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Comment Re:Prices are sticky (Score 5, Informative) 92

Anyone expecting corporations to not try to make a profit and extract maximum value for their shareholders ignore that that's their fiduciary duty.

"this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfo...

"We ... show that [the Shareholder Primacy Norm] is not a legal requirement, at least under the guise of shareholder value maximization. This is in contrast to the common assertion that managers are legally constrained from addressing corporate social responsibility issues if doing so would be inconsistent with the economic interests of shareholders."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p...

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 22

> Am I the only one that can't imagine any possible value an AI assistant would bring to a game?

I use AI assistants lots when playing games!

At the moment it's Minecraft. I want to figure how to build something, e.g. a golem farm. I look for tutorials online but (1) they're all videos which I hate watching, (2) they're all hyper-specific and concrete, "place this block here then that block there", but what I want to understand are the foundational principles so I can know how to adapt the golem farm to my own purposes -- what are the mechanics, how do they spawn, how does water flow, what is the SOLUTION SPACE of possibilities.

Gemini AI has been really good at this kind of thing.

The other time is when I get stuck, or want advice on how to make a character build to achieve a certain end. Once again the online advice is typically in the form of "walkthroughs", do step 1 then step 2 then step 3, in other words just one possible way to play the game, and it's too easy to accidentally read too far and spoil the rest of it. I don't want that. I like the feeling of openness and possibilities. I again ask Gemini, and it gives me advice on just the particular bit I'm stuck on, and is better at showing for me the available options.

Comment Alternative solution is simple (Score 1) 304

The alternative to auto stop/start is simple.

Reduce the amount of time cars spend idling.

Just replace all stop lights with smart sensors that detect when an intersection is empty and allow the approaching car to continue through without stopping and idling. It's a simple fix.

It just would cost a ton of infrastructure money. It would meet the goal of reducing idling.

Would this ever get implemented? Hell, no. It's much simpler and cost-effective to push it onto the car manufacturers and slowly address the problem, rather than address the problem for all cars. And the tech for this is as hard as the lines of autonomous vehicle tech and pedestrian detection. Lots of wonderful law suits the for the times the lights let a car proceed, and a pedestrian gets hit.

Of course, this is a silly solution and much more expensive than the auto start/start that is currently in play. But hey, why not?

Comment Re: While they are at it ... (Score 2) 33

Fox News is just about always truthful. You just have to watch out for the tricks they use (on 95%+ of their stories)...

(1) non-representative selection. Headline "illegal immigrant murders local mother", which is true in this case, but they don't report the other 99 murders that went by immigrants, and don't report a general trend of immigrants causing less crime overall per capita. (I made up this specific example to illustrate their trick)

(2) report quotes: headline "Biden's senility was covered up, says person". They are 100% factually reporting that the person did indeed say this.

In both cases the reader is left with an untrue impression despite the stories containing only truth. It's because it's not the whole truth.

Comment Re: Or, hear me out... (Score 4, Informative) 98

William Shatner is a classically trained Shakespearean actor who appeared in festivals and on Broadway prior to switching from stage to television. His TOS enunciation and emphasis is due mostly to his experience with radio performances (which were over the top verbally) combined with directors on TOS constantly telling him to increase the astonishment. And in reality, wasn't anywhere near as pervasive or dramatic as the pop culture version that pokes fun at Kirk.

Comment "Premium" ? (Score 2) 57

I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

Comment Re:Single Linux Target Platform for Games (Score 2) 30

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.

Comment Re:Fear is the appropriate response. (Score 1) 89

The hallucination problem _cannot_ be fixed. It is a fundamental part of the mathematical model.

I think it can. I've been working on getting an LLM (Claude Sonnet 3.7) to add missing type annotations to python code. When I naively ask it "please add types" then like you said it has about a 60% success rate and 40% hallucination rate as measured by "would an expert human have come up with the same type annotations and did they pass the typechecker".

But when I have a much more careful use of the LLM, micromanaging what sub-tasks it does, then it has a 70% success rate, and 30% rate of declining because it didn't have confidence to come up with an answer. Effectively there were no more hallucinations. (I got these numbers by spot-checking 200 cases).

So I think hallucination can be solved for some tasks, by the right kind of task-specific micromanagement and feedback loops.

Comment Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score 1) 19

OpenAI has $12bn annual revenue, about 3% that of Apple, about $3million per employees per year (compared to $2 million per employee per year at Apple).

I think OpenAI has a huge amount of growth potential even just from predictable growth over the next several years, even if steep changes towards AGI don't come.

Comment Re:why (Score 1) 70

All good in theory, except that you likely need something like a 200" TV so actually tell the difference between 8k and 16k.

Like I said, I figured 8k would be enough resolution for soccer. As for 16k, I imagine that something with bandwidth for 16k would translate that bandwidth into twice the frequency for 8k, which would be ideal for soccer.

[Lawrence of Arabia] Let me guess, you are watching these classics at 1080p, or at best 4k.

I watched Lawrence of Arabia on a Cinerama screen. It was breathtaking. I expect that the higher resolutions described here will help more places (like movie theaters) display higher quality prints. I suspect they'll open up new avenues like fake windows or full-wall screens in residences.

Comment Re:why (Score 2) 70

Do you watch soccer? 4k resolution means a player's head is about 14 pixels high, not enough to make out much beyond a blob of color; their jersey is 60 pixels high, enough to make out the number but not much more. Doubling the vertical resolution (i.e. going to 8k) would likely be enough to let you make out similar detail to what you'd see in real life. (Frame rate is another issue: HDMI 2.0 allows 4k at 60hz which is too slow when panning in a soccer game; HDMI 2.1 allows 4k at 120hz which is probably enough). I think that 16k is probably the right bandwidth to get soccer looking good.

Do you do VR? 4k per eye isn't good enough for VR yet. It's possible that 16k will be, but we might still need more.

Do you watch the gorgeous film classics like Lawrence of Arabia? One of the (many) things that make it look great is that it was shot on 65mm, equivalent to about 12k resolution.

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