Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Backwards from what they think? (Score 4, Insightful) 17

Given that big companies have already made it clear that they think AI will let them do the same work with fewer people, and given that using AI costs the company a lot in terms of compute resources, it seems intuitively obvious that the only reason execs would want to encourage more AI use is to find out what jobs can easily have their headcount reduced by more use of AI.

The people using the most tokens are the ones for whom more of their jobs can be most easily automated. This is not, IMO, a positive sign for the long-term survival of that particular job role. The only rational response is to use AI just enough to show a speed-up, assuming the speed-up actually happens at all, but not enough to be high up on the chart of AI users. Using it way more than that seems self-defeating.

Comment Re:The geothermal plant already exists [Re:MS Pow. (Score 2) 39

The summary says that this thing is supposed to be geothermal powered. So they just have the cart before the horse here. They need to set up the geothermal power plant first, then build the datacenter after the power plant is operational.

The geothermal plant already exists: https://www.globalelectricity....

Apparently, Microsoft was proposing to build the data center there and tap into the existing geothermal power, not build new geothermal power (the summary was a little confusing about that).

Yeah, that was confusing. But Kenya's president is almost certainly wrong. Here's why:

1. It is not numerically correct, assuming the numbers in the summary are accurate. The country has a surplus adequate to power the data center at somewhere around half to three-quarters capacity even at peak power use, and probably at full capacity for 99 days out of 100. So even if they built it at full capacity right off the bat and did nothing else, you'd still only lose power to a small fraction of Kenya occasionally.

2. They're not building it at full capacity. They're building a small data center at first, then building it up over time as more generating capacity comes online.

3. They're a reliable customer of power. That means that they will alway pay the bill, even if it is high. The grid operators and generation plant operators can charge them a huge premium for bulk power, then use that extra revenue to build more power plants. By the time the data center is running at full capacity, they could have more than enough power to power it.

4. Even if that extra investment in production doesn't happen, they can just refuse to provide the additional power from the grid. I'm sure Microsoft knows how to do solar + storage by now, and if not, they can pay someone to do it for them who does. Or they can build their own geothermal plant right next to the existing one. Or they can do any number of other things to produce power, like installing an SMR.

5. Nothing inherently prevents them from reducing power usage during peak load periods. Service will get slower, but should gracefully degrade, assuming they're doing it right. Nobody will lose power, realistically speaking.

It is unfortunate that so many people look at these data centers and the current worst-case state of resource availability and conclude wrongly that they are infeasible, but this is a common mistake made by planners, legislators, and members of the general public. They fail to account for how the existence of the data center with its need for resources will trigger the production of facilities to exploit previously unusable resources and make them available, and they fail to recognize that in a true power emergency, they can just turn 90% of it off and shift the load to other data centers.

But the reality of the matter is that nobody is going to build a gigawatt of additional power capacity in Kenya unless the government or some private company that needs power pays them to do it. They already have a 23 to 30% surplus compared with their worst-case power consumption. That means that adding more production will just drive power prices down, so they'll get less money for the power they produce.

But as soon as someone like Microsoft starts needing enough power to pull those margins down, suddenly additional capacity becomes economically feasible, and you'll see either existing power companies expanding or new power companies entering the market. And the existence of an all-but-guaranteed higher future demand is the key to making that happen. Without the data center being approved, that motive to expand does not exist, and the grid will likely stay at or near its currently levels unless the government forces the hand of the market by paying someone to build more generating capacity.

Comment Re:And are permanent? (Score 1) 88

Do you really mean that if your git repo were corrupted, restoring a snapshot of the repo from backups wouldn't work? If that's true, then it sounds like your backup system is broken. The hashes after restoring ought to be identical to what they were before the backup.

If git used the files' iNode numbers for its hashes, then I could understand how a filesystem-based backup/restore might not really work; you'd have to backup at the block level instead. But git doesn't use the iNode numbers.

git isn't magical. It only knows files. It doesn't know if you moved the repo, copied the the repo, or restored the repo from a ten year old backup. I have moved git repos around plenty of times, `cp -a`ed directories with repos, tared and un-tared directories that contain repos, and the copies have always Just Worked without any hash mismatches.

mkdir ~/test. cd ~/test. git init, touch test.txt, git add test.txt and git commit. cp -a ~/test ~/test2. cd ~/test2 and check out the backup repo. The backup is valid. Then simulate a disaster with rm -rf ~/test. Then recover from the disaster with cp -a ~/test2 ~/test and you've just restored a repo from filesystem-level backup. The resulting repo works perfectly and its hashes aren't off. git has no idea you deleted and restored under its nose. Try it yourself.

What am I missing? I'm not surprised to be called idiotic, and the shoe often fits. But I'm surprised to be called that over this.

Comment I don't ask FCC to "allow" me anything (Score 3) 57

My router's hardware's parts were made in China. Its software was made as a worldwide effort but the team seems to be officially based in the Netherlands. And I'm not asking my government's permission for updating either one. Trumptards and their micromanaging far-left centralized-economic-planners can go fuck themselves. Keep your damn dirty ape hands off my computers, comrade.

Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 60

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment Re:What ... (Score 1) 102

too many folks are still stuck on IPv4

Printer is IPv6 only?

What I'm saying is that if everyone had IPv6 in their homes and offices, remote access wouldn't require all the silly cloud server games. You could just hit the device directly by its IPv6 address, and assuming your router suppoerts UPNP pinholes, you're done. You'd need dynamic DNS and that's it.

I can understand the remote printing (not on the same network) part. But only up to the point where something jams and I'm not there to yank the plug and untangle it before it gets hopelessly borked.

An emergency stop button in the app should be able to do the same thing. If that's not possible, it's a rather bad design flaw.

Also, if something jams in a way that could cause meaningful damage (beyond having to brush blobs of filament off of the hot end) and the printer doesn't detect it, that's also a rather bad design flaw.

Comment Re: All according to plan. (Score 1) 209

I have an F-150 Lightning. It's 2 $200 parts to convert from NACS->CCS1 (one for DC, one for AC). The connector type doesn't matter. CHAdeMO requires an adapter that costs thousands. It's not comparable.

CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter: $565. If adapters in the reverse direction from NACS to CHAdeMO cost thousands, it's because the market is too small to achieve economies of scale. Yeah, you need some active electronics to negotiate the protocol, whereas NACS uses the CCS protocol, so you can do it with a passive adapter, but the actual DC is still DC.

Comment Not sure that was the best crowd to speak to (Score 4, Insightful) 171

While she's not wrong, saying it to graduates....Not the best idea.

It will be transformative, and not everyone will benefit. Some are getting screwed right out of the gate. The demise of the Newspaper industry seems an app comparison. That was just a little slower in its disruption. And journalists could migrate to new media outlets. But now even that is at risk. And it's not just them.

If everything that can be affected is, many entry level jobs will be gone. People with valid entry level skills can be replaced. And there are corporations already laying off people, prematurely in my opinion. The economy doesn't work if people can't make money for their work. And if the people don't have money, bad things can/will happen.

I'm currently safe in my position, currently. But I'm not taking that for granted. My experience helps me at the moment, but, you get an AI in here, let it read all our docs, and explore the system...who knows?

The best I can say to the kids currently in college, get in front of it. Learn how to use it appropriately, use it as a tool and it can help. To me just like a hammer, using it correctly, it's helpful, in correctly, you can hurt your self, ruin a project. But putting your head in the sand, and pretending it's nothing, that will hurt you.

Comment Re:Stop purchasing Bambu products (Score 1, Insightful) 102

I like their products. I just want printing without fuss and without having to learn every detail about leveling, etc. Their product works for me and I do not care about its openness, it is about as important for what I need it as my headphones being open sourced (not at all). So this product is for my use case, not for people who want to control every aspect of their printer and every software feature.

The problem is that their model works until it doesn't.

Having a good out-of-the-box "it just works" experience doesn't preclude letting people tinker. If anything, letting people tinker results in a better out-of-the-box experience in the long term, because the manufacturer can see what people are doing with their technology and can clean it up and make it more broadly available if it is useful. The key is ensuring that the default experience doesn't require tinkering for the majority of customers. And seeing people tinker shows you where the sharp edges are that need to be polished.

But more than that, locking down this sort of hardware means that when you inevitably run into some limitation, if the manufacturer doesn't provide a way around it, you're stuck. And the problem is that a lot of users of advanced tools like this are in a situation where 90% of their use is common to all other users, and 10% isn't. And different users have different 10% use cases. So you could be in a situation where 80% of your users need one thing that your product doesn't support, but it's a hundred different "one thing"s. This makes support very difficult if you don't allow tinkering.

But the worst part is that you can't know for sure whether you're going to be in that 80% until you run into the use case that they don't support out of the box. It could be a week, a month, a year, or several years. And then you're stuck with this hardware that won't do what you need, with no way to fix it, thus forcing you to replace it with a product from some other manufacturer.

So even if you don't think you will ever want to tinker with your 3D printer, assuming all else is roughly equal, you're better off choosing the printer that gives you the most control of the hardware, because that is the least likely to box you into a corner and make you regret your purchase someday.

Comment Re:Can free ICQ clients use ICQ servers, reloaded (Score 1) 102

Same discussion as 30 years ago with open source clones of messaging apps such as ICQ. The open source client pretends, on those days through reverse engineering, to be the official client. Ultimately, it was okay then, because it was beneficial for the operators to have a larger network of users who can talk to each other. Does this dynamic apply here?

I'd have gone with "Every web browser is Mozilla", personally, but yes.

If you're using a user agent for any sort of security purpose, you're not just doing security wrong; you're doing security so wrong that somebody is going to write an entire book as a postmortem about your company.

Moreover, if your service can't handle the traffic of a mere thousands of clients (four-digit QPS) hitting it at once, you have much bigger problems than security. I forgot how to count that low a long time ago.

Finally, the elephant in this room is that those "unauthorized" clients are YOUR USERS. They are people who bought YOUR HARDWARE and want to use it with your service. Basically, you're flipping off your paying customers. That's the fastest, easiest way to ensure that you don't have any of those anymore.

Comment Re:Stop purchasing Bambu products (Score 3, Informative) 102

Threats of lawsuits (especially to open source products, which do not have deep pockets) are the new corporate approach to what would appear to be appropriate reverse engineering. The only way forward, if you disagree, is to refuse to purchase any Bambu products.

Already done. When I was choosing what 3D printer to buy to replace my aging Snapmaker A350 last year, I read about Bambu's questionable commitment to openness, and decided to buy a Creality printer (K2 Plus with CFS) instead. Over the year that followed, I bought a Creality Hi with CFS as a second printer, plus two additional CFS units, a filament dryer, a spare Creality tool kit (since the Hi doesn't come with one), and more than half a grand worth of filament.

I've personally spent well close to $3,700 on Creality products in the last year (not counting third-party filament and the DXC2 extruder upgrade) precisely because Bambu comes across as being a bunch of litigious a**holes who are trying to lock down their products and prevent users from being able to modify the hardware that they bought.

As far as I'm concerned, they've dug their grave in the 3D printer market. Stick a fork in it. They're done.

Comment Ho hum. (Score 1) 72

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Slashdot Top Deals

The trouble with money is it costs too much!

Working...