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Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 20

retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI

Exactly how do they envision an autocomplete gaining sentience?

It hasn't been "autocomplete" in a long time. Sure, there's a training step based on a corpus of Human language, and the autoregressive process outputs a single token at a time, but reinforcement learning trains specific behaviors beyond merely completing a sentence.

Besides, the best way to write something indistinguishable from what a Human might write is to, well, "think" like a Human.

Comment Will we finally learn our lesson? (Score 1) 32

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

Comment The vector art 3D rotate tool is super cool (Score 2) 7

I watched the "Project Turntable" video, and that is unbelievably cool.

To work, the AI has to recognize what the drawing represents, figure out how to reverse-transform the 2D representation into a 3D object, and work out what the hidden parts should look like. It's amazing.

It's only a short step between this and working out walk cycles, matching mouth movements to dialogue, adding facial expressions, etc.

This will revolutionize 2D animation.

Comment Re:Modern security products seem to increase... (Score 2) 30

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

The whole world has realized that they need to start air-gapping databases

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

Comment Is this a surprise? (Score 3, Insightful) 18

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Comment Musk should thank his lucky stars for this (Score 5, Interesting) 222

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment Re: The nationwide "experiment" (Score 1) 354

I see it that we have evolved to the point where we can recognize the same flawed argument used to oppose one form of moral harm to when trotted out to oppose a different form of moral harm.

There is no need to try and force an equivalency on different types of moral harm; that's just another form of "whataboutism".

UBI makes a huge dent in the problems of homelessness and hunger - it does a lot more than that too, but just those two problems alone are major moral harms that deserve being addressed, if not solved outright. And while it is a comparison between apples and locomotives, I'll put "hunger" and "homelessness" on the same side of the moral scale as "slavery".

Comment Re: The nationwide "experiment" (Score 1) 354

> you also need to talk mechanisms to keep it from snowballing out of control.

What's to snowball? UBI is fixed to population size - it is *universal* basic income, so everybody gets it. The US population is growing by 0.5% annually, so unless there is a dramatic increase in birth rate coupled to a dramatic decrease in death rate, this is a fixed cost.

That comes out to roughly $164 billion, or roughly 25% of the annual defense budget. Not only is that not "out of control", it is relatively cheap for what it buys you.

Comment Re: The nationwide "experiment" (Score 5, Interesting) 354

Seems to me a similar argument was put forward vis a vis slavery - as in "we need slavery or the economy would collapse"

What the pearl-clutchers seem to not quite get is that the guy staying home and playing video games is still contributing to the economy. His UBI is buying food, rent , power, and video games. He almost certainly isn't *saving* any money, so 100% of that UBI goes back into the economy.

What he *isn't* doing is being a lazy, inefficient worker. He's not phoning it in on a manufacturing job, or a clerical job. He isn't making mistakes and lowering productivity. There is *value* in having that guy out of the workforce.

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