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Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 43

Actually, the cloud remains more expensive and less secure. Remember all that meltdown, spectre, row hammering, etc? All largely irrelevant to people who use their own servers in their own environment.

You still need an ISP with the cloud. Somehow, you have to be able to launch and monitor, do updates, etc. Smoke signals won't work for that application. You still need IT guys for the office LAN, server admins for your office infrastructure, etc.

If you decide to go with anything but very vanilla virtual hosting, you still need developers to run on the 'upgrade' treadmill as cloud providers update and EOL things nearly as quickly as fashion designers.

If you go with the vanilla virtual hosts, you need pretty much the same people you need for self hosting only they can't touch the physical hardware and just have to sit nervously twiddling their thumbs when things go down.

VMWare is not the best choice these days since the licensing IS a ripoff.

Swapping a failing disk is easier than it ever has been before.

Comment no thanks (I'm an author) (Score 1) 28

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Comment Sci Fi tells us how this will end: (Score 1) 38

...The AI will grow sentient, irradiate the crabs to make them larger and stronger, merge with their nervous system, and these Bionic Crabs will then hijack ships and battle the humans for control of major cities. An injured renegade Google employee will gave a child a special fob that can stop them, but only if...

Comment Re:MS and "visual" (Score 1) 52

Ironically few of their products are "visual" any more. They got rid of WYSIWYG in their dev tools so now devs have to play fiddle faddle to get stuff to look right, and even then DOM shuffles them around in drunk ways under different conditions. It's a time-drain.

WYSIWYG isn't evil, it just needed a few tweaks to adapt. But fadsters were too quick to toss it out with the bathwater over buzzword addiction. Gittoffmylawn!

Comment Re:In Holland you get a fine from the utility comp (Score 1) 62

there's already too much solar at those parts of the day. the money paid for giving it to the grid when it's not needed is exactly zero

If there were no solar contributed to the gird, would they charge for power? Yes.
If the power company had excess capacity on their end, would they give it away for free? No.

The only reason there is excess from solar is because they haven't invested in storage to handle it. They won't have money to invest in that storage if they're giving it away. Why is that up to them anyway? It's not theirs to give away. The only reason people are OK with contributing their own excess back to the grid is because they get back credits or money.

Submission + - The Human Only Public License (vanderessen.com)

nmb3000 writes: With the rapid ascent of AI training, tools, and a push for more autonomous agents, do we need a new software licensing option for developers that don't want their work used to support or advance these systems? One developer says yes.

Whether artificial intelligence systems will end up being a positive or a negative force for humanity is still an open question. But we might find ourselves one day with AI embedded at every layer of our existence, living lives of toned down and diluted humanity with only our dreams for escape. Although I am not yet convinced of this worst case scenario, I believe it is important that we as software developers have at least the option to opt out of that system altogether, to be able to continue hacking, working, and tinkering in a space of our own in total absence of artificial intelligence systems, and share this luxury with our users.

I designed a software license for this purpose. It is called the Human Only Public License, or HOPL for short.

While a license like this is probably entirely unenforceable and goes against a strict open source ethos (both traits shared with the problematic "do not evil" JSON license), the appeal of continuing the tradition of one human creating something specifically for other humans is understandable. It also gives those developers who are concerned with the negative impact AI tools may have on software development as a field and career a way to push back.

The license is also published on GitHub.

Comment Lesson from E-Verify: (Score 1) 34

...if there are only toothless penalties on the plutocrats who lie and cheat, the data will useless. They like to hide the reasons they cut staff to keep investors from knowing what's really going on.

Another way to say this: any bill that actually punishes slimy plutocrats will likely never pass.

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