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Comment Between billionaires and retirees (Score 1) 11

We have too many people disconnected from the economy.

Brexit absolutely destroyed the UK economy but you wouldn't know that if you're an elderly pensioner who voted for it because as the saying goes I got mine, fuck you. At worst you had to sell your Spanish summer home.

The same goes for the billionaires who used to just be lowly millionaires.

Both groups basically have all the political power, the billionaire is because of their money and the old people because of their numbers.

So you get a lot of public policy that is basically guaranteed to destroy everything because why the hell not?

The billionaires want absolute power and to build monuments and Dick ship rockets. The old people want to revel in their Petty bigotries and look back at the good old days without acknowledging the help from the government that made those days good.

Both sides have basically screwed anyone under 50.

Eventually although the billionaires will get away with it the old people might not. Especially the ones in the 50 to 65 age group.

Comment As soon as attorney general's started sniffing (Score 2, Informative) 8

My rent stopped going up. Like full stop.

It's painfully obvious this is cost consumers hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. The frustrating thing is as usual it's a settlement where they don't have to give up any of the ill-gotten gains. All any of these crooks ever have to do is hold out until there is a republican in the White House and then run it up to a federal court. It worked for Microsoft.

Seriously go read up on their antitrust lawsuit. They just dragged it in court until Bush Jr got in charge and he gave them a sweetheart deal that included a significant expansion of their presence in public schools.

Comment Nvidia is in a high risk position (Score 1) 26

A huge portion of their revenue is from AI data centers and there is going to be a huge push to create custom built hardware specifically designed to accelerate those workloads. You saw the same thing with Bitcoin where custom hardware was built and it outperformed gpus.

This means that a few good pieces of custom hardware have the potential to completely wipe Nvidia out. This is especially tough because everything is still consolidated into a handful of monopolies and duopolies that the couple of companies that are going to rule the roost for AI within the next few years will have more than enough resources to build their own custom hardware to do it. And they aren't going to like being dependent on an external company like Nvidia.

Nvidia may be able to stay ahead though by monopolizing engineers. It'll cost them literally hundreds of millions of dollars but it's doable.

I do Wonder though how long the wage arms race will last. Usually big companies like this don't like to get into bidding wars for talent and before long they are making deals at country clubs. Golf is a popular game for that because you're out in the open where it's harder for people to overhear what you're doing.

Comment The point of one laptop per child (Score 3, Informative) 22

Is to give access to information that otherwise just wouldn't be there. If you're in a position where you can actually measure academic performance then you probably have a semi-functional public school system and you don't need programs like this.

These programs work well in intensely impoverished areas where the school systems have broken down or just never existed in the first place and information isn't available. Places where you're lucky if the kids are taught to read.

Comment Re:You have options (Score 1) 89

Use something better like notepad++, if you are still using notepad maybe change your workflow. I realize that this can be difficult if you are doing tech support on someone elses machine.

The thing with Notepad isn't that it's good... rather that it's everywhere.

Notepad is for when you're working but not on your machine. Not everyone's work flow is going to be 100% local and you probably won't have permission to install something on someone elses server.

No matter what the version, what the patch level, what the fuck is wrong with it, notepad is there and notepad works.

Sounds like MS are working on the last part unfortunately.

Comment Re:Banned. (Score 1) 80

Meh, this kind of crap is what peer review is for. As long as he learns his lesson I'd be fine with letting him keep going. I mean he's still going to MIT so he's not an idiot.

I mean we all act like he got away with this but he was caught during the initial process of peer review. The system really does work.

We all like to complain about how there's thousands and thousands of papers that are just garbage but here's the thing so what? If the papers aren't doing any harm and they're just sitting out there then it's not a big deal. It's not like we are spending all that much money on any of this crap. I'm sure you can come up with a number that sounds big because we have a 33 trillion dollar economy so yeah you could find somebody who maybe got a grant and did some bad research for a few hundred thousand. But in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal

I mean think about how much money we waste on other crap. Human beings are just wasteful creatures. And we kind of need to be to keep our civilization and economy going anyway.

Comment Re:Uhg... (Score 1) 25

It would be kind of neat to see the algorithms for AI hand it off to a GPU or one of the fancy cores on a modern CPU.

But I can't see that really happening because machine learning algorithms requires so much processing power and modern graphics do the same so you just don't have a lot of head room.

Comment Re: Legacy Media BEFORE the war. "Ukraine are Nazi (Score 1) 138

"Remember, Na-Zi means National SOCIALIST, and that's that fascism is."

Remember, the Nazis literally called themselves socialists to fool stupid people, and you also don't know what either socialism or fascism is if you think one is a type of the other.

History lesson Children.

First things first, the Nazis never called themselves Nazis... We did that. I mean the German exiles in Britain and the British press were very happy to run with it. The Nazis just called themselves "Germans".

Secondly, one of the core tenants of Fascism is the transformation and rebirth of language, the idea was that you could control the way people thought if you controlled the language they used (which as history has shown was bass-ackwards, language evolves to reflect what people think and not the other way around). Hitler tried to purge the German language of anything he felt was foreign, in particular the French words in pre Nazi German. Socialism was one of these words he wanted to change the meaning of. he, and I quote "wanted to take the meaning of Socialism back from the Bolsheviks". Hitler defined socialism as more a form of civic pride, patriotism border-lining on jingoism. Obviously this didn't work as we kept using the Bolshevik definition of socialism (I.E. collective ownership) and keep using that definition to this day.

Drinky is quite right however, only complete idiots try to claim the Nazis were in any way socialist (as we describe socialism).

Comment Re:Why the rush? (Score 1) 220

Why does everyone need to be in such a hurry all the time?

Make a road trip. Stop and visit some charming places along the way. Take the backroads. Stay off the interstate.

Bonus: take a motorcycle and enjoy the smells you encounter along the way, in addition to the fresh air.

Because you might make the trip once a year, some people make these journeys several times a month, if not several times a week.

Smelling the roses gets old fast. So does smelling the cow shit too (for context, a Californian friend once described the I-5 as "smells like cow shit and that's the highlight" but it's the fastest way to drive from SF to LA, I'd already took the PCH up there and had to drop the car off).

Comment Re:just squeeze more juice from your customers (Score 2, Insightful) 53

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