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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: We're in the group (Score 0, Troll) 214

So many logical fallacies in there, buddy.

If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.

This presumes that "good public education" is being funded with tax money. It is, conclusively, not. It has in fact been getting significantly worse - which is why people are opting out of it.

Do you want educated neighbors?

No formal education is, in most cases, better than bad formal education. I'd rather my neighbors not be stupid but think they know something, which is what the last 50 years has produced.

Who you can hire for your business? Who will have enough income to purchase your product? Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

There's no evidence that education can elevate someone over their inborn genetic potential. You've either got the building blocks for intelligence or you don't. See also the last several centuries of 3rd world "enrichment" that's been carried out by one means or another - education, charity, etc. - of places like India and Africa. I'm sure you can look up average IQs if it's of interest.

Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

I can hire a home schooled person, then? Because this criteria definitely doesn't fit your average public schooled individual.

Who will know how to make healthy choices for themselves and for their neighbors (you)?

Yes, the Food Pyramid, D.A.R.E., and "Sex Ed" had a fantastic impact on society's wellness trajectory - I'm sure we can all agree on that, right? (This is sarcasm.)

Who will carefully consider and thinking critically about public issues and use that knowledge when they vote?

OK, now I know you were being facetious. There's no way you're talking about state schooled kids here.

Comment Too little, too late (Score 1) 52

This is the wrong approach. Perhaps it'd have been accepted earlier, but they've shot themselves in the foot due to their inaction over the grooming pedophilia groups that were operating with impunity - and seemingly, protection! - on their platform. It was brought to their attention repeatedly, publicly, and they did all the wrong things and did not address the issue.

Fuck them.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 12

The NVidia cloud isn't new. It's been around for 3-4 years now at this point and seems pretty mature. It also works far better than Stadia ever dreamed.

I was able to play through multiple games I'd purchased specifically for the purposes of playing them on Nvidia Now, because I didn't have a gaming computer but wanted to complete the titles (Cyberpunk 2077 and Mechwarrior 5). The 'free' tier was irritating with wait times, but was playable. The higher tiers were far better and other than a rare ISP-related stutter (at 80ms or so, no less), and it ran great.

This means it's definitely playable at the 30-40ms that a person would get on Starlink (which I later got, and tested, and it worked even better). $10/mo for a couple months seemed like a pretty fair price for something that enables gaming. It wasn't a great experience on hotel wireless, but that's barely ever usable for much more than email. Keep in mind, I'm not a 'gaming snob' focused on FPS or graphics so much as the gameplay and experience, so I'm sure there's some aspect there that I overlooked, but $30-50 for a winter of gaming beats $500+ for the computer to do so. I just used a Macbook Air.

And it doesn't work the way you think it does. It's basically like, from what I can tell, RDP specialized for gaming. You can play it from anything that can support basic framerates and uses remote rendering. The game dispatches and loads onto a 'thin' Windows client of some sort, and it integrates with GoG, Steam, and a number of other gaming services.

Comment Re:Question is (Score 1) 162

You can add how they've recently reclassified transgenerism (ne gender dysphoria) to the reasons why people have lost trust in the mainstream medical/psychological profession, as well.

Psychology has always been prone to un-scientific activities, but it's become increasingly bad with the wanton politicization of diagnostic standards, on top of the un-scientific approach employed in making most individual diagnosis.

Comment Understanding AI's limits (Score 3, Insightful) 62

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 79

They've done this with every meaningful cultural and corporate heritage item in our world. It's disgusting.

You don't honor the heritage of a people by removing all symbolic representations of that culture from public life. The Spartans and Centurions were millennia ago but still have strong, important cultural imagery for today: the same is true of the Apache. The apache were known for being mobile and adaptable, which arguably is something very true of the Apache foundation.

Removing these imageries results in a symbolically empty, culturally irreverent pastiche. Who was it that said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?

This is no different than the wanton destruction of ancient sculptures and art by ignorant tribesmen because it offends their sensibilities.

Comment Good gravy (Score 2) 258

It's amazing how many of you are responding out of emotional vitriol without even understanding import tariffs work in this case. The article rage baited you all.

This isn't going to put prices through the roof on anything but temu and similar direct-ship sites. Even most amazon-associated warehousers will be unimpacted: they were already shipping in such volumes the 'free' shipping was almost meaningless. It was an exception for - mostly - small trinkets. Raising the amount to $800 didn't matter much - items that really cost $500 were just having a declared value of much less (likely closer to the foreign purchase price).

You'll still be able to buy cheap trinkets and electronics. Amazon has competitively extinguished all but about 20% of online commerce outside their site.

More importantly... this will also impact all the illicit pharma people have figured out they could buy from eg. India at a drastically lower price than is available domestically. That's the bigger problem, as there's no other viable alternative for many people.

Though wasn't there something else crazy going on about pharma prices being globally leveled under threat of Trump? I know there was some sort of insane cutback in... Medicaid? Or Medicare? Hard to keep track of it all.

Comment 1.8 (Score 1) 243

I'm not sure if this is true, but I saw a stat recently: no civilization - and we are a global civilization at this point - has ever recovered culturally once their population replacement rate has dropped beneath 1.8.

That's sobering, regardless. We've got many developed populations rapidly approaching low 1.x ratios, while continuing to import (predominantly, young, male, illiterate) immigrants from what could best be described as "the developing world".

That's not a situation that works out well for anyone, in the end.

Slashdot Top Deals

There's no future in time travel.

Working...