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Comment Re:Still searching for the killer app (Score 1) 80

by cerberusss (#64204686) Attached to: Apple Vision Pro Review Roundup
Some years ago, I did a long-running project at a client, and the manager there was a pretty affable guy, very much into gadgets. When he told me about watching movies on the Quest (VR headset by Facebook/Meta), I listened and then asked, "so I'm really curious, what's porn look like?"

He was actually quite honest and said it first looks really great, but then he said it felt incredibly real. But what happened was that in the porn movie, a naked woman would walk up to him, and would sit on his lap. He said that because it looked so real, he really expected to feel her sitting on his lap. And when that of course didn't happen, the whole VR movie felt the complete opposite, i.e. incredibly fake. Being so thoroughly yanked out of the mood, that ruined it for him.

So I'm not sure that porn is really a killer app here.

Comment Re:I don’t really care about the green aspec (Score 1) 472

by cerberusss (#64119695) Attached to: How Electric Cars are Already Upending America
Yup, leasing makes for crazy prices. A buddy of mine drives a Lexus is250 for this decade and it drives so smooth it's like a 6-cylinder sewing machine. My mom and dad regularly make a 750 mi. trip and refuse to stop for charging. The technology isn't there yet.

At some point, Toyota (and daughters) will put effort in an affordable and maintenance-light EV, but that point is not within sight, unfortunately.

As for me, I love EVs so much that I pay more and accept a lot of fidgety technical problems, just for the novelty...

Comment Re:I don’t really care about the green aspec (Score 1) 472

by cerberusss (#64119423) Attached to: How Electric Cars are Already Upending America
The affordability is a big one, yeah. They all present themselves as oh-so-premium because that's the only way they can justify the price. And if the BMW is within reach, the dealer will suck your wallet dry whenever you so much as walk past the dealership. I don't blame you for waiting a few years. However I can see people leasing something to hold them over.

Comment Re:The anti-stalking features are incredibly annoy (Score 1) 29

by cerberusss (#64113795) Attached to: Researchers Come Up With Better Idea To Prevent AirTag Stalking
The attraction of the AirTags for this sort of thing is that it's got the brand on it. You say "buy a real GPS tracker" but which one? There's like a dozen weird brands, some have off-brand apps, some configure in clumsy ways via text messages, and I don't know which to pick because they all have fake reviews. I'm overdoing it here, but I don't think there's one brand you can trust.
AI

'What Kind of Bubble Is AI?' (locusmag.com) 100

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the you're-really-not-going-to-like-it dept.
"Of course AI is a bubble," argues tech activist/blogger/science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

The real question is what happens when it bursts?

Doctorow examines history — the "irrational exuberance" of the dotcom bubble, 2008's financial derivatives, NFTs, and even cryptocurrency. ("A few programmers were trained in Rust... but otherwise, the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.") So would an AI bubble leave anything useful behind? The largest of these models are incredibly expensive. They're expensive to make, with billions spent acquiring training data, labelling it, and running it through massive computing arrays to turn it into models. Even more important, these models are expensive to run.... Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That's the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency. Though I don't have a certain answer to this question, I am skeptical.

AI decision support is potentially valuable to practitioners. Accountants might value an AI tool's ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI's guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs' tendency to "hallucinate" and confabulate, there's an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a "human in the loop" to carefully review their judgments... There just aren't that many customers for a product that makes their own high-stakes projects betÂter, but more expensive. There are many low-stakes applications — say, selling kids access to a cheap subscription that generates pictures of their RPG characters in action — but they don't pay much. The universe of low-stakes, high-dollar applications for AI is so small that I can't think of anything that belongs in it.

There are some promising avenues, like "federated learning," that hypothetically combine a lot of commodity consumer hardware to replicate some of the features of those big, capital-intensive models from the bubble's beneficiaries. It may be that — as with the interregnum after the dotcom bust — AI practitioners will use their all-expenses-paid education in PyTorch and TensorFlow (AI's answer to Perl and Python) to push the limits on federated learning and small-scale AI models to new places, driven by playfulness, scientific curiosity, and a desire to solve real problems. There will also be a lot more people who understand statistical analysis at scale and how to wrangle large amounts of data. There will be a lot of people who know PyTorch and TensorFlow, too — both of these are "open source" projects, but are effectively controlled by Meta and Google, respectively. Perhaps they'll be wrestled away from their corporate owners, forked and made more broadly applicable, after those corporate behemoths move on from their money-losing Big AI bets.

Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they'll do if the AI bubble doesn't pop — wrangling about "AI ethics" and "AI safety." But — as with all the previous tech bubbles — very few people are talking about what we'll be able to salvage when the bubble is over.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
AI

Meta's New Rule: If Your Political Ad Uses AI Trickery, You Must Confess (techxplore.com) 110

Posted by msmash from the you're-really-not-going-to-like-it dept.
Press2ToContinue writes: Starting next year, Meta will play the role of a strict schoolteacher for political ads, making them fess up if they've used AI to tweak images or sounds. This new 'honesty policy' will kick in worldwide on Facebook and Instagram, aiming to prevent voters from being duped by digitally doctored candidates or made-up events. Meanwhile, Microsoft is jumping on the integrity bandwagon, rolling out anti-tampering tech and a support squad to shield elections from AI mischief.
Privacy

TSA Expands Controversial Facial Recognition Program (cbsnews.com) 70

Posted by BeauHD from the smile-you're-on-camera dept.
SonicSpike shares a report from CBS News: As possible record-setting crowds fill airports nationwide, passengers may encounter new technology at the security line. At 25 airports in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, the TSA is expanding a controversial digital identification program that uses facial recognition. This comes as the TSA and other divisions of Homeland Security are under pressure from lawmakers to update technology and cybersecurity. "We view this as better for security, much more efficient, because the image capture is fast and you'll save several seconds, if not a minute," said TSA Administrator David Pekoske.

At the world's busiest airport in Atlanta, the TSA checkpoint uses a facial recognition camera system to compare a flyer's face to the picture on their ID in seconds. If there's not a match, the TSA officer is alerted for further review. "Facial recognition, first and foremost, is much, much more accurate," Pekoske said. "And we've tested this extensively. So we know that it brings the accuracy level close to 100% from mid-80% with just a human looking at a facial match." The program has been rolled out to more than two dozen airports nationwide since 2020 and the TSA plans to add the technology, which is currently voluntary for flyers, to at least three more airports by the end of the year. There are skeptics. Five U.S. senators sent a letter demanding that TSA halt the program.

Comment Re:We already exerience such service. (Score 1) 123

by cerberusss (#63399771) Attached to: Panera Bread Begins Scanning Its Customers' Palms
This type of chain tries to cheaply mimick the experience. They stick their hand up their worker's asses and make them squeal your name. It's degrading for all involved. Back when Facebook was a thing, my buddy used to enter the wrong birthday. Some people who barely knew him, would congratulate him.

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