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Comment This guy... (Score 5, Insightful) 82

Quite possibly the most incompetent FBI director in history. He's been in office for a year...couldn't someone at the FBI have secured his digital footprint in that time? Oh wait, he fired many career agents with this type of expertise and Trump also neutered CISA. Perhaps he was too busy on "business" trips involving smashing down beers at the Olympics. Or sugar-daddying his girlfriend, who is young enough to be his daughter, and desperately trying to make her a country music star. Meanwhile, where is Nancy Guthrie? What about those people named in the Epstein files?

Comment Re:That's funny (Score 1) 44

While that's the hype, it's not going to be the reality.

Yes, what they are doing has a market.

Yes, it will absolutely allow many of the masses to do what programmers have been able to do for ages. It will change the market, the cheese will move, but it won't destroy the marketplace for programmers.

I think work in graphics design is probably the best parallel. People freaked out in the 1980s when home computers could make banners and flyers. As the software advanced, you got more and more people doing Word Art, and enormous clipart catalogs let office secretaries make good looking office flyers, creative garage sale fliers, church bingo night announcements, and much more. LLMs let people continue to create this type of thing, and print-on-demand services let them send their creations out to make custom stickers and such. But most critically, NONE OF THOSE PEOPLE were hiring graphics designers for those jobs before. It enabled the masses to do some of what graphics designers do, but when it comes to real ad campaigns and professional marketing, companies know investing a few hundred dollars will bring in a few hundred people from the community, investing many thousands or millions are essential for large regional or national campaigns, those jobs continue to get the professionals.

More people making vibe-coded websites that satisfy their specific needs? Great. They weren't hiring a team of programmers for software development before, and they're not hiring a team of programmers after. Executives that claim they'll cut costs by 90% by firing all the professional programmers are in the hype, they either don't understand the work being done or are playing the field. They may do well in their quarterly financial statements, but a couple years down the line the company won't have anything of value remaining. The CEO will be long gone, sold his options, collected his golden parachute, and moved on to the next company to be restructured. Investors will have gutted and sold everything of value from the company by that point as well, they'll take the hype bubble, milk it, then dump what remains in an asset fire sale. The companies that continue making great things and not seeking the bubbles will continue to create good value, leveraging the tools where appropriate but still hiring skilled workers to create products with lasting value.

There will always be changes in who is the winner and who is the winner this quarter. Certainly plenty of profit-seeking investors care only about those quarterly results, not the products and services on offer. There are companies that will grow and companies that will die, nothing new is there. It's good that more people will be able to have more custom program options, just like WordArt and clipart collections allowed people to easily make their own fliers. Those who want a specific vision in marketing can start with "here's my interpretation from an image generator, but I want it done better." Similarly when a small business needs a team of developers to build a program, the customer can also bring in what tried and failed and what they want to see differently, and they come back with a better bid being able to reference what the client generated using AI as a starting reference for building the professionally-built items.

Comment Re: ESP32 (Score 1) 36

Agreed. The ESP32 family of processors are popular for good reason. Some of the chips support RISC-V.

Unfortunately there is far more to the question than the Ask Reddit post contains, cost, processing speed, memory requirements, software needs, and much more. Even so, the ESP32 family and earlier ESP8266 have been popular in IoT devices from smart lightbulbs, watches, cameras, and even light industrial use to Arduino ecosystem and student devices for over a decade now.

Comment Re: All in (Score 5, Interesting) 160

It was the kids getting ready for school in darkness, taking flashlights to the bus stop in the cold, dark winter mornings, along with some high profile deaths of kids in the morning darkness, that got it reversed when the US tried it about about 50 years ago.

People are great at imagining the late summer nights, but quick to forget the darkness of winter.

People are also slow to remember the location matters. East VS west VS center of the time zone matters. Latitude north matters. People on opposite sides of the time zone experience about an hour difference, one may see the sunrise at 8 am, the other side at 7 am. For latitude, southern Florida has about 3 hours of variance across the year, Los Angeles about 4.5 hours, New York City about 6 hours, Maine nearly 8 hours between the summer and winter. Juneau is a 12 hour daylight difference. Both matter tremendously in how someone experiences the daylight differences across the year.

Comment Re:Nevermind... (Score 2) 54

Vast oversimplification for the purpose of your argument. They're not in my house. They're not in the washrooms at work. They are not in a number of other places where people have an expectation of privacy.

You must be one of the rare outliers, so it's surprising you're posting on /.

Does anyone in your house or workplace have a cell phone, tablet, or laptop computer? All have the devices, including cheap feature phones, include cameras and microphones. Microphones can easily be activated, and even old dumb phones could have a cell phone set to a speakerphone with the other side mute or otherwise listening without making sounds. Smart watches typically have at least a microphone. Any of these can be activated without your knowledge. What about tech gadgets like automated vacuums, vehicles that include dash cams and legally required backup cameras, smart TVs, all have them. Wireless earbuds are the norm, as phones don't come with wired ports, so listening devices there. Your video game systems can include them, the older XBox Kinect, or if people have headsets for their games, they've got surveillance in their living room even if they don't have one of the digital assistants like an Amazon Echo. Hell, even your microwave oven probably has a microphone in it that gets used with the popcorn button, it isn't online but with smart appliances these days, who knows what exploits exist.

You say cameras are not in the washrooms, but apart from strictly regimented workplaces like government security clearance required, everybody is going to bring their cell phones with them, and some people will even get out the phones while sitting on the toilet, with 2 cameras facing forward and 3 facing back. Doom scrolling or checking message while sitting on the pot is quite common.

It isn't just security cameras mounted on the wall, or clandestine recording devices. We, the unwashed masses, happily surveil ourselves, we buy our own self-surveillance equipment, and have various recording devices all around our most intimate moments.

Comment Re:Gift to China (Score 4, Insightful) 135

Anthropic's primary objection was the use of the AI for mass surveillance, the second for autonomous drone operations (which it isn't designed for). So you think Hegseth using AI to supercharge the NSA an order of magnitude beyond the Snowden era capabilities is cool? We don't beat China by becoming like China. You know, freedom.

Comment Gift to China (Score 0) 135

Perhaps a red envelope should be handed to Xi for Chinese New Years with a note from Trump: "We've crippled our capabilities until we get a new AI vendor so feel free to invade Taiwan now while we're busy." The PRC can also feel free to pour military money into AI and chip development and take the lead in the AI race.

Comment So we get to buy the music again? (Score 2) 70

Bought it on vinyl, sometimes more than once. Bought it on cassette. Some I also bought on 8-track. Bought it again on CD. Bought it again in digital formats because it easier than trying to copy it over. There are tracks I've already bought 4 or 5 times.

Then switch to streaming, were we bought it a fraction of a cent at a time, every time, frequently with ads, for just 13/month, 156/year to rent the music.

Now we'll get to buy it again in whatever is next, but this time direct from the artists.

Sucks, but nothing new. Good for the economy, I guess.

Comment Re: Not to disparage ... (Score 1) 28

Apologies for writing in a living language, but the immigrant/emigrant grammatical distinction isn't a rule so much as a stylistic preference at present. While you're right from an antiquarian perspective (i- vs e- word roots in ancient Greek and Latin signify a direction dramatically), modern language no longer really conforms to these rules. The Merrian webster dictionary argues for the interchangeability of these words in modern English. https://www.quickanddirtytips....

Although there is a difference not only in spelling but also in meaning, the usage of those two words demonstrates it is not something to be dogmatic about. Technically, âoeemigrateâ means to exit and âoeimmigrateâ means to enter, but sometimes the choice of word used is based on the perspective of the one using it and if the emphasis or focus is on exiting or entering a country. Other times, itâ(TM)s just a matter of choosing one word for the sake of an economy of words or not having an awkward-sounding sentence. Even though it is grammatically correct to say that your great-grandpa immigrated to the United States and emigrated from Germany, it is grammatically correct and makes sense to say the same thing in four different ways without altering the meaning. You could say that he emigrated from Germany to the United States, emigrated to the United States from Germany, immigrated from Germany to the United States, or immigrated to the United States from Germany.

Comment Re: Not to disparage ... (Score 2) 28

So absolutely true. Some folks who immigrated from India to the US that I have worked with were some of the best developers and tech people I've known. The numerous Indian based outsourcing firms, however, we're never above mediocre. Maybe one person is fairly good but it's always diluted with a sea of clueless newbies who say yes, I understand and have no idea what is going on. The most comical has been seeing non-technical startup founders secure funding, pay an Indian outsourcing company to make their mobile app to save money for marketing, and then either run out of money before launch or end up with a buggy app that needs a complete rewrite. The project always gets bloated midway through and they love expanding scope and charging more when the founders are getting impatient and desperate. This is one reason why VCs (rather than angels who funded these startups) look for technical cofounders, they know better than to make the mistake of fully outsourcing to India.

Comment Must be rampant... (Score 3, Insightful) 30

Many of the items prediction markets allow bets on are just too easy to insider trade. Things like "Who wins the most gold medals in the Olympics," or "who wins this election" are much harder to get a betting advantage with. Will x celebrity meet with x person or mention z thing in a podcast? Those shouldn't even be allowed as bets, because a handful of people know the answer already, or could change scripts to manipulate the answer to the one they've bet on. If this is the first enforcement action, it must mean many people have gotten away with it already. I'd speculate it's to the tune of how many people get hit with a ticket for riding a bicycle on a city sidewalk versus how many actually do it.

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