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Comment Why backup beepers? (Score 1) 59

...And finally, don't these autonomous cars already have robust detection of humans? Detecting humans then refraining from mowing them down near a charging station seems no different to detecting humans on sidewalks or crosswalks. Easier perhaps, because the vehicles should only be moving very slowly....

So... what is the purpose of the beeping alerts, then, if there is no danger to which you need to alert humans?

Just remove the beepers entirely.

Comment Re:Miracles (Chips, how do they work?) (Score 1) 106

ii. Get rid of senior executives who are more interested in their fiefdoms vs. the company well being

I appreciate your ideas, but this will never work. Executives (and every other sane person at the company) will always be more interested in their own success than in the company's success.

Comment comments (Score 1) 13

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

Comment Re: Correlation still isn't causation (Score 1) 45

You're not helping your case by quoting a quack like him. He's a pop sci author that specializes in junk science. Exactly the kind of guy that I would expect to do a lazy study pointing to cell phones bad.

Like I mentioned on other comments I'm still not at all convinced and correlation is not causation.

I keep coming back to the fact that these same studies have been done with every new form of media and they always find a correlation.

The problem isn't the New Media the problem is we don't support parents and kids enough so the parents plop their kids down with Penny dreadfuls or radio or TV or Internet and now cell phones and screens.

In another hundred years these same dumb studies will be done for cyberdecks.

Comment Re:Correlation still isn't causation (Score 1) 45

So I'm aware that the abstract says that they controlled for socioeconomic factors I'm just dubious of that.

It's far more likely that kids spending a bunch of time on screens is a symptom of other problems.

That said on the off chance that the phones are a problem they are a miniscule problem compared to everything else kids are up against in 2025.

Taking your kid's phone away isn't going to magically make them get better grades or take up sports.

Even so I think it's far more likely that you're seeing the same basic problem across different economic groups. And because of that you could replace the phone with basically any form of media. Which is why you get the same little panic every time a new form of media comes out and the same group of social scientists running the same experiments blaming the New Media for causing the problems.

I'm not a huge fan of folk music but having listened to a little bit of it just because I'm a lefty and Lefty's tend to blare the stuff I can tell you that the same problems that we had a hundred years ago or more we're getting sung about in folk music back then and are getting sung about it and folk music today. We haven't solved any of the problems. And it's the same damn problems. The only thing new is obesity and that's just because we have reasonably reliable access to food for most people... Most people. There are still several million kids having sleep for dinner every night...

Comment Correlation still isn't causation (Score 3, Informative) 45

It's entirely possible even likely that what we are seeing here is just that latchkey kids are more likely to have smartphones at an early age.

The problem isn't the phone itself it's overworked parents with low pay and no social support.

The abstract at least says that the account for socioeconomic factors but I'm not able to read the actual study past the abstract.

Also I guarantee that these exact same studies can be found for television, the internet and if you go back far enough you can find the 18th century equivalent of these studies for Penny dreadfuls.

Every time a new form of mass media or a new device for mass media shows up you can bet somebody is going to find a correlation between everything bad and if. Meanwhile we never actually do anything about things like child hunger or forcing kids to get up early to go to school when we have plenty of studies indicating the teenagers need more sleep and it needs to be later in the morning...

Comment Re:They are using AI to code core Windows function (Score 1) 69

You know whether people should or not they do. I've more than once come across somebody using Excel like a database application. It's exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds but people do it and for the most part despite time spent debugging problems it does work.

I guess what I am saying is the answer to, there isn't a tool that can do what the customer wants to do, should not be, tell the customer to knock it the fuck off.

Antitrust is mostly how Microsoft stays in power but they do one thing. It's called the 80/20 rule and the idea is that 80% of your features are used by 20% of your customers but it's a different feature for every single customer. So you can't just take features out because you will rapidly start losing customers even though on paper very few customers are using those features. Basically when you have a sufficiently complex application it has a ton of features only used by a small group of people but you keep adding those groups up and suddenly you've got market dominance.

Before the industry consolidated that was part of what put Microsoft on top. Of course nowadays they just don't let anyone compete

Comment I'm so sick of clickbait (Score 3, Interesting) 33

Headline is they refuse to give up Instagram reality is that they refused to gag order.

I just got a article in my feed that the lead actress for the Asoka series at Disney refused to do another season because she wasn't paid enough.

The actual facts are that season 2 filming is already done and one of the other less important characters didn't come back because they didn't offer her enough money to afford to live in London where the shooting was.

I'm so sick of clickbait. Lately it's being written by shitty AI so it's gotten even worse.

Comment Re:unattainable tech (Score 1) 69

you understand that the war that was supposed to last for maybe a week or two is now closing on 4 years, right? That all of the western powers were absolutely certain that prior to 2022 ruzzia was a world level super power with the military that was somewhere in the top 2 or 3 maybe, right? That this supposed super power was stopped by a country with 1/3 to 1/4 of the population, with 1/28 of size, with no oil or gas mining to speak of. Today ruzzia is occupying significantly less territory than at the end of 2022 as well because Ukraine got some of the territory back, for example the city of Kherson and most of Kharkhiv region.

More than that, Ukraine was able to enter ruzzian territory for whatever purpose and was able to hold some of it for about 6 months.

Currently ruzzia is actually a much more dangerous enemy than it was in 2022 to the rest of Europe, it gained enough knowledge, learned new tactics and is capable of taking out any European army in a conventional fight, I am certain of it. Should Ukraine fail and fall, putin will attack Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and then will go further and nobody will stop him without nuclear weapons if the USA decides to retreat, the Europeans are not in a fighting mood and will not be dying for their homes, they will be enslaved by putin if nuclear weapons are not used, this is certain. Europe's best chance at preventing this is seriously helping Ukraine, at this point with some man power as well.

As to the story we are talking about, ruzzia does not have factory capacity to build a new 8U216 service cabin and this has nothing to do with 'brilliance of people they are attacking', you are not reading me correctly. I am saying they do not have the capacity, they do not have the resources to manufacture this cabin unless they actually stop the war, retreat and restart normal manufacturing. It is also unclear that this type of a cabin can be built at any of their plants, maybe at the Cherepovets metallurgical plant. There is a reason why the USSR was manufacturing this thing in Kramatorsk and it wasn't about brilliance, it was about capacity, ability to handle a task of this magnitude. What, do you think you can just turn any factory into something that can manufacture a structure of this size and complexity? You are the one living in a fantasy world.

Comment They are using AI to code core Windows functions (Score 4, Insightful) 69

And then having people check it. The result is every single update can randomly break shit that doesn't get caught.

Having people check the AI code at slop doesn't really work because the entire point of AI coding is to do it fast and cheap so there's going to be enormous pressure to do as little checking as possible.

Not that it matters. Microsoft has a monopoly. Any viable competitor will simply get taken out by well-known and well understood anti-competitive tactics. And because we refuse to enforce those laws because we refuse to vote for politicians who will enforce those laws Microsoft can basically do whatever they want. With the occasional bribe to some of the larger governments that might try to regulate them.

I think Europe is actually trying to quit the habit but I don't think they will be able to. I can tell you right now that there is no alternative for Microsoft Excel when you're doing large complex spreadsheets. Open offices nice but it just doesn't cut it. Some of that's because of shitty little patents Microsoft has but the system is designed to let them keep generating new patents that make it difficult to compete. And some of it is just that it's rough going writing office software so it's tough to compete with someone who can pay people to do that kind of boring dreary work.

And of course you have the aforementioned anti-competitive tactics that work like a charm.

I'm not even going to say we need to decide what's more important, software freedom or whatever bullshit that makes us vote for pro corporate anti-capitalist political candidates (and mark my words pro corporate is just as anti-capitalist as any socialist or communist just in a different direction)

It doesn't matter what the reasons are the end result is we don't enforce laws.

Comment Re:backup beepers? (Score 2) 59

Seems like, with all that technology, they could turn off all that beeping and flashing while they're in the charging station area.

Good idea, but you'd also need a pretty robust safety verification mechanism, showing that the vehicles are indeed in an area where they can turn safety features off, with no humans accidentally in the area.

Comment Re:unattainable tech (Score 1) 69

I am typing this on my phone, while on a train from Kyiv to Lviv, laying down in the dark, I have all of the autocorrect functions disabled on the phone, one thing is hitting the wrong keys and still have a more or less recognizable word come out than having the word changed completely by the stupid autocomplete feature (dumb ass grandfather of whatever we call AI today). That is why the words are often scrambled.

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