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Comment Re:The kind of destruction to get behind (Score 2) 17

I wouldn't say scam, but, its a marketing trick for "wear leveling" that standard microSD doesn't do. But just because you wear level doesn't make it more durable. Durability needs more NAND layers and more NAND chips and striping to truly shine, and microSD simply can't fit all that.

My point is that the microSD Pro cards exhibited their first error after half again more cycles, on average, than the "high endurance" cards, suggesting that the high endurance cards might actually have lower endurance than Pro cards, which is... unexpected. The Pro cards, IIRC, do more wear leveling than the standard cards. I have no idea whether high endurance cards do more wear leveling, have a lower number of levels per cell, have more spare cells, or something else entirely.

Comment Re:The kind of destruction to get behind (Score 4, Interesting) 17

This is the kind of destruction we love to see. Destruction to determine product quality and help decide what to purchase. Not dumb destruction of brand new quality products in order to generate dumb clicks and dumb comments.

Looking forward to when the high endurance cards finally reach the 1% failure state so that we can find out whether these things really are better than the standard cards. So far, the first failure of SanDisk High Endurance was *way* earlier than SanDisk Pro, on average, so I won't be surprised if it turns out that the whole high endurance thing is a scam.

Comment For how many years? (Score 2) 37

How many years do they have to work there before they get the bonus? Because $10 million is more than enough to retire, even in the Silicon Valley. So they can probably assume that most of these engineers will work there until the bonus pay date, and then retire and do whatever they want to do instead of what someone else tells them to do.

After all, most engineers are driven less by money and more by wanting to do cool stuff. If they have enough money to be able to only do cool stuff and never have to worry about money again, why would they want more money? Why would they choose to do what other people want them to do, when they can do the even cooler stuff that they want to do?

Bonuses that big tend to be counterproductive.

Comment Re: How does this even work? (Score 1) 54

In general, the court you file in can be either the court where one of the two parties is or the court where the event occurred. As the weaker party and the plaintiff, it would take serious legal finagling for the choice of venue to not be yours. So you could file in your own local court.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 140

Some SpaceX vehicles like Falcon have done well after many attempts. Their Starship (which was the most ambitious) has not done well with the last one exploding on the pad, the one before that exploding shortly after launch--I mean it was a "controlled disassembly".

The nice thing about exploding on the pad is that they should be able to do a proper failure analysis, complete with being able to X-ray the fragments of the failed components, because they can locate them all. :-)

Comment Re:How does this even work? (Score 1) 54

That's where you get a libel judgement in the court where you live against both the company that got the first judgment and the credit agency that approved it. Clearly, someone who does not even know your correct birthdate is not you, and any credit agency involved clearly must have conspired in that fraud, so the preponderance of evidence is clearly in your favor. Thus, absent something you're not telling us, such as video footage of you providing a false birthdate, it should be trivial for you to get a civil judgment against them.

If everyone did this every time they got scammed, a lot of things would improve.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 140

The falcons are regular rockets, carrying on with the basic principles that Germany developed during WW2.

Yes and no. The biggest difference is that the falcon 9 lands safely and can be reused after refurbishment. The German V2 was good at coming back to earth, but the landing had a different outcome.

So you're saying that the new Starship is basically a V2, as well, but it is exploding prematurely? :-D

Comment Re:Except they don't (Score 1) 56

Just because it's a judge doesn't mean they understand basic math.

No, but they do understand the law, which considers an attempt to monopolize a crime even if unsuccessful.

They also understand that in the context of U.S. antitrust law, Apple's ~58% market share, at roughly twice the size of their next largest competitor (Samsung), is absolutely large enough to make Apple a successful monopolist, and they also understand that Apple is a twice-convicted monopolist — once involving Epic, and once involving the iBooks store — which makes their ongoing behavior worthy of extra scrutiny.

Comment Re:So... (Score 2) 17

Freelancers with coding skills comprising at least 25% of their work now earn 11% more for identical jobs compared to November 2022 when ChatGPT launched.

So what you're saying is that they're basically keeping up with GDP and using AI has no real benefit.

No, no. They're saying that the people who aren't using AI are getting less work because there are fewer jobs, and the people who are using AI are barely keeping up with inflation compared with the pre-AI world.

Comment Re:This is why (Score 5, Informative) 62

The argument against SMS is way overblown. For it to work an attacker would not only have to gain access to your account details but also spoof your phone on the phone network. Possible? Yes, likely? Unless a nation state is after you - no.

Actually, it's a pretty common strategy for breaking into the accounts of celebrities. It usually involves convincing someone who works for one of the phone companies that you've gotten a new phone, i.e. they already have enough personal info from you to impersonate you to the phone company. And then after that, all your accounts fall like a house of cards.

Comment Re:Only 20% for human doctors (Score 1) 70

I only skimmed the article, but am I the only person who thinks that, if we had a situation or field of diagnosis where doctors were only getting it right 20% of the time, we would throw some research/education/analysis at it? Because 20% correct (or 80% incorrect) seems kinda concerning and I would think would lead to a lot of brouhaha or lawsuits? Maybe it's just me.

I'm assuming this is based on edge cases, e.g. medical images where cancer was just barely starting to appear, situations where lupus is mistaken for rheumatoid arthritis, etc., in which case the human rate of correct diagnosis could indeed be very low, precisely because they were chosen from cases where humans had made mistakes before.

If that is the case, then the question becomes whether the model is over-trained on these edge cases and would generate false positives, would miss obvious diagnoses, etc.

Comment Re:Amazon (Score 2) 71

You're arguing with someone who's given you millions of dollars over decades about a single 2-dollar missing component on a massive order they made? You're insane. They're just going to go elsewhere. It's not even worth the time on the phone call to argue it.

You're assuming companies don't understand that. What you're missing is that the companies that do this tend to be the companies that have their customers over a barrel. You have a choice in where to buy random stuff online. You don't have much choice in airlines. Only a few companies go to both of the airports that you need to fly between. They can screw you as much as they want, and unless you're prepared to lawyer up, you're gonna accept whatever they give you and like it, or you're not gonna fly, because they're all approximately equally horrible.

Ultimately, the reason for bad customer service is that the customer has no power. Short of a class action, you're not going to change their behavior, and they usually write their contracts to make class actions hard. And governments are thoroughly in the pockets of these big corporations, so they're not going to do anything about the problems, either. And there's no competition, because a few big companies have cornered the market, in part because of high cost of entering the market, which in turn, is often because of high regulatory burden. But those regulations are essential for preventing other problems, e.g. safety issues, so removing the regulations won't help, either.

The right fix is to separate the customer-facing organization from the safety-critical organization. Have a few companies that own fleets of airplanes, and a hundred companies that rent planes from those companies and fly them and sell tickets. With that organizational model, all of these problems go away, because the customer-facing orgs have a low barrier to entry, so you'll tend to end up with companies competing to provide the best service at the best price, with some focusing on higher-tier service, and come focusing on lower prices, but everybody knowing that if they screw up, you'll go with one of a hundred other companies. And you'll get a higher diversity of routes, and you'll have aggregators combining routes from multiple airlines, etc.

Unfortunately, we won't see this, because regulators aren't interested in breaking up oligopolies these days.

Comment Re:Uh huh (Score 5, Insightful) 173

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

If Judas Priest listened to what you said and wrote custom songs about you individually, sure.

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