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Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 1) 89

NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases.

NHTSA and NASA didn't study all of the code in the PCM. Their analysis is therefore invalid. Barr Group found a significant number of paths to unintended acceleration, zero of which depended on cosmic rays and also that Toyota not only didn't follow industry best practices, they didn't follow their own internal procedures. And you think China, which hasn't ever made the best software for anything, is immune to the same kinds of errors. You literally stated that there was no other way that it could happen, which is an obvious falsehood. It's unclear why you're engaging in this level of gaslighting.

Comment Wrong conclusion (Score 3, Interesting) 54

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

Comment Re:Thanks for the research data (Score 4, Insightful) 104

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

Comment Re:"Cable" a Failure to Innovate (Score 1) 85

I doubt it is economically effective today to replace the parts that can actually do multi-gigabit.

I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.

Anecdotally speaking I think the demand for 10Gbs residential internet is low, and probably will be for some time.

I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...

Comment Re:Disagree, this is the stupidest way possible! (Score 1) 24

now the best people quit and you're left with the very worst and least ambitious coworkers. [...] The CEO must be really clueless.

Yes, but not for the reason you think. He thinks he can have AI do all the work. This is a move to get rid of everyone who will go easily. Paying these severances has surely been calculated to be cheaper than fielding lawsuits for dismissal without "justifiable reasons." You can be sure that they will next move on to a just-barely-not-legally-provable hostile work environment in order to convince more people to quit. There is no urgent need for layoffs, just a dumb CEO idea, so doing a layoff isn't viable.

Comment Re:Short AAPL (Score 1) 65

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

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