris in orbit. But it's unlikely to be anything related to that. There is much more debris from satellites that collided, parts of rockets that didn't quickly re-enter the atmosphere, and natural rocks caught in Earth's gravity well. It might also be something that was dropped from the Chinese station or one of the visiting vehicles itself. I haven't seen any reports of them losing stuff, but during EVAs on the ISS, tools are regularly lost as they drift out of reach.

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