Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Good news bad news time (Score 2) 24

The bad news is that Robert f Kennedy Jr and Christi Noem are going to be in charge of any sort of containment response,

The proper containment response appears to be: administer antibiotics when a case is found. Since there is no vaccine and prophylactic treatment with antibiotics is an absolute no-no (breeds resistant strains of bacteria).

In other words, the proper response is to do nothing different. Having hissy fits about Kennedy and Noem is also counter-indicated.

Comment Re: Regulations written in blood (Score 1) 117

Think about how one would "accidentally" bump two switches, approximately one second apart. Even if the "accident" occured as a result of one of the crew guarding the throttle position (see the video in a previous post) and then bumping the switches to off, that would occur nearly simultaneously. The approximate one second delay suggests that one switch was lifted over its detent followed by the other.

Comment Federal law is ... (Score 1) 13

broadband is an "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" under federal law,

... an idiot. Still back in the era of 'the Internet is a series of tubes.' My ISP supplies me with _no_ information on their own. Only that which is provided by actuall information services, like Wikipedia, Amazon and Slashdot for subsequent transportation to customers. Actually the 'series of tubes' description comes a lot closer than what these judges cooked up.

Comment Re: thank god (Score 1) 35

And what would we have in their place?

The credit cards that banks (like JPMorgan) offer their customers. "Alternative payment platforms" can coexist within the same clearing and settlement system as physical cards. And with the same data requirements. Transactions only need a yes/no verification for the amount entered at the point of sale. They don't need my banking and financial history.

Comment Re:It's not this is different (Score 2) 109

We really didn't have the tech back then we really do now.

Yeah, we did. Write out a pseudo-code (English language) description of what you want done. A _complete_ description. Hand it to a machine which generates and compiles the code. Done. Back in the 1990s.

But what we had in the 1990s was a group of middle managers that realized that their status and income depended on the number of warm bodies they had reporting to them. So they fought the move to technologies that would reduce their headcount from 500 to 5. Those people are retired and, increasingly dead. And we have Wall Street investors asking where all that expense money is going when you could just buy a beige box to do the work.

We can't stop AI there is trillions of dollars to be made

Not once the investment community realizes that they are being taken for a ride. Current AI is garbage because it's envisioned as a general purpose tool. We have great AI that can model protein folding or do many specific tasks. But the GPAI push is just designed to part suckers from their money.

Comment YouTube cares about nothing but $$$$ (Score 5, Insightful) 74

YouTube's only concern these days is revenue and profit.

They breach their own community guidelines each and every day by running scam ads that continue to run despite hundreds or even thousand viewer-reports. Those ads run until the advertiser's spend is exhausted -- however if a creator (the life-blood of the platform) is falsely accused of "scams or deceptive practices" by YT's AI then they're gone in the blink of an eye.

They also allow AI spambots to post endless comments linking to porn pages/sites and claim that their AI can't automatically detect such things -- although that same AI, when unleashed on creator's videos, constantly demonetizes anything that is deemed to be unsuitable.

I hate the AI dross that is overwhelming YT as much as anyone but I really have doubts that YT intends to do anything effective to stem its flow. You see, so long as AI-generated videos are getting eyeballs on ads, YouTube will be happy because they'll be generating revenue and profits.

Let's face it, YouTube is actually *encouraging* the use of AI on its platform. AI suggests ideas for new videos and will create thumbnails for you. VEO3 will even create shorts or entire videos on demand. Google wants to sell its AI services and is pitching them at YouTube creators so they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot are they?

This is why I'm moving to self-hosting my own videos on an instance of PeerTube and I encourage other creators to do the same. When you self-host you have *FULL* control and you no longer have to worry about censorship or losing your entire community just because one of YT's AI bots has runamok and identifies your cute cat videos as CSAM.

Comment Re:the problem is being numb to disasters (Score 2) 194

Numb to emergency alerts. After the WEA system went live, the first one I got was from a Medicare broker: "Call now with your Zip Code and make sure you are getting everything you are entitled to." (The dog whistle for all retired people.)

Amber Alerts are next on my list. Solve your child custody fights on your own time. The recent Travis Decker case (killed his three daughters) illustrated how useless the alert system was. Because they don't issue them for planned visitation. This one also falls into the same catagory as the Blue Alert Program. Yeah, right. I'm going to be staring at the guy in the next car who might be the one with no compunction about killing cops.

Comment Re:Ain't none (Score 1) 42

But I see a flaw in that work. From the article:

However, this study by Clowe et al. made no attempt to analyze the Bullet Cluster using MOND or any other modified gravity theory.

Proof by contradiction would have been much more powerful evidence that dark matter exists. Apply MOND or other theories and show that the results would not fit the measurements. But no. Some people just don't want to test their beliefs.

Slashdot Top Deals

% "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work" -- Robert Orben

Working...