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Comment Re:Well the good news is 3/4 figured it out (Score 1) 331

How fast do you imagine this technology will grow?

Let's say that Ford invents AI tech that allows them to fire every single employee tomorrow and run their entire factories lights-out. How much can they undercut their competitors with a nearly $0 labor cost? (Let's say they pay Amazon Turks $0.05 a review to double-check the AI-designed cars and make sure they look like something a human would want to drive.) How much will the stockholders' profit while the other companies struggle to catch up?

Once Ford pulls the trigger, how many quarters of losses and negative earnings reports do you think it will take for GM, Subaru, etc to do the same? Say GM decides to hold out and runs a "Buy Human" marketing ad (has "Buy American" ever actually worked?) how many GM employees are going to use their salaries to buy GM trucks over cheaper RoboFords?

Personally, I imagine that once each specific field is automated, it will rapidly become totally automated (on the scale of financial quarters once the lagging companies' stocks take a beating). How about RoboShipping? Humans won't be able to compete against $0 labor plus reduced insurance costs. Once RoboTrucking can be done, it will be done as quickly as RoboTrucks can be made and/or retrofitted into existing trucks. We will probably never develop "general" AI, just a lot of task-specific ones that only have to be invented once each.

Comment Re:10 things AI won't do (Score 1) 331

If human judgement is needed, it's far easier to train someone to decide whether an alternator armature is worth refurbishing than to rebuild an engine. Then you sit them down to do nothing but screen alternator armatures all day.

And you feed pictures of those armatures and the human's decision to the AI so it can learn to do the job cheaper and faster.

Comment The official "You're doing it wrong" post (Score 1) 4

While it won't deal with switching the USB hub, have you considered using Synergy to share mouse/keyboard between the computers? The way it works is you lay out your displays and computers, and tell it when you go off the right side of monitor 2 of PC 1, pass control to monitor 1 of PC 2 and the mouse (and keyboard input) appears there. As a bonus, it can transfer the clipboard between computers too.

Comment Re:What's a good browser for 2018? (Score 1) 102

I use Cookie Clicker as my benchmark. Set it to Christmas and turn on audio. Does the reindeer sound play before the reindeer leaves the screen? On Chrome the deer was gone by the time the jingle quit and almost gone by the time it started. On Firefox, the deer was halfway across the screen. Click a wrinkler. Does it respond to every click? Triple click one. Did it pop? It should, but on Chrome it sometimes takes four-five clicks. Get a cookie storm. Does it even react to you clicking the cookies before they disappear?

I'm on Linux with a 4k monitor so maybe there's something with Chrome in that environment, but Firefox does reasonably well.

Comment Re:AMD (Score 3, Insightful) 87

Getting to the point where I'm going to have to dig out my old VIA-powered Wal-Mart PC to do my banking and such on to ensure security from hackers dropping javascript into my browser.

At the very least, the slow speed means I'll realize pretty quickly when someone is trying to use it to mine cryptocurrencies.

Comment Re:Speculative Memory References and Page Faults (Score 1) 416

mov rax, kerneladdr is the instruction that page used as the exception, which is a page fault and a memory access violation that should segfault. What I was missing is that non-root users can actually trap SIGSEGV (which I should have realized, otherwise SIGSEGV would terminate debuggers too), though the stack overflow pages on this definitely demonstrate it's not simple to come up with a trap that isn't "crash into debugger" or "exit".

Comment Re:Speculative Memory References and Page Faults (Score 1) 416

That's exactly what happens.

cause a page fault, and then

Write a short little helloworld.c that causes a page fault and then prints "Hello World". Let me know what happens to "and then" when you run it as a non-root user.

There's another piece of the puzzle that is still missing/not being talked about. I suspect that this exploit *only* works meaningfully when done in a virtualized guest with a hostile admin/root exploit. My suspicion could work with a root exploit without a VM, but you're already root so why?

Comment Re:This could be massive (Score 4, Interesting) 416

Based on this link from Hacker News: https://cyber.wtf/2017/07/28/n... and the linked email/patch from AMD, it looks like what happens is that AMD checks memory permissions up front before allowing an instruction into the pipeline, while Intel made the memory permission check as a later part of the pipeline, apparently after the memory was accessed and inserted into the cache.

Comment Re:Cost savings: Only healthy people treated! (Score 1) 486

I'm almost up to 300 pounds because I sit at the computer at work for 9-10 hours a day, then go home and sit at the computer for 5-6 more, and I eat:

1 slice multigrain toast: 120kCal*
1 large egg: 70kCal*
2 slices bacon: 100kCal*
1 slice pepperjack cheese: 80kCal*
Breakfast: 370kCal

Lunch at work is 1 Healthy Choice Steamer: 270-310kCal*

1 wheat sub roll: 220kCal*
3 slices oscar meyer roast beef: 60kCal*
1 roma tomato: 35kCal*
1 slice blue marble jack cheese: 80kCal*
1 handful of romaine lettuce: 5kCal*
mustard: 0kCal*
Dinner: 400kCal

Snack: 1 lowfat mozzarella stick: 80kCal*

Drinks all day: Diet soda: 0kCal*

Total: 1160kCal*

*: All caloric counts as determined by examining the shit of olympic medalists from 1890-1910. YMMV, especially if you do not have the body of an olympic athlete.

(and yes, I do actually eat the same thing over and over. I don't see any reason to waste an hour a day cooking food for myself, and there's plenty of variations in the steamers for lunch that it doesn't get "boring" whatever "boring" might mean to a person who pushes buttons on a flat rectangle for 14+ hours with minimal interruption.)

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