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Comment The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 4, Insightful) 95

In the USA car companies are bribing politicians to keep fuel economy standards low because they do not want to spend money on R&D. Meanwhile the Chinese car makers are designing dark factories that crank out electric cars that are better and less expensive than anything made in the USA. Ten years from now there are going to be Chinese factories in the USA cranking out amazing cars. And it is going to be a bloodbath for the companies that want to keep living in the past.

Comment Too late. (Score 3, Interesting) 45

China already won this war. They have robot taxis that cost a fifth of Waymo's. Xiaomi has a dark factory that manufactures a smart phone every second. There are already Chinese humanoid robots turning up at trade shows. They're years ahead of us and they have more research universities training more roboticists than the USA ever will. This initiative will fail just like Obama's attempt to beat China at making solar power tech did. Trump needs to pick fights the USA can win.

Comment Our Paradise, Lost. (Score 1) 63

Remember the days when you could have a gaming rig with a killer Intel CPU, the best Crucial RAM on the market, a great Canopus GPU, Windows 2000 was stable and secure, and you still had money for pizza and beer? Now Intel sucks, Crucial won't sell to gamers, a great GPU is week's wages, and Windows 11 is almost as bad as Windows 95. We have lost so much!

On the up side, nobody is commenting about the Penis Bird anymore.

Comment Re:Just shoddy... (Score 1) 88

something about 'AI' seems to have caused people who should have known better to just ignore precautions

The cynic in me wants to say that they see "intelligence" and go "great, it has something I don't, let's just 100% trust it".

The social critic in me wants to say that it's due to the gigantic hype about AI and how it'll revolutionize everything, replace everyone and solve all problems.

And the tech/security guy in me wants to say "doh, people do dumb shit. What else is new?"

Comment But soon all Waymo cars will be safer. (Score 1) 156

This will happen a few times because Waymo has to learn how to detect a small animal running into the road. But Waymo will figure out how to keep it from happening and then every Waymo car will be able to avoid small animals running into the road. Which is much better than millions of human drivers having to learn it on their own.

Comment This is PE assholes fucking stuff up again. (Score 5, Interesting) 81

This is not typical of the font industry. Most type designers are solo practitioners or small studios that license their work directly and treat customers well. The asshole in question here, Monotype, is owned by a private equity firm that overpaid for it, then bought some small font companies, and is now trying to sell the combined company for a markup of billions of dollars. But Monotype's revenues were hit hard by Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, so they are trying to make up for it by dramatically increasing licensing fees. The higher prices have turned off customers which is hurting sales. They also tried and failed at AI. And their distribution agreement with type designers got nasty so they have lost some popular typefaces that used to be sold on MyFonts. Now Monotype is floundering and has been laying people off. Nobody wants to buy the company and it is now probably worth less than the owners paid for it. What Monotype is doing to these Japanese developers is going to bite them in the ass; AI for rapidly developing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts is right around the corner and in a few years Monotype will end up in a price war with smaller rivals, which they will not win.

Comment Re:Two problems (Score 2) 81

OEM licenses for fonts are not always perpetual. These Japanese companies probably had licenses that expired and got screwed when they had to renew. This kind of licensing is often beneficial for the licensee because they can buy a less expensive license then replace dated fonts in their products with new ones every few years.

Comment junior dev? no, intern (Score 1) 88

AI tools behaving in ways that "would get a junior developer fired,"

AI isn't a junior dev. It's an intern. Someone who doesn't much care beyond the current session, and whose skills can surprise you - in both directions, and whose primary focus is that you like him at least in the moment.

And like an intern, if you include the code in anything even close to production without review, it's your fault, not theirs.

Comment Re:Wow! (Score 2) 183

Luckily - other than with criminals - covering yourself in naff tats seems to have been a millennial fad that is slowly fading.

My observation is the opposite. In my 20s tattoos were just common enough to be accepted as normal, but the majority of people didn't have them and most people who did had one or two fairly small ones.

Today, it seems everyone and their dog has them.

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