Comment Re:I stay away (Score 1) 143
That's why I never considered consuming them. I just at regular Centrum (TM) brand vitamin pills instead.
Comment Still no match against uBlock Origin. (Score 2) 307
The latest update to uBlock Origin, Version 1.54, is not really affected by this change. And the Open Source developers behind uBlock Origin are updating the filters constantly as I type this to thwart YouTube's latest efforts.
Comment Re:bogeyman (Score 1) 125
Also, the effective rise of the public Internet from circa 1991 to 1995 also started to doom newspapers, because news could be sent out in effectively real time, not wait a day for a printed paper. This change really accelerated starting in 2007 with the rise of social media, especially the expansion of Facebook and Twitter.
Comment Why the "quiet" SST? (Score 1) 90
Simple: the sound of any object going faster than the speed of sound can be VERY loud even without an engine on the plane running. Anyone who remembers the Space Shuttle flying overhead during the landing phase as the Shuttle approaches the landing strip or more recently close to the landing of the Falcon 9 first stage rocket know the very loud and distinct "double bang" of a sonic boom.
As such, thanks to modern computational fluid dynamic research on supercomputers, we know how to shape an airplane so the pressure wave buildup that causes the sonic boom can be dramatically reduced. If the X-59 and the Boom Supersonic XB-1 lives up to their claims, they should be able to fly at supersonic speeds up to Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet and the resulting sonic boom would sound more like the dull thud of a automobile door closing.
Comment More than just a Boeing issue, though. (Score 1) 159
Airbus is (kinda) going through the same thing with certification of the A321XLR long-range single-seat airliner. That's why both the FAA and EASA are very carefully scrutinizing the the A321XLR, especially with its wingbox integral fuel tank, out of fear of what happens if the plane has to make belly-up landing on a runway due to landing gear issues.
Comment Pivot towards being ISP? (Score 1) 104
This is why I think the cable companies have already begun the pivot to becoming mostly an _Internet_ provider.
After all, Comcast rolled out DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 technology in the last decade, and just started rolling out DOCSIS 4.0 symmetric gigabit Internet recently. I expect Comcast's revenue to be mostly through being a gigabit-speed ISP by 2030, and Comcast will be essentially streaming most of their content. Yes, there is competition from fiber providers, but fiber is not yet available even in many metro areas, while cable TV lines are.
Comment Waiting on new tech for iPads? (Score 1) 31
I think Apple held off on releasing new iPads because of the resources being tied up with developing the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset.
But that the Vision Pro is pretty much done, I expect Apple to do the following:
1. Release new iPad Pro models with OLED displays on both the 11-inch and 13-inch models.
2. Release a new iPad mini and iPad Air models, with the iPad Air getting a 12.9" display as an option.
3. Upgrade the SoC on the iPad Pros to M3 and the other other iPad models to M2.
The iPad mini and iPad Air update arrives in March 2024; the iPad Pro update arrives in June.
Comment Re:Why we get plane evacuations right these days (Score 1) 41
I think it was earlier than that. Remember Saudia Flight 163 from 1980, where an L-1011 had a fire in the cargo hold start after takeoff from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, made an emergency landing back at the airport, and the flight crew then did a lot of erroneous things that made the situation worse? With the result that 301 people on the plane died when it could have been less than half that had the plane made an immediate stop after landing and the cabin crew immediately start emergency egress procedures? That unfortunate tragedy was the major reason why they instituted the 90 second or less procedure to get everyone out of the plane, a procedure I believe the ICAO also required. That ICAO rule definitely saved the lives of everyone aboard Japan Airlines Flight 516.
Comment Re:surprising (Score 1) 363
I know I will get downvoted for this, but I think her tacit support for the sometimes virulent pro-Hamas protests by Harvard students turned off a lot of alumni, particularly the RICH alumni. I wouldn't be surprised that the Harvard Club of New York City (arguably the most powerful college alumni club in the USA) read her the riot act "behind closed doors" and she ended up taking a "golden parachute" payment from a rich group of alumni to essentially go away.
Comment Re:EVs are not yet mass-market (Score 1) 472
I think that may change by 2026. By then, better battery chemistry will allow much lighter battery packs, and the switch to 800 V electrical systems could mean initial charging rates in well over 300 kW, which means we may see EV's go from 0 to 85 percent charge in under 10 minutes.
Comment Re:Pointless gesture (Score 1) 181
True. But they do need to circa every 2 to 4 years remove all the dead and fallen trees to reduce all the dry fuel that can cause massive forest fires that can wipe otu an entire forest, with attendant issues of landslides and accelerated land erosion for up to a decade until new growth replaces all the dead trees.
Comment Re:Bad policy long term, but good for votes (Score 1) 181
This is why we need to have all dead trees still standing and all fallen trees removed once every two to four years to keep the rest of the old growth forest in good health. Otherwise, we end up with a huge amount of dry fuel that makes forest fires extremely dangerous and _all_ the trees are burnt down, creating an potential disaster of landslides and accelerated land erosion afterwards until new growth returns.
Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 181
But I'd like to see highly controlled "thinning" of these old forests to reduce the extreme danger from forest fires. That means only certified dead trees and fallen trees need to be removed once every few years to reduce the "fuel" that can cause some huge wildfires.
'What Kind of Bubble Is AI?' (locusmag.com) 100
"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.
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.
Comment But isn't this battle redundant soon? (Score 1) 85
Especially with Apple announcing iOS Messages app support for the GSMA-compliant version of Rich Communications Services (RCS) in 2024. I wouldn't be surprised if after the iOS 17.3 release, iOS 17.4 will be the first to support RCS. Once RCS is supported in iOS, Beeper's attempt to break into iMessages is pretty much over.
