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Comment It's merely a stop gap measure not a solution (Score 1) 198

This is a stop gap measure not a solution. The real solution is the start building nuclear power plants using the latest technology which is a thousand times safer and more efficient. New reactors can run a variety of fuels including the processing of fissionable waste from the old reactors. They can be built far smaller and fit inside a shipping container. They can also be made smaller still and dropped into a lead lined deep shaft in the earth. When the fuel is spent you fill in the hole with more lead and concrete and drill a new hole. New reactor designs will never meltdown like the old designs.

The UK has a fascinating design where an isotope pellet is fired into another isotype target which causes a short-term fusion reaction which heats a substrate such as lithium which liquifies and passes through a heat exchanger to turn water into high pressure steam. Every few seconds you fire another pellet at the target. The moment you stop firing the reaction stops, the lithium solidifies and the reactor is shut down. You just start firing again to bring it back online. The tech is cheap and can definitely be scaled from small to enormous. Many benefits.

Data centers are already talking about commercial nuclear power using new reactor designs. In the meantime, we need to keep pursuing multiple avenues to reach productive fusion reactors. If we can get it working and produce far more energy than it takes to maintain the reaction and keep it contained it will be limitless clean power source.

Comment WTAF? (Score 1) 155

1. GNU coreutils is ancient as is sudo. There's bound to be a metric ton of legacy code in there for all sorts of bizarre edge cases encountered across many platforms and systems over decades. Duplicating all the C code into RUST is a nightmare and the evidence is found in the delays with the uutils being deployed.
2. This is not about security it's about hijacking the GNU General Public License.

I was going to upgrade an LTS server to this new release but now I am seriously considering making a different Linux distribution choice. Ditching Ubuntu LXD in favor of Incus as well. Yes, I know you can install GNU coreutils to override the rust-coreutils (uutils) and even GNU sudo but I want no part of Rust replacements until they have had several years behind them.

I might just go with Fedora or NixOS without Flakes. Yes, I know Fedora is providing rust-coreutils but it is still optional and not the default like it is with Ubuntu. With NixOS it is declarative, so I get to define what I want regardless. Another option is GUIX but sadly, their package list means I would have to package things myself in GNU Guile Scheme way too often. LISP is fun but I don't want to do that on a server.

Comment Re:AI isn't going anywhere (Score 1) 123

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

Comment Re:Who watches the watchers? (Score 4, Insightful) 165

It is possible to put laws into place that require how public-private partnerships work. It would be an imposition upon Flock and upon the police. And that is just fine, and as it should be.

Law enforcement contracting to the private sector should not be allowed to be a bypass of our rights.

Comment Re:Sounds like... (Score 1) 98

The only place I see Al in the legal profession making sense is to do basic caselaw research, where it can cite the sources and the references upstream and downstream to those sources. The lawyer should be responsible to review the claimed caselaw citations to determine the merit of their support for the argument that the lawyer is making, and to pick the particular citations to use that are the strongest for the particular case.

Likewise the same sort of search but inverted, for one's opponent's most likely arguments or rebuttals might be performed, again with the lawyer doing the review based on the citations that the Al tool provided.

There was a television series in the 2010s called Person of Interest where the premise was that one of the main characters had managed to achieve Al, but in order to satisfy legal constraints, the Al was only allowed to spit-out a single phrase about a person, rather than any detail of any sort. It was up to the limited number of persons associated with the Al to figure out why this 'person of interest' had been referenced, whether they were the perpetrator, the victim, a witness, or someone who would suffer downstream effects. While soft science fiction, and pretty clearly taking inspiration from the older series Quantum Leap in having to figure out why they were there, the concept had some merit as to how Al should really be used. It should be treated as untrusted, it should be treated as requiring thorough review. It should be treated as another tool available, but no more trustable or authoritative than any other, and arguably a bit less trustable, a bit less authoritative.

Comment Re:Functionally illiterate is the new norm (Score 1) 98

Except that in basically all of the examples that you cite, the transition was from one proven technology slowly into another technology that was at least approaching some degree of maturity by the time it it mass-market adoption.

In most of those examples. early adopters were nearly all ultrawealthy who were using it for themselves. Those who weren't incredibly rich were technology-enthusiasts of some fashion or another. Those groups initially worked-out most of the showstopper-problems with the technology before widespread adoption, and in many of those industries either compatibility or outright law added extra constraint over time.

AI for the masses has taken a different development path. It's not ready and is misbehaving, to the detriment of many. "Hallucinations" should not be tolerated at this scale of deployment.

Comment Who watches the watchers? (Score 4, Insightful) 165

Or as it was put nearly two millennia ago, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

This is why systems like this require human oversight. Arguably if there's a judicial review process for allowing searches, then this system needs to be required to use that process. With a system containing precinct, local court district, municipal, county, state, and federal district jurisdictions, the nature of setting up proper permissions alone should be a mandatory herculean effort, probably the most difficult part of the entire system.

Without such a system requiring judicial oversight to confirm that searches are authorized, all we have is a further slide into a police-state.

Submission + - China's Top Spy Chief Warns AI Is a Threat to Party Rule (gvwire.com)

fjo3 writes: China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the AI debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that AI could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Chen called for more party control over AI and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Comment Re:Kimmel Doesn't Want to give Republicans a Platf (Score 2, Informative) 279

That was about their opinion shows, not their news shows. That case was specifically about Tucker Carlson.

Those kinds of arguments weren't saving Fox from the Dominion lawsuit, though. If they seemed like to have worked, Fox wouldn't have settled for almost $800 million right before trial.

Comment Re:Talarico is a gay vegan (Score 4, Informative) 279

Hastert doesn't have a law named after him. There's the Hastert Rule, which is an informal rule that no bill should be brought before the House to vote on it unless it already has the support of the majority of the majority party.

Hastert was convicted of structuring withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements and making false statements. The charges themselves were not inherently about homosexuality, though it came about from him covering up his same-sex abuse of a minor, and the indictment didn't mention the sexual abuse, and his allocution under the plea deal didn't initially mention it. He did admit it under pressure from the judge, who seemed to start to lean against accepting his plea without him admitting to the molestation, for which he could not be charged because the statute of limitations had expired decades prior.

Hastert has never come out as gay. Most child molesters, even those who molest the same sex, never identify as homosexual.

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