Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 19

... going to corporations. One billion dollars no less. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits.

Oh stop it. This is a loan to Constellation energy to help finance the cost to restart a nuclear power plant by 2027.

Why should he stop exactly explaining the situation?

Lenders take on the risk of a default, and when the government lends money, the risk is socialized.

The loan is being made to a private, for-profit corporation, who will be able to keep any profits generated by this scheme (however unlikely that may be).

Whatever activity the loan is for is irrelevant, whether it's for cranking up a crusty old nuclear power plant, or for bailing out a Wall Street firm during a market panic.

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 1) 32

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Comment Re:But are still investing heavily in said bubble. (Score 1) 16

My takeaway is that it seems like everyone is saying the same thing. AI bubble. The CEO's of the firms involved, press, government, retail investors, now global fund investors. Yet investment managers still have to be deeply invested in this bubble to compete with the returns of the other managers...to get your fat Xmas bonus, etc.

"The market can stay irrational long than you can stay solvent."

Fund managers with more than 10 years of experience knew that trying to short the market during a bubble is just as likely to bankrupt you as to make you rich. The most difficult part of a bubble is no one has yet found a way to predict with any confidence when it will burst.

For fund managers whose bonus is tied to how they compare to "the market" (i.e. everyone else), the safest path during a bubble is to dive into bubble like everyone else. If the bubble did not burst, they all make gains and pocket nice bonus. If the bubble did burst, every fund manager loses a whole lot of people's money but hey! we are competitive with "the market"!

For people investing with their own money, your best bet is to pull out entirely like Warren Buffet did, unless you don't need the money until 10-20 years later, then you have the option to leave them invested in non-bubble related investments and ride through the burst and subsequent recovery.

Comment Re:No (Score 3, Insightful) 15

Part of raising capital is convincing everyone that you need the money and have a good plan for it. We're probably better off if these companies don't actually buy even 10% of the things they are saying they will buy. The hype funding schemes are incredibly harmful to business long-term, but the short-term pay off is too attracted for them to ever stop doing it.

Comment Re:Very quick code reviews (Score 1) 33

At my company we don't have any dedicated Rust programmers. We all have to learn it (eventually). So passing a review off to a Rust developer or dedicated team isn't an option for us.

C++ reviews go quick for us because we have 20 years of it in our code base. And our changes tend to either be a tiny increment at the core. Or a massive dump of support for a new feature or chip that not every reviewer is familiar with.

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 2) 32

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Comment Re:Russians only learn cursive (Score 1) 238

Yeah, I saw years ago when one of my in-laws was writing in it. I thought it was a joke or something but their humor doesn't really go that way. Absolutely mental looking when someone is a bit sloppy with their handwriting in Russian.

People can write in a neat and tidy way. And there are a few little marks people add when writing to make it easier to separate the letters. So be a little skeptical of the online examples, they're a bit contrived. Russian cursive is really difficult to read but it's not impossible.

The Soviet Union's collapse had more to do with them being a significant portion of the world economy but were frequently excluded in trade either because of their own internal politics or because of its poor relationship with the West. And the Soviet Military was kept at a top priority and tended to suck all the air out of the room when it came to investment in technology, leaving very little for pure civilian usage or for entrepreneur or peaceful long-term academic research. The workers' councils (Soviets) themselves were probably a good idea and regionally were frequently effective and represented the vast majority of people well. Actually turning many councils of industry and regions into a working country was far messier and less successful. But hey, our American democratic-republic is very messy and inefficient too and we used to make it work pretty well.

Comment Re:Dumb managers manage dumbly (Score 1) 59

When prices dropped, the sites automatically canceled existing bookings and rebooked customers at lower rates. Hotels lost already-booked revenue whenever they reduced prices to fill empty rooms

Why penalize your best customers who reserve the longest in advance?

100% this.

Smarter hotels should tell their customers they would refund the difference if their room prices (for the same class of room) dropped after the booking. That, plus no penalty cancellation, makes customers more willing to book long in advance, in turn allows better planning for both the hotel and the customers.

What hotels do now only encourage travellers to book only in the last minute and hence create sudden surges which is bad for both customers and hotels. It further discourages people from travelling for leisure and in the long term reduce customers for the hotels.

Slashdot Top Deals

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing. -- E. Dijkstra

Working...