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Comment Re:No good options here (Score 1) 91

If you're in a "crisis" now, you've been in a "crisis" for 2 decades with the exception of only a couple of years.

The rates are bad, we don't focus on using the least bad estimate we produce, and we stave off crisis to a degree with mediocre public assistance programs which struggle to cover needs for lack of funding but which really amount to can-kicking. That's better than nothing, but still leaves us poised for disaster. If Cheeto Benito successfully terminates these programs (as he has been trying to do, and he has successfully been interfering with them) then the looming crises become immediate not quite overnight, but in literally more 10-30 days.

Comment This is an interesting topic, at least to me. (Score 1) 2

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

Submission + - The MOST artificial intelligence is Chinese? (linkedin.com) 2

shanen writes: Pardon my clickbait and quasi-joke Title suggestion, but the topic has been on my mind for a while. I have not been pursuing the research topic seriously, though I did take several close looks at DeepSeek when it was the center of hoopla and have sometimes benchmarked against it since then. But this summary of new Chinese AI was just pushed at me by the AI-empowered algorithms of LinkedIn and I'm wondering how seriously I should take it.

If we (non-Chinese?) were actually technically ahead of them (Chinese heathens?) then this would not be an issue. Unlike the computer security race we lost a few years ago? However the real concern is not with these public AI tools, but with the secret ones, both government and private... (Bond villain conspiracy theories, anyone?) But I don't think there is likely to be an outspoken and authentic expert from inside China also inside the (Slashdot) house.

Personal disclaimers needed? Lately most of my AI games of the non-fun type have involved Claude, but Gemini keeps sticking it's remarkably unintelligent nose into my business to the point where I've become much more tolerant of Bing than I used to be. More broadly, there used to be a time when I would have high confidence of seeing useful discussions on Slashdot with some known experts who were probably the real people to boot (in at least two senses of "real"), but these days Slashdot has also been infected with the lack-of-trust virus. Another terminal case? I can't say, but I'm no longer surprised when one of the oldtimers keels over. Bash.org had a great collection of jokes...

Comment Re:The best outcome... (Score 1) 113

Today I'm mostly avoiding working on cars, but I do have some ongoing projects and they suck. I can't wait for "every" vehicle to be an EV, which isn't practical for me now, but hopefully will be in the future. But I really don't want everything phoning home with information about me constantly. That information could be used against me, so I don't want it to be collected. Nothing prevents it here except opting out by not buying the whatever-it-is, but sometimes you need the thing.

As vehicles age, they tend to get first cheaper but then more expensive to maintain, so just staying in the past forever isn't realistic. It would be nice to have some options without the constant oversight.

Comment Ok. (Score 4, Interesting) 64

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Comment Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score 4, Interesting) 60

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 105

Oh look, modded down by a clown, it must be a day that ends in y.

I know the tower near my home that I normally get signal from doesn't have a generator because it went out after the batteries ran out when we had our last quake, and Verizon promised to bring in a generator but didn't. They wouldn't need to bring one in if it were already there.

I know the tower near my work has a generator because I can see it. I could poke it with a stick through the cyclone fence.

There's a bunch of trolls on here who are mad that I know things. It's very fucking weird.

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