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Comment Devices, not sites. (Score 1) 15

The onus should be on the parents and their agents to control and restrict any internet-connected devices that children have access to. Children should not have unrestricted access to the Internet, unless directly supervised by an adult. The end.

There aren't just "some" sites that are a problem. There are millions of them. Trying to control all sites and strip adults of their privacy is not an acceptable way to deal with the problem. A whitelist restrict is needed. It needs to be made socially unacceptable and shocking that a minor has full access to the Internet on any device, or to call/text/media to/from a stranger.

They need to put this energy into helping to make better/newer/easier lock-down tools for devices parents want to give to minors and leave everyone else alone.

Comment Re:Rent (Score 1) 73

>"Man I was with you right up until this corny line. It costs a shit ton to develop and maintain all of these player clients."

The player clients exist regardless of what network it is used on. It doesn't change with viewing "outside" your own network to some other server. Money is fungible, of course. But there is nothing about your rent payment to enable "remote" use of a different server that costs any development money for a Plex client. They might host an entry in a reflector, but that, again, requires essentially no new development on maintenance- it is already present so you can reach your own server with the "free" plan.

Comment Re:YAFS (Yet Another Financial System) (Score 1) 66

Like I've said before, this is just yet another financial system being created to have a minority of people manage the majority of the wealth, to their own advantage. This is just a new competing system with less regulation created by the crypto bros to wrestle the current system away from the Wall St. bros.

I think this view gives the crypto bros too much credit. They might now be thinking about taking advantage of the opportunity to wrestle the system away from the Wall Street bros, but there was no such plan.

Comment Re:Very difficult to defend (Score 2) 37

too much hassle. build a shadow fleet of well-armed fast interceptors with untraceable munitions and sink the saboteurs.

To intercept them you still have to identify them, which you can't do until after they perform the sabotage. Given that, what's the benefit in sinking them rather than seizing them? Sinking them gains you nothing, seizing them gains you the sabotage vessel. It probably won't be worth much, but more than nothing. I guess sinking them saves the cost of imprisoning the crew, but I'd rather imprison them for a few years than murder them.

Comment Re:What is thinking? (Score 1) 222

You ignored his core point, which is that "rocks don't think" is useless for extrapolating unless you can define some procedure or model for evaluating whether X can think, a procedure that you can apply both to a rock and to a human and get the expected answers, and then apply also to ChatGPT.

Comment Re:PR article (Score 1, Interesting) 222

For anyone who cares about the (single, cherry-picked, old) Fedorenko paper

Heh. It says a lot about the pace of AI research and discussion that a paper from last year is "old".

This is a common thread I notice in AI criticism, at least the criticism of the "AI isn't really thinking" or "AI can't really do much" sorts... it all references the state of the art from a year or two ago. In most fields that's entirely reasonable. I can read and reference physics or math or biology or computer science papers from last year and be pretty confident that I'm reading the current thinking. If I'm going to depend on it I should probably double-check, but that's just due diligence, I don't actually expect it to have been superseded. But in the AI field, right now, a year old is old. Three years old is ancient history, of historical interest only.

Even the criticism I see that doesn't make the mistake of looking at last year's state of the (public) art tends to make another mistake, which is to assume that you can predict what AI will be able to do a few years from now by looking at what it does now. Actually, most such criticism pretty much ignores the possibility that what AI will do in a few years will even be different from what it can do now. People seem to implicitly assume that the incredibly-rapid rate of change we've seen over the last five years will suddenly stop, right now.

For example, I recently attended the industry advisory board meeting for my local university's computer science department. The professors there, trying desperately to figure out what to teach CS students today, put together a very well thought-out plan for how to use AI as a teaching tool for freshmen, gradually ramping up to using it as a coding assistant/partner for seniors. The plan was detailed and showed great insight and a tremendous amount of thought.

I pointed out that however great a piece of work it was, it was based on the tools that exist today. If it had been presented as recently as 12 months ago, much of it wouldn't have made sense because agentic coding assistants didn't really exist in the same form and with the same capabilities as they do now. What are the odds that the tools won't change as much in the next 12 months as they have in the last 12 months? Much less the next four years, during the course of study of a newly-entering freshman.

The professors who did this work are smart, thoughtful people, of course, and they immediately agreed with my point and said that they had considered it while doing their work... but had done what they had anyway because prediction is futile and they couldn't do any better than making a plan for today, based on the tools of today, fully expecting to revise their plan or even throw it out.

What they didn't say, and I think were shying away from even thinking about, is that their whole course of study could soon become irrelevant. Or it might not. No one knows.

Comment Rent (Score 1) 73

>"The Remote Watch Pass costs $2 per month or $20 per year, but there's no lifetime purchase option."

That is because we aren't allowed to buy anything anymore. We have to RENT your access so it continues to cost money forever. Especially ridiculous on things like this, which really require no maintenance resources.

Comment Re:CO2 as an indicator of air quality. (Score 1) 49

>"My HVAC inspector wanted to sell me a UV light air disinfector. It's hideously expensive for what it does. I declined."

Yeah, unfortunately, much of the stuff is WAY overpriced. It doesn't NEED to be, but they know they can charge it and get it because it isn't "mainstream". If there were a lot more demand, the prices would drop a lot.

At home, I use an AprilAire system with a large MERV 13 filter. It is not HEPA, but it is affordable and effective against tons of allergens and helps with other stuff. But to be more effective against viruses, you have to jump to much higher MERV ratings (essentially HEPA).

Comment Re:Not really new information... (Score 4, Interesting) 76

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

DVD-R? DVD+R? DVD+RW? Single or dual layer? Gold metallic layer? Silver metallic layer? How are they stored?

Depending on how you answer those questions, your 25 year-old media may be past due and you've just gotten lucky, may be just entering the timeframe where it may die, or may have decades of reliable life left.

DVD-R single layer disks with a gold metallic layer are good for 50-100 years. Other recordable DVD options are less durable, some as little as 5-10 years.

Comment Re: What they didn't say (Score 1) 37

And I wouldnâ(TM)t bank on a paid email account not being used for AI scraping.

In Google's case, they're under quite a lot of FTC scrutiny, operating under two consent decrees, and they have an employee population that isn't known for keeping their mouths shut. It's possible that Trump's FTC might not act if he were paid off, but a leak would definitely generate a lot of press.

Comment Re:CO2 as an indicator of air quality. (Score 1) 49

>"What can be done to help prevent it? Mask wearing might help some"

Barely.

>"along with sanitary other stuff - improve the ventilation in such buildings, including good filters, UV lights and such helping to sterilize the air."

This is what I have been saying for ages. Central HVAC systems need to run the fans full time and contain HEPA filters and UV lights. That could be a HUGE winner for airborne infection reduction. And it is completely passive. Couple that with air exchangers to reduce VOCs. But it does cost significant money.

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