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Comment Re:Macroeconomics 101 (Score 4, Informative) 66

Be careful there. Lots of AI is being put to silly, useless, or unreasonable uses. OTOH, lots of it is being put to extremely productive uses. (OK, 20% improvement in output, but also an increase in expenses.)

ISTM, that PART of the AI hoopla is a bubble. Possibly much more than half. But the other half is not a bubble, and is growing rapidly. What the collapse will look like depends in part on how much the productive segment grows relative to the other part before it happens.

Comment Re:And this helps how? (Score 1) 143

It wasn't from "a random influencer". It was in a popular science publication, and I believe they were quoting (or perhaps paraphrasing) the person who invented the term.

Does it have a "legal definition"? I doubt it. So for regulations I think it means whatever the person enforcing the regulations wants it to mean.

Comment Liability (Score 3, Interesting) 127

Ages ago I worked for a company that developed car stereos. Car companies were insanely paranoid about driver distraction. There were industry standards on minutiae like how fast song titles scroll on the screen, and a complete ban on flashing or pop-up anything.

Car companies being OK with anything flashing up on the screen that isn't absolutely critical to driving is mind boggling. All it takes is one diver glancing down for a split second to look at an ad, hitting someone walking out from between parked cars, and you have a slam-dunk lawsuit that will evaporate any money made from the advertising. Lawyers salivate at this kind of thing. Standing in front of a jury with a client all bandaged up "This callous car company thought it was more important to make money while distracting this driver by selling ads than to make sure the driver was paying attention to the road..."

Comment I mean the jokes write themselves (Score 1) 76

But I'd really love to know how exactly how many of these things were sold? A dozen? 500? Thousands? Feels like there is an econ or finance study about consumer behavior buried in the customer base of such an item.

Mainly just folks with disposable incomes who like tech? Someone with cancer risk really convinced this will work? The most expensive Spencers gag gift? "I could look it up myself but I don't want to have to look at my own poop?"

Comment Re:What I love about Git ... (Score 1) 67

... is that it's a protocol designed and built by someone who knew what he was doing (Linus Torwalds) resulting, among other things, in the fact that migrating your upstream Git repo away from a commercial service like Github takes something like 20 seconds, if you're having a slow day.

The difficulty of migrating away from Github is when you've built your entire deploy pipeline and QA process around it, which is what a lot of companies are doing lately.

Comment Re:Wassa matter China? (Score 1) 87

More cylinders does make for a smoother engine without complex harmonic dampening, which the Japanese have decades of experience in doing exceptional at.

There was a big scandal about smooth submarine motion during the cold war. Toshiba makes the quietest refrigerator I've ever heard (42 db iirc). Can't hear it in the next room.

Comment Any Jobs (Score 1) 73

If you want *any* manufacturing jobs brought back to the US, they are going to be in mostly automated plants. Car companies can barely hire enough workers to cover existing shifts. People don't want to work in factories, and companies don't want to spend $100,000 a year paying workers to stick an automatic torque wrench onto a bolt.

Even completely automated factories large-scale need a few thousand employees to maintain and ship stuff.

Comment Re:And this helps how? (Score 1) 143

That really depends on exactly what definition you are using. I suppose you could argue that yogurt could be made at home in a normal kitchen, but cheddar cheese couldn't. And I've never actually seen anyone make sauerkraut, though people certainly used to do so.

I.e., the first published definition of "ultraprocessed" specified "things that couldn't be made in a normal kitchen". I'll agree that it's a very sloppy definition, but I haven't heard a better one.

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