Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

But we've dropped really low if we even skip OP or can't remember it a couple PgDn's further, haven't we.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Now, would you like a slightly smaller burger with your slightly smaller portion of fries?

BTW, that'll be 5% more with the new pricing.

Raising a question is asking a question

Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.

Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.

If the government mandates this, will they be paying for the replacement of the EV battery and charging circuits?

There's another use case lurking here; rather than just (or even at all) feeding battery power into the grid and so imposing more charge-discharge cycles on the vehicle, any vehicle with auxiliary solar panels (like these) can switch to feeding the grid once the battery is already fully charged.

It's also worthy if one EV can charge another; for instance, someone runs out of charge, a kind-hearted motorist can stop and provide some juice. Auxiliary roadside services (like this) are already somewhat available, but you can be pretty sure that's going to be fee-based. There's still room in the world for the occasional good samaritan.

Microsoft says Office 2024 will require a Microsoft account and an internet connection

So far (referenced to the non-sub version of Office21), all that's been used for is to let you know you can downgrade to the subscription version of Office any time you like to get whatever new features / fixes you absolutely must have. You can just click the offer away and carry on. I find this to be acceptable; Microsoft's not force-picking my pocket the way Adobe would.

It's also worth pointing out that Office21's sub-downgrades have never once tempted me with a new feature of any kind. If I can read and edit submitted manuscripts, I'm all good.

I will buy this. I want a license and a fixed cost. Not a shitty subscription.

Exactly. I have the 2021 version; happy to upgrade to the 2024 version now.

Subscription-only applications are straight up anti-consumer fishhooks. Looking directly at you, Adobe, you assholes.

The regulatory agency was of two minds about it.

...innovative TNT batteries stored a lot more energy than Lithium Ion.

It's all about the discharge rate.

Any "ranking" system that doesn't rank completely separately...

o Markup (HTML, CSS, Markdown, aa_macro, LaTeX, etc.)
o Interpreted (Python, Perl, Ruby, Javascript, SQL, etc.)
o Compiled (c, c++, c#, etc.)
o Metal (Assembly)

...I find to be both entirely unserious — and mildly hilarious. What they're doing here is just like counting the number of grapefruit to determine the level of interest in pizza.