Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment A bunch of psycho tech bros (Score 2) 60

Want to get us all wearing glasses because we'd be walking around creating a surveillance network. Americans don't like the idea of the government running a surveillance Network so we're building our surveillance Network with Private industry and then the government taps into it with private contracts.

Americans have this weird thing where they don't care how much they are oppressed or how much the boot is on their neck as long as it's a privately owned boot. The idea of that the billionaire is getting together on their golf course is a de facto government is way too complex and abstract idea for most people. And try explaining a power vacuum to them or what happens if you don't have a powerful central government...

The way I've tried to explain it to people is imagine that in the center of the town is a giant box of guns and ammo. And anyone can just pick up the guns and ammo. And you decide that guns are dangerous so you don't pick one up. That means a handful of your neighbors can grab all of those guns and now you have to do what they say.

Large governments are the box of guns. They are an inevitability. They are up there with the nuclear bomb as inventions of humanity that once we got it we were stuck with it. You either pick up that gun and take part, which is to say you take an active role in your state and federal government and understanding it is best as you can and the systems that need to be built to make it functional. Or somebody else comes along and takes all that power for themselves and uses it against you.

The solution a lot of people come up with to deal with government is the same solution people come up with to deal with nuclear weapons which is just do away with them. And yeah that would be great. Sit down with a real anarchist sometime and they will tell you for hours how great that would be.

Except it never works because sooner or later some rich asshole builds an atomic bomb or sets up the same power structures as government and doesn't call it government.

Comment Re:Spread it evenly (Score 1) 112

"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste,"

Given the high standards this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.

Yea, those tears in the casks are due to vandalism and Democrats and of course, Joe Biden ...

Comment Dump it into the ocean (Score 1) 112

Add the waste to the existing pile off the Farallon Islands.

Excellent fishing there, you can catch rockfish and lingcod most of the season almost as fast as you can take them off the hook. I'm hardly radioactive at all, although I got terribly seasick because the water is usually really rough from the Golden Gate out to the Farallons.

Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 1) 111

However, it's because I believe many great consumer technology leaps were driven by porn: photography, home video, the internet, the smart phone, etc.

The smartphone??

I mean it was convincingly invented, if not widely used by IBM in 1993. It was made to look very impressive (albeit wired) in the late 90s by Olivetti. And of course PDAs approaching from the other end being more computer and less data. J2ME phones came out which were a pile of shit. Maybe you could get a shit game on them. I don't really know if Blackberries count: they were messaging first but did they have any generality beyond that? There was of course the legendary N900, and some impressive (for the time) yet deeply wonky Symbian devices.Then in 2007, Apple came out with a rather good dumbphone which was turned into a smartphone by Cydia, which Apple then got in on the game a year later (which is a bit weird if you think about it).

None of those were porn. It was all about connectivity and messaging and nerdy shit especially businessnerd shit (except the N900 which was real nerd shit). Then fashion, then just plain old usefulness.

I mean that's not to say people don't watch porn on a phone on a plane (shit head in 23A knows what I'm talking about you utter wanker, but not in that case literally thank god), but I don't there's a convincing case that porn had a significant role. Pocket computers were obviously useful, even more so with a data connection, and people had been trying to get them working for years before it finally took off.

Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 1) 108

A bonfire can't write Shakespeare, but it can still burn you. A car can't cook you breakfast, but if the brakes fail it can still cracks a few eggs (heads)

AI agents have no agency. They are not alive. And their capabilities are inconsistent and it struggles to translate competency in one area to another.

Comment Dude if they can barely come up with 200 mil (Score 5, Insightful) 79

To get out from under the SEC regulations then they are going to be buying a presidential election for anyone. Elon Musk dropped a quarter billion just on Trump's last election and he's going to spend the same amount of money getting the Republicans the midterms. Maybe some more.

Years ago I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire woman who was complaining that she couldn't get the time of day from congressman anymore because the billionaires could outspend her. That's the level we're at.

It's not just that you and I don't matter. If you've only got a few hundred million to spend that's not enough anymore to buy an election. That's how much money and power we have given the billionaires. Or should I save the trillionaires...

Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 1) 111

Punches very obviously not connecting suggests it's been trained on Hollywood fight scenes. The other giveaway is rapid hard cuts and shaky camera so you can't see how badly the punches are not connecting. Everything feels weightless and fake.

There is a lot of AI slop, but I wouldn't discount it being able to do something decent with the right person at the helm.

Slashdot Top Deals

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."

Working...