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Comment no shit (Score 3, Insightful) 164

"TikTok owner ByteDance would prefer shutting down its loss-making app rather than sell it"

Yes, that's because its purpose is not profit, as it's a PsyOp. If the goal were profit, they would prefer to sell it. If they sell it, there is a risk that documents which prove its purpose will be transferred, and blow the whole operation even worse than being shut down.

Comment Re: modding me down won't change facts (Score 1) 97

"It's probably because you're asserting that the mod down process validates your "facts"."

If you want to claim what I'm saying isn't factual, the onus is on you to provide some counter evidence, or at minimum, counter arguments. When people mod down an opinion because they don't agree with it they have surrendered the point.

Comment Re: When no one is employed (Score 2) 97

Every major shift WAS different from the one before.

What's DOUBLY different about this time is that this time we are not moving from skill to skill, we are moving from unskilled to something.

I truly despise the idea that there are no unskilled jobs because it is not just false, it's a counterproductive argument. All of us who have worked a variety of jobs know that some jobs require both talent and education, and others require mostly just a pulse and respiration. But people who work both kinds of jobs have essentially the same needs.

Comment Re:Apple servers (Score 1) 30

For a lot of workloads it's apparently not all that bad and Apple's SoCs are already in the server-class in terms of power draw. It's just a matter of not getting the same raw core count, but you can buy a lot of cheap Mac Minis to string together if you're buying a $10,000 Xeon or Epyc processor.

That's fine if you have an embarrassingly parallel problem which doesn't require a lot of data transfer between processors. There are jobs like that, of course, but those mac minis have pretty poor connectivity and having that many nodes means doing a lot of extra work to set up and maintain them. The EPYC processor (and to a lesser extent the Xeon) also offers very good price:performance. The minis come with a lot of extra case material that you have to pay for (including making it pretty) but don't really want.

Comment Re:Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate (Score 1) 214

Having children later increases the risk of defects and complications, and it's not just because of older genetic material so freezing it isn't a complete solution. And it's true for both men and women, for their respective parts. If we want more people to have more kids (which is something I question at a time when jobs are being eliminated by automation) and we want those children to be as health as possible, then we need to make it more feasible for young people to be able to afford to do it.

Comment Re:When no one is employed (Score 4, Interesting) 97

Ahh the myth of eternal technological unemployment. You realize that people have been saying similar stuff about every single piece of technology in the history of humanity, right? This is no different. There's always more work to be done.

That is not only generally false, but this time IS different. Since there is NOT always more work to be done, we have moved over to a service economy, where we CREATE more work to be done. BUT the software is now able to do many of those service jobs, and there's no other sector to move to. ALSO, every major technological advance HAS destroyed jobs, and some of those workers were left behind at every step. A lot of people DID become destitute, starve and even die due to the economic upheaval of the industrial revolution. If you want to invoke history and be taken seriously, you have to account for the parts you don't like, not just the parts you remember fondly.

Those service jobs were only viable because people had money, so as the percentage of service jobs has increased (it's now about 80%) the system has become more unbalanced because those jobs don't pay as well as more skilled jobs. (There may or may not be "unskilled" labor depending on who you ask, but there are definitely jobs which require more skill[s] than others.)

What industry do YOU think the low-talent service job employees are going to move into when there are no longer jobs for humans to read scripts on phones? When there are 10% or fewer jobs in fast food compared to now, because the work truly can be done by a bunch of robots plus one guy who knows how to clear jams in the burger printer and replace parts occasionally?

Comment Re: Where is the killer app? (Score 1) 133

I don't think making it smaller works yet. The focal depth problem is too serious. Until someone comes up with a way to solve it with holograms or something, we're stuck with bulky optics that still hurt most people's eyes. I further think you could use fiber, which would only make the device more expensive. Wasn't that supposed to be on the Firewire roadmap anyway? Hmm, I see they formally gave up on that back in 2013.

Comment Re:ISA (Score 1) 42

I remember a friend trying to get his shiny new AWE64 to work with his off-brand beige box. Either the printer port or the sound card could work, because they had incompatible DMA channel-address space combos.

He must have had a strange LPT port and/or address then, because normally those wouldn't be in conflict. I've had cards with fairly huge numbers of dip switches, but as long as you could get your hands on some documentation you were OK. Even very cheap ATA multi-I/O cards usually had fairly generous I/O ranges. I had a 120MB Maxtor ATA disk in the 386DX25 on which I first ran Linux, on a $15 no-brand ATA card, and with a 1MB Trident VGA card. That $15 card had pretty decent UARTs, too.

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