Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment What should really be of interest here (Score 2) 49

What should be of interest to slashdotters isn't the irony of someone associated with cryptography losing their private key, but that there exists an open source system to securely allow voting and also to absolutely verify that the vote was counted. All while still maintaining anonymity. Barring the issue of losing private keys on the part of those administering the vote, this sort of system is very interesting, and really could be used to promote voter engagement and democracy. I had heard of it before, but kind of forgot about it.

Comment Re: We're in the group (Score 0) 209

So many logical fallacies in there, buddy.

If you want these things, then you will pay for a good public education.

This presumes that "good public education" is being funded with tax money. It is, conclusively, not. It has in fact been getting significantly worse - which is why people are opting out of it.

Do you want educated neighbors?

No formal education is, in most cases, better than bad formal education. I'd rather my neighbors not be stupid but think they know something, which is what the last 50 years has produced.

Who you can hire for your business? Who will have enough income to purchase your product? Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

There's no evidence that education can elevate someone over their inborn genetic potential. You've either got the building blocks for intelligence or you don't. See also the last several centuries of 3rd world "enrichment" that's been carried out by one means or another - education, charity, etc. - of places like India and Africa. I'm sure you can look up average IQs if it's of interest.

Who will be employed and can adapt their skills to a rapidly changing environment?

I can hire a home schooled person, then? Because this criteria definitely doesn't fit your average public schooled individual.

Who will know how to make healthy choices for themselves and for their neighbors (you)?

Yes, the Food Pyramid, D.A.R.E., and "Sex Ed" had a fantastic impact on society's wellness trajectory - I'm sure we can all agree on that, right? (This is sarcasm.)

Who will carefully consider and thinking critically about public issues and use that knowledge when they vote?

OK, now I know you were being facetious. There's no way you're talking about state schooled kids here.

Comment Too little, too late (Score 1) 52

This is the wrong approach. Perhaps it'd have been accepted earlier, but they've shot themselves in the foot due to their inaction over the grooming pedophilia groups that were operating with impunity - and seemingly, protection! - on their platform. It was brought to their attention repeatedly, publicly, and they did all the wrong things and did not address the issue.

Fuck them.

Comment Re:Good luck with that (Score 1) 12

The NVidia cloud isn't new. It's been around for 3-4 years now at this point and seems pretty mature. It also works far better than Stadia ever dreamed.

I was able to play through multiple games I'd purchased specifically for the purposes of playing them on Nvidia Now, because I didn't have a gaming computer but wanted to complete the titles (Cyberpunk 2077 and Mechwarrior 5). The 'free' tier was irritating with wait times, but was playable. The higher tiers were far better and other than a rare ISP-related stutter (at 80ms or so, no less), and it ran great.

This means it's definitely playable at the 30-40ms that a person would get on Starlink (which I later got, and tested, and it worked even better). $10/mo for a couple months seemed like a pretty fair price for something that enables gaming. It wasn't a great experience on hotel wireless, but that's barely ever usable for much more than email. Keep in mind, I'm not a 'gaming snob' focused on FPS or graphics so much as the gameplay and experience, so I'm sure there's some aspect there that I overlooked, but $30-50 for a winter of gaming beats $500+ for the computer to do so. I just used a Macbook Air.

And it doesn't work the way you think it does. It's basically like, from what I can tell, RDP specialized for gaming. You can play it from anything that can support basic framerates and uses remote rendering. The game dispatches and loads onto a 'thin' Windows client of some sort, and it integrates with GoG, Steam, and a number of other gaming services.

Comment Re:Upside, if it's a bubble (Score 2) 12

I really don't think all these datacenters will ever be built. There are always more plans and announcements than what comes to fruition. The only way so many datacenters will be needed (i.e. economically viable) is if AI is so revolutionary to the economy that it would affect our power consumption in very unpredictable ways, likely offsetting a lot of activity in meatspace.

Comment Re:How did they lose a slam dunk? (Score 1) 19

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

Comment Re:Used/old tractor makers are doing fine. (Score 1) 25

Some of us are. I did my BS in computer science. Spent 15 years in IT working mostly with Linux servers.

I now run a large farm. My background is actually a really good fit for farming. In fact I think farming would be a good fit for quite a few Linux enthusiasts and makers.

Comment Re:Used/old tractor makers are doing fine. (Score 3, Interesting) 25

We still have running tractors from the 1940s and 50s. John Deere two-cylinder "putt putt" tractors.

If there was a golden age of tractors, it's hard to pin it down. Yes the 4020 was and is a great tractor, but it's not a tractor you'd want to run all day every day. It's loud and the cab was never comfortable. The Deere 50-series tractors from the 1980s were pretty good, and the cabs were comfortable and quiet. In the 90s there were some good ones too but ideas on what looked good were really weird in that decade. Our current tractors are all 15-20 years old with about the right amount of electronics for my taste. However the engines from this era have a mixed reputation for longevity on some models.

So it's a mixed bag. Computer-controlled engines sure start nice, even in the winter. But a fully mechanical engine can be rebuilt several times.

Comment Re:"education experiment" (Score 1) 256

This aspect is troubling to me too. You know they keep making changes because "studies show..." Yet so much of the time, what studies show does not pan out IRL. I am (was) a researcher (in a technical field), I am not anti-intellectual. I want there to be an evidence-based argument for designing programs that work better than before. Yet it seems like it is not working.

I feel the same about discipline (or rather the lack thereof) in the classroom, "studies show" being coerced is bad for them, but now one problem kid that can't be controlled or moved out of the general population classroom is destroying it for 24 others in that class. There are certain kids who don't respond to instruction, and once they realize nobody can actually do anything to stop them (and I mean that literally, even while they are physically assaulting other students) it's all over.

Comment He really means he grew up with Star Trek (Score 1) 210

Like many of us he's enamored with the fictional tech from Star Trek that portrays talking to an intelligent computer and seems like a great idea on screen at least. So futuristic. Computer, please reconfigure my warp core for more power. Done. Best idea ever.

That and touch panels everywhere! Works so well on a star ship, why not put them in our cars?

Never mind that copilot, like all LLMs, confidently lies. And "super smart" really means it reads rubbish posted on the internet and pretends it is accurate and truth. There's no way it can be super smart because it was trained on all our data! At best it's average smart. And we want copilot actually in control of our computers? No thank you. I find it mind blowing he would think giving copilot agents physical control over a PC is a good idea.

Anyway, Star Trek has a lot to answer for!

Comment Because (Score 1) 210

You oligarchs aren't engineering AI to work for people. You're engineering AI to work for corporate interests. It takes far more than it gives in return. It's taking our jobs. It's taking our electricity. It's taking our wealth. It's taking our creative works. It's taking our data.

And what is it giving in return?

It's giving the executive and corporate leaders at eight companies on our planet a ridiculous amount of wealth. To hell with the dog-and-pony show going on in the foreground.

Fuck our corporate overlords.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely."

Working...