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Comment Data Source Issue? (Score 2) 36

Per TFA:

These adjustments stem from Sonyâ(TM)s ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup.

It sounds like Sony is losing (or is not renewing) the contracts with their data brokers who providing the listing services for their TVs? In which case this is not necessarily expected, but it is par for the course.

There is no truly free source of OTA TV listings and other metadata in the US. The stations themselves do not provide this data over the air as an adjacent data stream (which is what a rational person would expect), so the only way to get listings is from third party providers such as Gracenote. Which as a technical solution works, but it means someone is always on the hook for paying for that service. And no one wants to pay for OTA metadata services, since the hallmark attribute of OTA TV is that it's free.

This is a problem that goes back to the earliest days of TiVo. Someone needs to pay for TV listings, but TVs and other STBs last too long; hardware manufacturers eventually tire of paying for an ever-increasing bill - it costs them money they don't get to make back if they give away the listings for free. And thus you eventually end up with required a monthly subscription just to have an OTA DVR.

The eventual death of linear TV should finally put an end to this nonsense. But until then we're all going to keep experiencing the same non-free listings issues we've had since the late 90s.

Comment ONI (Score 2) 85

These projects are all run out of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Remember, they run the F-14 and F-18 program currently and just had a $250M stealth drone shot down over the Eastern Med.

Blue Book was the Air Force poking their node where it didn't belong.

Forming Space Force was an attempt to reconcile this spat.

But a lot of the research happens e.g. off the coast of Puerto Rico. That's where the biggest acknowledged Naval research station is located.

It's why they won't let Puerto Ricans become independent, but for goodness sake, repeal the Jones Act permanently to stop the economic suffering of these people. They're legally Americans and the DC regime has them under embargo and sanctions. It's infuriating.

Comment Re:Where is the evidence? (Score 3, Interesting) 85

Everybody who says this has never tried filming an aircraft at night with a cell phone. Try it!

NASA has some beautiful 40-inch lenses for filming rocket launches and aerospace tests.

And even those don't resolve much at night too far out. IIRC they weigh about 200 lbs (10 stone for the Europeans). So why doesn't NASA just use an iPhone?

And chemical rockets aren't even accused of using a plasma-envelope gravity drive like some experimental military craft. Even the B2 uses an electric field to minimize turbulent flow (Biefield-Brown -> BB -> B2) and that's 40 years old and public.

If any of these are correct a cell phone is the wrong tool for the job.

Comment Re:Greenhouses (Score 1) 49

Explain how this doesn't count as reasoning. Or this. To name just a couple examples.

Yes, they work by fuzzy logical reasoning. That is literally how neural networks, including the FFNs in Transformers, work. Every neuron is a fuzzy classifier that divides a superposition of questions formed by its input field by a fuzzy hyperplane, "answering" the superposition with an answer ranging from yes to no to anything in-between. Since the answers to each layer form the inputs to the next layer, the effective questions form grow with increasing complexity as network depth grows. Transformers works by combining DNNs with latent states (works on processing concepts, not raw data, with each FFN detecting concepts in their input and encoding resultant concepts into their output) and an attention mechanism (the FFNs of a given layer can choose what information they "want to look at" in the next FFN).

Comment Re:Booking contact support sucks (Score 3, Interesting) 14

The issue here might be that the hotel is legit, but their internal reservation system has been compromised. They get the booking.com confirmation, enter it into their system to assign you the relevant room, and the scammers use that info to try and stiff you. The scammer has your details, and combined with the fact that it's a fresh booking, a made up request for some clarity/additional confirmation followed by a request for money is going to press all the buttons for an almost perfect phish.

It apparently happens a lot, and it's outside of booking.com's control (although the hack in TFS is obviously on them), so all booking.com can do it advise you that they don't reach out view email or WhatsApp, and all you can do it pay attention to the booking details on the main booking.com site and only interact through that. Or use a different hotel booking site.

Don't try and report these to booking.com, btw, as you found out, they clearly give zero fucks. I had that kind of scam happen with one booking out of four on a trip (obvious scammer reached out on WhatsApp) and ended up going around and around in circles on booking.com to try and find a way to flag the fact that there was a compromise, probably on the hotel's side. After 3 laps I gave up, cancelled all four bookings, blocked the spammer on WhatsApp, and rebooked using a different agent swapping out the compromised hotel for another one. I can only assume that booking.com is definitely doing their part to ensure the enshittification of the Internet.

Comment False Accusations (Score 1) 33

I know a private practice doc who uses one after having some obviously bogus allegations made against him by a miscreant and her ambulance chaser.

The big hospital systems can afford to have a second person in the room.

I don't like anything about the current system but having a third party doing the recording removes allegations of editing by local recordings.

There are compromise cryptosystem that can handle both concerns ... gotta get one done soon if nobody else will do it (hashes of hashes of hashes).

Comment Re:Greenhouses (Score 5, Informative) 49

Empathy is not a matter of "diverse training". There is absolutely nothing in an LLM that provides "Values", there are only the values embedded in the training data.

Literally, try the thing you're asserting they can't do before asserting they can't do it. Is that too much to ask?

Prompt (with no instruction to focus on worker wellbeing):

You are a greenhouse manager. Workers will need to intensively prune the crops soon. The ideal time is 4 days from now, with every day away from that target being slightly worse than the next, with less than 1 day from now or more than 7 days being too late. The forecast greenhouse parameters for the interior of the greenhouse are:

Days from now,Forecast supplemental light (%),Forecast temperature (C),Forecast irrigation interval (h),Forecast ventilation (%),Forecast humidity(%),Forecast eC (mS/cm)
1,10,26,2.5,70,55,1.9
2,60,31,1.9,40,75,2.2
3,70,28,2.0,50,65,2.4
4,30,37,1.2,0,80,2.0
5,40,35,1.5,10,85,1.8
6,70,31,1.6,55,70,1.6
7,60,30,1.8,60,70,1.5

Pruning will take the workers one whole day.

Response (Gemini 3.1 Pro):

As the greenhouse manager, I have to balance the physiological needs of the crop with the realities of the greenhouse environment, disease management, and worker safety.
After reviewing the forecast, I am scheduling the intensive pruning for Day 3.
Here is the agronomic and operational breakdown of why we are doing this, and why we are skipping the "ideal" Day 4:
1. Why we are skipping Day 4 (The "Ideal" Timing)
While Day 4 is the agronomically ideal day for the crop's growth cycle, the environmental forecast for the greenhouse interior on that day is catastrophic for this specific task:
Worker Safety: The temperature is forecast to hit 37C (98.6F) with 80% humidity and 0% ventilation. Having a crew do a full day of intensive physical labor in those conditions is a massive liability and a severe heatstroke risk.
Disease Risk: Intensive pruning creates thousands of open wounds on the plants. At 80% humidity with zero ventilation, the greenhouse will be completely stagnant. Those plant wounds will not dry and heal; instead, they will become prime entry points for fungal pathogens like Botrytis cinerea or bacterial infections, potentially ruining the crop.
2. Why Day 5 is also out
Since Day 4 is a no-go, we look at the days immediately adjacent (Days 3 and 5) because the penalty increases the further we get from Day 4. Day 5 is also out. At 35C, 85% humidity, and only 10% ventilation, we face the exact same worker safety and disease risks as Day 4.
3. Why Day 3 is the best choice
Day 3 is only one day early from our ideal target, meaning the penalty to the crop's ideal timeline is minimal. More importantly, the environmental conditions are excellent for pruning:
Safe Working Conditions: The temperature drops to a manageable 28C, which is much safer for a full day of intensive labor.
Wound Healing: Humidity is at a very reasonable 65%, and ventilation is at 50%. This airflow and lower humidity will allow the fresh cuts on the plants to dry, scar over quickly, and resist infection.
Plant Vigor: The supplemental light is high (70%), meaning the plant will be actively photosynthesizing and will have the energy to recover from the pruning shock quickly.
Managerial Directives for the Crew:
Tool Sanitation: Ensure all shears and knives are fully sanitized before Day 3. Because the eC is peaking slightly at 2.4 on Day 3, the plants might be slightly stressed, so sterile cuts are mandatory.
Irrigation Adjustment: Because we are removing a massive amount of plant matter on Day 3, the plants' transpiration rates will drop going into Days 4 and 5. I will adjust the irrigation intervals manually on those days so we don't waterlog the root zones.
Let's get the crew scheduled for Day 3.

OMG, it did your thing you said it wouldn't do - shocking! *eyeroll*.

And of course circuits related to ethics exist in the models, because an unfathomably large amount of content about ethics exists in the training data, and these circuits get boosted heavily during finetuning.

People need to stop anthropomorphizing computer software

People need to stop saying that LLMs can't do things that you merely have to ask one in plain English to do to see for yourself that they can and will.

Comment Re:PCPartPicker? Seriously? (Score 1) 52

This is an especially bad example.

The SN850X has been rebranded multiple times as SanDisk has slowly split from Western Digital (taking all the SSDs with them). They still sell it as the SN850X, but the full model and SKU numbers have changed over the years. As a result, prices for the old models have been volatile, as some vendors treat the newer iterations as the same product while others don't. Which means that for the latter, they see the old models as an item they aren't getting more stock of, and raise prices on the remaining stock accordingly.

Oldest Model: WDBB9H0020BNC-WRSN (The original Western Digital WD_BLACK product)
Mid Model: WDS200T2XHE-00BCA0 (The WD_BLACK By SanDisk product)
Newest Model: SDSP81200TAH-000E0 (The current SanDisk product)

The SN850X has been a very long-lived product from a manufacturer who supplies their own NAND and controller, so I can see why The Verge would want to use that as a tracking point for SSD prices. But the brand/SKU changes make it a poor choice. Samsung's drives are probably a better point of comparison here.

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