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Comment I'm happy with my System 76 laptop (Score 1) 52

Just a couple weeks ago, I replaced the battery in my 6-year-old Lemur Pro. Not very hard, and now it's great at holding a charge again.

Yes, getting this thing in 2020 cost me 2-3 times as much as today's new Macbook Neo, but I needed a machine I could rely on, that wasn't designed as though I'm the manufacturer's adversary.

Comment pretty much nothing the US is doing successfully (Score 1) 233

Out of curiosity, What exactly is the proper modern approach to warfare?

1. Propagandize on teh intarwebs to get the useful idiots baying in the wrong direction. Including demonizing the wrong 1%.
2. Collect kompromat to control politicians. If none is available, have a program to create some. (RELEASE THE EPSTIEN FILES.)
3. Assymetric warfare, use swarms of cheap drones s while the enemy uses 1 million dollar missiles to try to stop them.
4. sabotage, particularly cyber and ecoonomic .
5. Don't be a blundering loudmouth. Diplomacy has a much greater ROI. Needing to blow things up is a failure.
0. Make sure you've got people on the inside working in your interests instead of those of their own nation.

Comment just like the last war (Score 3, Interesting) 233

Looks like the ADE 651 got a quantum upgrade.


Kind of like how in WWII the allies promoted the idea that carrots help with your night vision to obfuscate the fact that they had RADAR to explain away how their night fighters kept shooting down German planes. Even Bugs Bunny played his patriotic part for the war effort.

Comment What I find most fascinating is ... (Score 1) 118

... that the ultra-tech ultra-capitalist are the ones actually making true marxism possible, recognizing that if all goes as planned capitalism will soon have reached its final goal of making itself superfluos and that we need a post-scarcity post-capitalist measures to handle what's next.

In that regard Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk and Co. are more woke and progressive than any l00ny noisemaker on the interwebs could ever dream to be. The irony is quite impressive.

Comment Re:Speed enforcement (Score 4, Interesting) 196

2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.

This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.

When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.

OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)

Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.

The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost .. a game?

Comment Just build a staircase already. (Score 1) 47

I was into climbing and moutaineering in my teens. I clearly remember when climbing an 8k mountain actually meant something and doing it proved you were an experienced hardcore expedition climber. Everest today is such a joke and farce that I'd be embarrassed to brag of even attempt a summit. They should just install a Via Ferratta, stairs and bridges all the way to the summit and be done with it. That would actually make sense, given the state of things we've reached. They have actual traffic effing jams at the summit and the rainbow flank is littered with the dead bodies of dimwitts taken out by Darwin. It's called "rainbow flank" because of all the colored jackets of the dead.

Just build a staircase, ask an obscene fee to pay for it and void all insurance for anyone who goes above 5500 meters. Problem solved.

Comment Re:really? (Score 1) 125

That's generally how it's being done. The robot reads the code and writes specs. Then another robot reads the specs and writes code. If courts still accept the traditional clean room defense (and why wouldn't they?) then they're probably going to say it isn't a derived work.

It looks like the big catch, the actual source of uncertainty, is that the instance of the robot that reads the specs and writes code, may have seen the original code as part of its training data. That'll be enough to keep it from being a true clean room. In those cases, you'll be totally right.

But for any particular given project, was it trained on the original code? That'll be a case-by-case thing, and I think in a very long-term way, the answer will increasingly be No, simply because codebots' need to keep training on newly-published code, will diminish.

As an analogy, imagine you're a human author, and for some weird reason, one thing you like to do is have people tell you high-level plot summaries (specs) and then you write a detailed story from that. Someone says "the moon is unusually bright one night and people fear something bad has happened" and you write a story much like Larry Niven's Inconstant Moon, from that prompt alone. And you do this with 100 more stories, and most of them honestly don't appear to be derived. You take specs like "bombardier has crazy war experiences" and your resulting story is nothing like Catch-22.

But then one day, you're up in the attic and you find an old box that's been sitting there for decades, and inside, you find an old, worn, dog-eared paperback of Larry Niven stories which happens to include Inconstant Moon. Oh shit, you must have read that 45 years ago and then somehow "forgot" that you had, so your story wasn't truly independent of Niven's work. Your story turned out to not be "clean" at all, whoops! It was a derived work after all, because you read it ("trained on it") when you were a kid.

But the other 100 stories? Nope, those really were clean. Your story-writing process was almost legally foolproof, except that you had to learn reading and writing at some point, so your childhood favorites needed to be off-limits.

Comment Works pretty well. (Score 4, Insightful) 49

I'm part of that 5%+. The thing about gaming on Linux is that I have no time or mood for fussing around with compatibility issues. Steams Proton layer handles quite a few games without trouble. I used to be a GoG only person but since their requirements for Linux versions are very specific and cause trouble on newer versions of Linux I finally installed Steam on Linux a few weeks back. Sure it's quite a performance hog and it keeps you in the dark about wether it's taking so long to launch because it's running some background update thingie and you have to use top to see what's going on, but other than that, the games listed as playable on protondb launch with a simple click. Which is good.

Guess I'm a steam customer now. After, what, 25 years? I remember when Half-Life 2 came out and they tied it to steam to push the first big digital game distribution platform. Guess that was/is a huge success. Provide good value, get my money. I don't mind.

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Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. -- Bertrand Russell

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