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Comment Re: China may or may not has overtaken (Score 1) 99

You shoehorn a claim with 21K vaccine deaths per month...

Come on, that's a 99.8% survival rate since those vaccines started. Vaccine denialists say that number is perfectly fine, being happy enough to plop the same number on the side of a protest sheep.

Let me know when this death rate approaches the older claims where everyone would die within 2 years of taking the vaccine.

Comment Keep in mind... (Score 1) 96

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

Comment It's not just foreign languages (Score 2) 47

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Comment Well, that's one example. (Score 1) 184

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

Comment Re:And TP-Link is being investigated for a ban.... (Score 1, Interesting) 34

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

Comment Re:LLMs are not ready for production use (Score 1) 103

And if you got it, you had to include the sector number in the file name.

Only if you're using a custom loader (e.g. commercial game). Commodore 64 Basic abstracts this with the LOAD and SAVE commands, and the 1541 also takes care of placing files onto any available sector. It's not like most developers needed to memorize the file system just to write a file.

It didn't have any security features AT ALL,

It's basic security feature is restoring itself to factory settings whenever the machine was turned off. This didn't stop viruses, but it greatly reduced the spread, and makes it slightly easier to try detecting if there is a virus on the system. Because there wasn't an obvious soft reset, it was safe.

This is compared to Amiga, where resetting the system didn't always clear memory, or PC, where a virus could sneak itself into a boot sector of a hard drive, and where both systems were designed to allow multiple programs to run at once (as opposed to the C64, where hiding a program in memory might not be practical.)

no logins, no memory protection

This is less important for a single-user and single-tasking operating system.

Logins would be substituted by bringing around disks with you, and memory protection is more of a shoot-self-in-foot approach. Even with memory protection, it doesn't stop assembly code from soft-locking the system, because the executable had a bad assembly code in it.

Comment Re: That's a good thing (Score 2) 74

Same with finding the best prices.

This isn't too hard, simply by tracking known websites (i.e. any major retalior, etc.)

I don't know about security

AI falls for fake websites. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Pretty sure AI browsers would check email, see an important account issue from a scam email, and happily log into the scam website to resolve said issue.

Comment Re:The PHEV is the future (Score 1) 137

I bought a Prius PHEV even though I'm firmly convinced that the PHEV is the worst of both worlds. You don't get the freedom from maintenance hassle that the BEVs give you, and the battery is small enough that it cannot fill all use cases _and do what you paid the premium $$ for_. If you want compromises, the hybrid will be a cheaper car.

Why did I buy this car? Because for reasons that I couldn't fathom, the BEVs that were in my price range were simply not available on the dealer lots at the time I needed a new car.

That being said, the car is working out great so far. Its been three weeks since we drove it off the dealer lot and thanks to our normal driving patterns (to the office / grocery store and back), we have not consumed more than half a gallon. There is a real danger that the gas in the almost full tank we have will degrade to the point its unusable before we end up using it.

Comment Re:Or... (Score 1) 150

There are 1500 genes involved. As effects are likely not merely down to specific genes, but gene interactions, you're going to need a model that can handle 2^1500 different permutations. That's simply not something that is classifiable.

As far as gene therapies are concerned, since autism seems to involve combining elements of Neanderthal neurology with homo sapiens neurology, the obvious fix would be to add further Neanderthal genes where combinations are known to produce adverse effects.

Submission + - SpaceX Wants to Fly Its Gigantic Starship Directly Over Florida (gizmodo.com) 1

joshuark writes: SpaceX is inching closer to sending its Starship rocket into low Earth orbit. A newly proposed flight path for the upper stage would see it fly across Florida skies—an unusual route that would seriously disrupt air traffic and raise the risk of debris falling onto populated areas below. On the plus side it will make orange juice ready for space and decrease the drain on Social Security.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is reviewing SpaceX’s request for new launch and reentry flight paths, but awaits a donation from Elon Musk to grease the administrative costs and provide timely rebates for the agency. In its recent report, however, the FAA concluded that there would be “no significant impact” from Starship’s new launch trajectories.

A number of Starship’s test flights have ended with the rocket breaking apart and raining debris on parts of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Elon Musk intimated about breaking eggs to make an omlet.

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