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Comment Why all at once? (Score 1) 13

I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

Comment Only idiots would (Score 1) 46

That's an extremely short-term analysis.

Your red-pilled lawyer will soon have a reputation. They'll find their client pool shrinking, judges not giving them the benefit of the doubt, and other lawyers not referring work to them.

They'd better do a lot of slop cases quickly and hope the money lasts, because that strategy is going to tank their practice faster than they graduated law school.

Comment Re:Logistics matter (Score 1) 60

As more and more datacenters were being announced, some skeptics kept asking about how datacenters would be powered and cooled. There was concern that the infrastructure was not adequate. "Trust me bro," always seem to be the answer. It turns out building megawatt datacenters requires a great deal of meticulous planning. Who knew?

I completely agree with this. My state was all about banning ICE vehicles and gas stoves and furnaces in about a decade...but had very few plans to handle the terawatt capacity requirements...and this was *before* datacenters got a seat at the table.

Something else that has been brought up is that with delays, the hardware in these datacenters might be obsolete by the time they are built.

I'm...not quite sure I agree with this one as much...

AI always needs the latest and greatest processors.

This...I think, has some wiggle room. Sure, training new models requires greater amounts of compute power, and as newer models and services develop, there will be a need to increase compute power. However, that doesn't mean that older models are useless. They may not be front-and-center, but they can still be used in lesser capacities. ChatGPT 3.5 isn't quite as awesome as v5, but if it's what is used to serve up ads in ChatGPT sessions, the hardware is still perfectly fit-for-purpose. Same goes for Google or Microsoft - older boards may not be front-and-center, but they can still do boring, smaller-scope tasks that are still useful.

Investors might start asking too many questions about what happened to their investments.

...we can only hope.......

Comment Gullibility (Score 3, Insightful) 5

"Incognito" has been redefined to mean "we'll pretend we don't know who you are."

More generally, if you're talking to a robot that runs on someone else's machine, you should not be surprised if the machine owner spies on you. Maybe it shouldn't work this way - I'd say it definitely shouldn't, and the big outfits acknowledge this by pretending it doesn't - but that's the world we live in.

The assumption should always be that these robots are front ends to Zuckerberg's & Google's user profiling systems. Your robot talk therapist or cofounder is trying to help Nestle and Ford manipulate you. And let's not forget LEOs and intelligence - we haven't heard much about how they're targeting this stuff yet. But they would be incompetent if they aren't.

Comment Re:IMO: NextCloud is not ready for prime time (Score 1) 46

Not exactly an answer to your question, though I've found Stalwart e-mail server has most of what "homelab" users would actually find useful which is modern email (with JMAP), calendaring, and contacts. Give Stalwart a look especially if trying to ween oneself off of Google Mail.

Agreed; Stalwart isn't a bad mail solution...but Nextcloud isn't a mail solution. The GP's unsubstantiated statement was that Nextcloud was not viable for a business of any meaningful size. Since the claim was unsubstantiated, however, it was unclear what the recommended alternative would be. GP hasn't indicated why Nextcloud isn't viable, or what would be viable for a company with a need for browser-based file access and syncing.

In fairness to the GP, a large-enough company is going to prefer Google or Microsoft simply due to a desire to pass the buck to someone...but here on Slashdot, it's a default understanding that monolithic tech companies tend to have their own problems, starting with data sovereignty and continuing with the lack of customizability. So, while they're probably right that a big enough company would prefer to problem solve via litigation rather than through technological means, business priorities neither validate or negate the merits of Nextcloud, or any other available solution, hence the question.

Comment Re:My inner editor is incensed. (Score 1) 41

Also, let's not burden EmDash with the historical baggage of Wordpress just because people are looking for an alternative. I mean, it sucks in its own special way, but it's not *THAT* terrible. Yet. Move enough people to it and I'm sure it can get there, but no reason to start its race with all the baggage of Wordpress hanging on its neck.

While Cloudflare is certainly free to release their own alternative...it's not like Wordpress lacks competition - there's Ghost and WriteFreely for blogging. There's Drupal and Joomla for website building. There's Plone, Concrete, Hugo, Silverstripe, and Ametys (if you hate yourself) for niche requirements. ClassicPress and WPDistrib are direct forks of Wordpress. All of these are free-as-in-beer. Most have some form of OSS license.

So...while I'd certainly agree that Wordpress sucks in its own way, its massive ecosystem makes it attractive to users who value the ecosystem rather than custom code development...and while EmDash might make some inroads due to Cloudflare integration, I'm not sure that the massive plugin/theme/custom code stacks will be drop-in replacements overnight...and until EmDash gives a compelling reason to move off Wordpress (or if the WP/WPE crap flares up again), EmDash is going to have an uphill battle ahead of it to accomplish what a dozen incumbents haven't.

Comment Re:IMO: NextCloud is not ready for prime time (Score 1) 46

I can hardly believe any sizable establishment would use NextCloud.
NextCloud might be okay for home use, or a very small business.

Well, if we operate under your assessment, what would be your recommended alternative for an open source (any license) file sync / collaboration suite? Owncloud? Pydio? Seafile?

Or are you suggesting OneDrive or Google Drive or Dropbox?

No seriously, I'm aware that Nextcloud has its faults and shortcomings...but if you can "hardly believe any sizeable establishment would use [it]", I'm interested in what you'd recommend as your preferred alternative.

Comment Re:Brain transplant? (Score 2) 162

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.

Comment To what end? (Score 1) 162

I can see the utility of having spare organs in certain emergencies; but how much life extension would you actually get even if the sort of neurosurgery involved in removing a brain and reattaching it to a new host's spinal cord were viable? Is the theory that the assorted ghastly flavors of neurodegeneration are actually to be blamed on older organs and everything will be fine; or is this just a very expensive way to ensure that you skip the various ways peripheral organs can kill you and are assured to be the spryest patient in the dementia ward?

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 46

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Comment Re:The Horse is Already Gone (Score 1) 68

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Comment Re:ed-tech (Score 1) 94

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

Comment Re:We've had enough hero shooters (Score 1) 42

You mean Unreal Tournament 3? That was 19 years ago, and it sold well and got good reviews.

No, Unreal Tournament (2014).

It's pretty depressing what happened, actually, because on paper, it was awesome. The base game was free, and it even had a new game mode called Blitz. The amount of maps it shipped with was pretty meager, but the goal was to have modders sell their maps/mods/skins/etc as IAPs within the game and then they got a cut. The game still allowed for private/dedicated servers, and while it lacked some of the polish of UT3, the framework was there and it really worked well as a de facto tech demo for UE4, and was surprisingly stable for an alpha release.

The problem, of course, was that Fortnite quickly became their money printer, limiting how much effort they put into developing the base game, before they finally canned it.

I'm still really bummed about it; I really liked the pre-alpha version I got to play with some friends for a bit.

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