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Comment Re:We've seen this pattern before. (Score 4, Interesting) 61

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

Comment Re: Dumb managers manage dumbly (Score 1) 50

No one is really suggesting"at ANY price point". No one thinks renting rooms at 10 dollars is better than nothing, but renting rooms at 100 dollars that normally rent for 200 is better than nothing. And there is nothing stopping you from renting last minute, except the possibility of not getting a room or at least the room you want. If you want to take a chance of not getting a room to save 50 dollars you go right ahead.

Comment Re:Not as important as bringing back flashcards (Score 1) 210

Generally, at least I think, forcing kids to memorize a bunch of things at a young age is better for them in the future. Even if they don't 100% understand why, once they move up to high school and have to start thinking (aka book reports, algebra, etc), they don't have to go back to using fingers or manually doing multiplications. Sometimes you get that "ah hah" moment when you realize you have all that information already in your noggin and can apply it.

Of course you also end up with kids who skip a grade or move to a different school it throws it all to wack. I got experience in that front.

Comment His Whole Pitch is Safety (Score 4, Interesting) 57

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

Comment Re:Proof we live in an Idiocracy (Score 1) 67

People has been buying stuff like this for century's. Yea my mom could use the same yarn and put it together in about a day, but fashion is fashion. Think of it as a way to meet people. You start off with a conversation about it and go on to other small talk. Personally, as somone who is paranoid going outside now a days without some kind of recording device on myself makes this great way to have a body cam without it seeming intrusive.

That said, $5 of yarn is enough to make one your own. Its just a scarf with some stitching. I am good enough to make scarfs so I am thinking of making something similar for presents. The question is should I go with the same colors or make it goth.

Comment Really? (Score 2) 27

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

Comment Re:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 3, Interesting) 65

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.

Comment Re:Modern VR hardware is really disappointing (Score 1) 45

Its really more of a cost issue than anything. Steam uses a custom WiFi 7 adaptor (or "router" as they call it) to avoid the issue of people having a sub standard WIFI hub. Considering at 6Ghz it can stream at 20Gbps, it should work just as well as a wired connection. With Foveated streaming it also should help with better rendering. Of course these are all "should" and no one has put their hands on the thing.

In reality it all comes down to price. There are wireless dongles you can get that work with DP ports but the chips are very expensive and short range. Also Steam doesn't have the decade of experience that Oculus had in camera tracking. That said I feel like this is the old Google vs I-phone back in the day. It looks like the Steam device has a port you can use to make custom devices and I am betting there might even be a way to make your own hand controller's latter. Like it or not, Oculus has been held back by being a toy and it looks like Steam is trying to make their device more flexible at the start.

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