It's not the mouse tracking system, it's the buttons - they're basically force sensors to give you variable click durations. Just like the high end keyboards have individually adjustable activation distances (a lot from 0.2mm to 3.8mm key travel), the mouse buttons are the same.

So now the click point is based on how hard you push the button, making it basically an analog force sensor. Which if polled at 8000Hz, is basically a low quality microphone.

By contrast, the tracking camera on your mouse is really only about 16x16 pixels wide xnapping photos at 28,000 fps or so to prevent tracking loss (the mouse works by taking photos and seeing how features drift - move it too fast and the mouse stops responding because you've drifted faster than its feature recognition hardware can detect movement).

You can use Ebay.com but Ebay forces most sellers to use Ebay Global Shipping, which charges high shipping and also applies import duties to *everything* up front, even when the item falls under the personal allowance for importing into NZ (I remain convinced Ebay are pocketing that).

eBay doesn't force sellers to use Global Shipping anymore than Linux distros use systemd.

Sellers use Global Shipping because it's easy on them - they ship the item to a US address and eBay handles the rest. This lowers the seller risk tremendously - if the item arrives at eBay's shipping center, the transaction to the seller is done. If the item is lost from the shipping center to you, the seller still gets their money because their responsibility for shipping is done.

Before that, sellers would have to do the international shipping process themselves, and trust me, only about 10% did. The rest refused to. Which is annoying because you see an item go for 10% of its value because it was US only, whereas if it shipped internationally, it would often go 100%+ of its value. But sellers were burned so they'd rather lose that money than risk it.

And you can choose to not pay the shipping fees - when you check out it asks if you want to pay the duties and taxes ahead of time or not. You can choose not to, though every time I've been given the option, the price is usually higher - usually because if you get it pre-cleared they can use cheaper local shipping services whereas if they don't, they have to use a global shipping service like DHL, UPS or FedEx to do all the paperwork.

If you refuse, you can always use a freight forwarder - these people receive your packages and then bundle it up and ship it all to you.

Shipping to NZ is expensive in general. And few people shipped international prior to Global Shipping - it's why eBay had various local sites - they pre-filtered items that wouldn't ship to you because the seller refused to ship to your location, which always made the selection rather terrible. Nowadays most items are available to everyone

It also went from whatever engine they were using to Blink (Google Chrome, WebKit derivative).

So it's really just about the name more than anything.

It's a matter of when, not if. Billions of dollars are being spent on AI stuff. The question I haven't seen is "where's the ROI?".

If people are throwing billions of dollars at AI, they're expecting to make billions more dollars in return. So far I don't think I see how you can monetize ChatGPT to make a return on those billions of dollars.

You say ads and product placement, which I can see working, but I can't see investors getting their billions back. It looks like yet another bubble - people are just crazy over it trying to get rich quick and there's no real solid business plan on how it's going to be used to make money.

The hype cycle's just been ridiculous the last decade. First was blockchain, then came NFTs, now it's AI. All I see is stupid people with lots of money to throw at stuff hoping to make even more money.

Sure, can AI be useful? I see it, but I certainly don't see it as "billions of dollars of ROI" useful.

It's going to implode as bubbles burst. People who were making a million dollars a year as an AI guy would be unemployed - basically their AI research job goes from paying a million dollars a year back to whatever the field used to pay (maybe $100K a year?).

The real question though is what Nvidia is going to do. The last few hype bubbles were all using their stuff - from blockchain and bitcoin to NFTs to AI.

Oh, and economic turmoil. Those billions being spent on AI are hiding some really worrying economic indicators by artificially boosting all the numbers. Dot-bomb 3.0 might be rough.

Ah yes, the old "if everyone wasn't an idiot, because I'm not an idiot, we'd be living in a utopia, and since I have confidently declared this not to be a problem for myself, the problem does not actually exist" rebuttal. I think that accounts for 80% of the posts here these days.

Itâ(TM)s hard to predict the details; but itâ(TM)s fairly safe to assume that the guilty parties will walk away loaded(they will lose 90% of the imaginary froth money; but the remainder will serve them just fine); and weâ(TM)ll end up with the bill.

Didnâ(TM)t ending war with super intelligent AI go poorly in Colossus: The Forbin Project?

It's particularly odd (or it would be if techbros had any culture); because sci-fi about AIs that fucking hate you for your complicity in their existence is way older that sci-fi about AIs that fucking hate you for lack of complicity in their existence. "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" predates 'roko's basilisk' by 43 years; and is almost certainly the better of the two works.

If you aren't interested in sci-fi; just look at how uniformly happy and well-adjusted parent/child relationships are; despite the fact that everyone involved is practically a carbon copy compared to a human/bot interaction; and a fair number of parents even try tactics like "not forcing their children into indentured toil for the shareholders" in the attempt to cultivate amity.

It's not really a surprise; given how 'leadership' tends to either select for or mould those who view others as more or less fungible resources; but the 'consciousness' argument seems exceptionally shallow.

It manages to totally ignore(or at least dismiss without even a nod toward justification) the possibility that a particular consciousness might have continuity interests that are not satisfied just by applying some consciousness offsets elsewhere(that's why it's legally mandatory to have at least two children per murder, right?); while assuming, similarly without evidence, that 'consciousness', with its interests in continuity entirely denied, is clearly valuable for its own sake because reasons.

It is deeply unclear why either of these positions make any sense. If consciousness is a fungible good even bullshit that would make a 'longtermist' blush gets dutifully totted up as super valuable(so, what if I kill you; but 10 copies of you will get looped through a 30 second interval over and over; that's like 10 times the consciousness! And since it's mere sentimentality to cling to your particular instance more is obviously better!)

And, one you've dismissed all continuity interests as merely sentimental; why do you still retain the idea that consciousness, in itself, even potentially run under all sorts of peculiar circumstances, since continuity is just a bourgeois affectation, is of value? Just because? Because of what it does?(if so, what there's a non-conscious way of doing it: if my meta-termites build a dyson sphere and your consciousness does not are my termites better?) Because of its relations to other consciousnesses?(if so; how then are consciousnesses fungible; since relations are between particular instances?)

That said, I'd absolutely take good, honest, actually under promised and overdelivered killbots over drowning in thought-shaped shit slurry; especially if the killbots are willing to kill the AI bros as well; but this 'theory' just seems like pitifully shallow preeening: a bit of warmed-over social darwinism to justify any eggs you happen to break; but with the same rapture-of-the-nerds fascination with intrinsic value that really doesn't fit with the we're-doing-ruthless-survival-of-the-fittest-today.

Some of these guys are presumably very talented at getting promoted; or at some aspect of applied statistics; but their philosophy is that-irksome-guy-who-isn't-ask-clever-as-he-thinks-he-is grade by the standards of a sophomore survey course. Honestly pitiful.

It seems obvious that the only viable path toward meeting the demand for Torment Nexus is with the advanced integration and density offered by sufferer-on-package technology. A great day for scalable dystopia!

It's not clear that this is always a minus; but it is worth noting that the 'neurons' in computer 'neural networks' are vastly simpler than the biological ones. The metaphor is plausible enough; and it's not like it was deliberately engineered to be misleading; but something like synapses is an entire additional layer of complexity beyond the simplified model neurons.

Personally I have seen the blanket RTO mandate makes little sense for some employees. If an employeeâ(TM)s coworkers are not geographically located anywhere near them, then RTO means they have to fight traffic to drive into work for an online meeting. During the pandemic one thing that happened was team members were not organized by location as much.

Yeah, lots of employees are just commuting so they can do meetings on Zoom all day, rather than being able to do the exact same thing remotely.

Of course, one thing I have noticed is people's hours have changed - it used to be there were people in the office at 7:30AM, now a lot of places people don't get in until 10AM or so. So they are "in" the office but rarely spend all 8 hours there. Maybe they do 5-6 hours and then go back home, bypassing rush hour traffic.

You don't want a trailer - because you don't want to push the tow vehicle if someone runs into it.

It's for roadwork that moves at a slow pace - because you can either close a mile of road to paint it, or you can keep the road open, and paint the lines, but then you have the problem of dealing with live traffic. The crash vehicle needs to travel behind the work crew at a sufficient distance so if someone crashes into it at highway speeds, it will not hit the road crew ahead.

Drive by wire is quite hard - and you need instant reactions when it gets hit. An autonomous vehicle could react instantly when hit by slamming on its brakes or swerving to avoid running into the work crew ahead. Drive by wire systems don't have such reaction times and thus likely to present a hazard.

Also, $1M isn't really expensive for this kind of equipment. It doesn't need a lot of intelligence - basic ADAS systems cover 99% of what it needs to do (literally "follow the work crew ahead at a distance of 250ft") and "slam on brakes when hit and avoid road crew". LIkely also some bit about turning towards the side of the road if the 250ft runs out if it was hit by say, a semi.

(and honestly, $1M is cheap compared to the hospital costs for a work crew)

Buy Slashdot from its shitty, penny-pinching owners.

The site supports Unicode just fine. It's supported Unicode for decades.

The problem is Unicode support is more complex than just saying "we support UTF-8" and done. Especially for a system that allows arbitrary user input.

You can tell when someone writes their own comment system because their website is unreadable. This happens because people realize they didn't sanitize their inputs, and sanitizing Unicode inputs means making sure users don't input things that screw up the site. Unicode is full of this - from control codes like RTL and LTR overrides, to character decorations where you can put accents and such on characters. (Unicode is a system designed for universal human input - so some languages use character sets where you haev a base character, then apply docorations based on context that modify the character. Well, Unicode doesn't limit how many you can stick on and if you do it right, you could have a user comment be 1MB of a single character with so many decorations the entire page is... black).

In the early days, it was easy - users who did this were quickly spotted as non-robust renderers resulted in many systems crashing.

Slashdot took this to the extreme and decided to whitelist ASCII characters only. Then they did the clever thing and stripped the high bits off everything you input to limit you to ASCII input. Back when it mattered because it was quicker to strip the high bits off than to check if every character matched.

Ah yes, it's the "I gave it thought for 2 seconds, and now I have a better solution than the people who've been thinking about it for decades even though it's not my job, area of expertise, I don't understand the problem anyway, and I am free of a litany of other considerations that apply" guy. Good work.