Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment oh brother (Score 1) 228

how much is the cheapest TV today compared to the 90s

You can't eat your TV. You can't drive your TV to the grocery store. You can't take your TV into the bank and get a home loan, nor can you take your TV to a home seller and get a reasonable price. You can't hand it to the university and be handed back an education. You can't give your doctor your TV and receive surgical or even preventive care or the meds you need.

Your problem (other than the root one of spewing disingenuous nonsense) is that you're looking at the pricing in the electronics sector and pretending it's representative of the extremely high basic living costs I called out (which of course it is not) — nowhere did I say anything about either the pricing of electronics or the need for a TV to achieve a reasonable cost of living. Nor should you have. But here we are.

Comment Economic worship (Score 4, Insightful) 228

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

Comment Even fake leather is better (Score 1) 39

There's a reason that there is a saying that goes "Wears like leather." Leather is an excellent material to make durable stuff out of if it can't be made out of metal or needs some give.

Even if you can't bring yourself to use real leather from any animal (a waste Native Americans would chide you for given how much leather is produced as a bi-product from raising cattle for food), there are plenty go fake leathers that feel great and wear really well!

The "fine woven" stuff was crazy bad. I upgraded my phone this year and waited to look at the cases in person, and wanted no part of what I could tell was a terrible material just by touching it. You could tell just from sample cases in the store it would not wear well...

Generally though for me, third party cases have been simply better for a number of years now, and first party Apple cases have just not been as good. But they could at least get back to making soemthing that felt and looked premium.

Comment Oh, well, change :) (Score 1) 22

Every change looks like corruption in the eyes of people who don't like it.

And corruption looks like evolution to some people.

Personally, I'm in favor of words meaning as much of the same thing over time as possible. It enhances communication and understanding. If you need a new meaning, you either need a new word or you need to explain yourself at a bit more length. Lest you "decimate" (cough) the listener's/reader's understanding... you get me?

Comment They did help as a networking resource (Score 5, Interesting) 107

How exactly has a non-profit helped women get jobs in tech fields?

Just recently I ran into a woman having trouble finding coding work despite a solid background and resume, some people had suggested to her she try Women Who Code to get some connections that could help her find some job opportunities.

I had contributed to them in the past as they also held women only coding camps for teenagers, that is I think the key way you actually get more women into coding as opposed to simply juggling the few professional woman coders in a sightly different mix across existing companies.

I had kind of lost track of them though and hadn't contributed for a few years, I think the coding camps were shut down... maybe the organization just lost track of the core mission.

Comment Re:Good, but what about inflation? (Score 1) 23

Constitutionally yes health care belongs to the provinces. I'm sure you are aware that in reality that is not the case. The Canada Health Act firmly inserts the feds into the system and has for most of my life.

Running the health systems is completely the purview of the Provinces. The major requirements of the Canada Health Act are mostly in terms of what services are offered (so that we don’t have a nationally fractured system where basic procedures aren’t universal).

Other than that, there is the health transfer from the Federal Government down to the Provinces — but the Provinces aren’t supposed to rely solely on that transfer to fund their health care systems. And that money typically doesn’t come with any strings attached (other than it be used for healthcare).

Crumbling systems are entirely the fault of the Provinces. The licensing of Doctors happens at the Provincial level (albeit by the various Provincial colleges), training and education happens at the Provincial level, hiring of Doctors and Nurses happens at the Provincial level, and the construction of hospitals happens at the Provincial level. And those are the parts of the system that have been failing, and mostly because successive Conservative Provincial governments have been starving the system.

Yaz

Comment Re:Good, but what about inflation? (Score 1) 23

Anyone who has been paying attention knows our health care system has serious issues.

The bulk of which aren’t due to the Federal government, as in Canada the provision of healthcare services is the domain of the Provinces.

It’s notable that two of the Provinces with the worst problems are led by Conservative Premiers, who have been dismantling health care systems in their Province as a way to try to bring in more American-style private for-profit healthcare.

Yaz

Comment Re:Don't sit on this bench(mark.) (Score 3, Interesting) 22

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

Slashdot Top Deals

"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds

Working...