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Comment Re: YAAF (Score 1) 197

The font is a deliberate decision whether it's a bot or not, on which I have no firm opinion. A variety of accounts (how many different people are involved is anyone's guess) have chosen to set their output in monospace over the years here. I think of them like hipsters. Monospace is inferior for the majority of tasks (except arguably for programming, and for a few data processing tasks where the data is naturally columnar when represented with fixed character width) so they're making a decision to make you read their thoughts in an inferior fashion. You could of course override fixed width text but my recollection is that Slashdot uses the classic HTML for this purpose and not something you could conveniently override without affecting other text that you might not want to make monospace. However, I haven't looked at the CSS recently so you might have options there.

I handle it by simply not reading anything they write. As a speed reader I unfortunately sometimes read parts of their comments by accident, but otherwise I choose not to consume any of it. They want to make it harder to read? Fine, in that case I'll pass.

Comment Re: Exported deflation (Score 1) 197

they could easily retool to deliver for another market while selling the existing inventory slowly to domestic buyers.

Domestic buyers have to have money, so they have to have jobs, etc etc. They have official unemployment over 5% and among employable youth it's over 13%. Cars which sit degrade. This is more true for ICEVs but it's still true for EVs. And actually it's more true for EVs if they aren't kept charged, but I was assuming basic maintenance (washes, waxes, fluid changes, battery charging) being done in both cases to be generous.

Comment Re:ACs are shit (Score 1) 111

I think the better request would be to turn back on the ability to register an account first and foremost, then maybe the ability to post anonymously.

I agree that those two things should happen at the same time. But I stand by the vast majority of AC comments being trolling or worse (e.g. uncreative trolling) and the "feature" being a huge detriment to the quality of Slashdot.

Comment Re:Not high end (Score 1) 94

So how many people do you know who have 2.5 Gb at home?

I don't know many people these days, so I'm the wrong guy to ask. However, it's super common for people with fiber to have 2.5GbE to the routermodem. I also live in a BFE county that's just now getting fiber to ONE city, so even if I knew a lot of people, I'd still be the wrong person to ask. But I'm also not representative in general, so again, wrong person to ask.

Comment Re:Collective Risk (Score 1) 148

Yeah, it would probably take legislation forcing all of them to post and advertise prices including taxes. If everyone had to do it no retailer would be disadvantaged by being the first.

That said, I think it's a bad idea, unless retailers also have to itemize out the taxes on receipts so that consumers can see how much tax they're paying, which typically doesn't happen in Europe, as far as I've noticed (other than VAT, which is often itemized out on some purchases so that foreigners can get a VAT rebate). I think it's important that people see the taxes they pay so they can evaluate whether they think they're getting good value for their tax money. This is why I also oppose corporate taxes and any other sorts of taxes that are ultimately borne by individual taxpayers but are hidden by layers of obfuscation. Actually, there's another reason to oppose corporate taxes: Corporate taxes delegate to corporations the decision of how to allocate the cost of the taxes between customers, employees and shareholders. That allocation is an important public policy matter, and it should be decided by legislation, not by corporate bosses.

To be clear, I think there are a variety of public services that absolutely should be funded by taxpayers, and wholeheartedly support taxation for those purposes. But exactly what should be taxpayer-funded, at what level and with what efficiency are all important questions that voters should have input into, and that requires that they actually see what taxes they're paying.

Comment Re:Who asked for this (Score 2) 95

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

Comment *some* games (Score 3, Informative) 94

Linux currently plays Windows games better than Windows in side-by-side tests.

I have experienced this myself, but I have also experienced the reverse many times. There are also many games that won't run on Linux at all. Most of these have Windows kernel DRM, so I wouldn't buy them anyway myself, but I'm not the whole market.

Comment Re:That secure feeling. (Score 1) 23

If they're using the enclaves built into Intel and AMD, there may be side-channel issues to deal with. ARM is closer to what Apple is trying with their enclave.

ARM's TrustZone is definitely more secure than the alternatives on Intel/AMD, but TrustZone is also subject to side-channel attacks. To a first approximation, it's impossible to run two workloads on the same CPU and keep them perfectly isolated from one another.

However, I don't think any of these secure enclave concepts are relevant in this case. The way you'd build a private AI cloud is not to run it in enclaves (which are essentially just security-focused VMs) on CPUs that are running other tasks, the way you'd do it is to devote a bunch of CPUs solely to running the private AI workloads. Then your isolation problem becomes the traditional ones of physical access control to the secure machines and securing data flowing into and out of those machines over network connections.

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