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Comment Really? (Score 2) 15

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: So it's a problem that will solve itself (Score 1) 68

This has nothing to do with billionaires. You can decide right now to stop buying plastics, stop replacing your phone every year, give up your car and move to a city center, and stop supporting businesses that are oil based.

I don't want to stop buying plastics. I want to have the option to buy actually recycled plastics that actually get recycled. We can do this but we don't. We don't because the people with all the money who therefore control the means of production decide that we don't. "We" is a stretchy word. So is "you" and so's "can". Sure, you can choose to opt out of society, but it would make more sense to make society not shit all over everything.

Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 1) 91

NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases.

NHTSA and NASA didn't study all of the code in the PCM. Their analysis is therefore invalid. Barr Group found a significant number of paths to unintended acceleration, zero of which depended on cosmic rays and also that Toyota not only didn't follow industry best practices, they didn't follow their own internal procedures. And you think China, which hasn't ever made the best software for anything, is immune to the same kinds of errors. You literally stated that there was no other way that it could happen, which is an obvious falsehood. It's unclear why you're engaging in this level of gaslighting.

Comment Re:Can you make that the default? (Score 2) 70

I'm not going to respect a comment like this from someone who puts a space on either side of an em dash. Now tell me your take on the Oxford comma.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

Comment Re:"Cable" a Failure to Innovate (Score 1) 97

I doubt it is economically effective today to replace the parts that can actually do multi-gigabit.

I agree. In fact for most cable companies in particular it probably makes little sense to replace anything that can do even just 1 gigabit, because they almost surely have other regions or at least boroughs which are currently underserved.

Anecdotally speaking I think the demand for 10Gbs residential internet is low, and probably will be for some time.

I suspect it's mostly limited to sizable households with a lot of users. But we keep finding new ways to use available bandwidth...

Comment Re:Thanks for the research data (Score 1) 109

When the next Democratic president waves their hand you can be sure the Supreme Court will do its duty and say that waving is not part of presidential powers and block whatever it is they want to do.

If they do end up being that two-faced and there's a Democrat-led Senate and House, that's how you get a 15-person Supreme Court.

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