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Comment Re:What's with the delusional AI bros? (Score 3, Interesting) 45

It also depends what AI is used for.

AI can be used for so many aspects but not all of it would warrant disclosure. Maybe it was used to generate an outline for a story, which was then fleshed out by a human writer to produce the story and plot.

Or maybe it was used to create a game prototype to see if some concept was "fun". Maybe some new game mechanic or something to see if it integrates well in the world. If they prove successful then the code was re-written by programmers to integrate into the final game.

Or used to develop test textures used to create initial maps to test them out, then artists designed the final textures.

For those, AI was used, but it was just used to test concepts and storylines and other things to see if it would work, and likely those are AI uses most people wouldn't mind.

But if AI was used in place of artists, writers, creatives or programmers in producing the final product you purchase, then that kind of disclosure would be warranted.

It's like people using AI on the Linux kernel. Most people wouldn't have an issue with AI being used for the code reviews of patches. It gets a lot muddier when it's used to create those patches though.

Comment Re:I mostly skipped these (Score 2) 25

In the PC era with 80 column screens, a full 80x24 screen (PC screens were 80x25 but the last line was almost always a status line and unusable) is just under 4000 bytes (3920 to be exact - 80x25 is 4000). It's why you needed 8K for full screen text 80x25 for characters and 80x25 for attributes (color - 4 bits, blink, underline, etc).

The biggest problem with ANSI art though was corruption - some line noise or an overflowing UART would instantly corrupt it especially at the fancier levels when people had 14.4kbps or faster modems. Nothing worse than having a burst of line noise or something corrupt some multi-screen login art. Especially because it 3was sent without error correction.

Comment Re:Sam Altman is wasting precious oxygen (Score 1) 181

Is he really suggesting that we all go back to the days of running dumb terminals?

Yes, The whole AI industry is suggesting it as part of the whole "you don't own anything anymore".

Nvidia because they don't want you to own GPUs - they've been restricting how many 5000 series gaming GPUs they make so they can make more of their AI processors. In the meantime, why not subscribe to GeForce Now and their gaming subscription services. And with RAM prices causing everything to jump up in price, streaming gaming services are being promoted. Why do you think Microsoft is having to restrict usage?

Altman wanting you to not own a PC anymore is exactly the point. Get their little AI device and it replaces your phone as well.

They're scheming to basically not own a computer anymore.

Comment Re:Why does such a level of notability really matt (Score 3, Insightful) 60

And what's the threshold for notability? It's entirely possible that someone is well known in a certain circle but that circle isn't in the public zeitgeist, but if you join that circle you would know of that person.

I mean, I can guess if you have a public persona then at a minimum that should be worthy of something - if your neighbor is like everyone else who keeps to themselves then yeah, they don't get a wikipedia page. But if you're a public performer and have done something in public you are notable for, then having that would be worthy of inclusion. If nothing more than just your public facing persona.

Like Xav's page would have his parents listed (both are public notable personas), and details on his music, but I would expect the rest of it to not be documented because that would likely be private information. But it would be a useful detail if someone were to ask "Is Xav related to Justin?".(It's a question worth asking, given Justin's rather public dates with Katy Perry)

Comment Re:Too obvious (Score 4, Informative) 55

Yeah, I fully expect that Trump - and especially his family members is profiting on these platforms by leveraging their inside knowledge about events for which the timing is under Trump's own control.

Kalshi hired Trump Jr. as a strategic advisor earlier this year.

We can all guess why.

It's starting to be if it's worse if a party (CCP) does it, or if the leader's family does it. After all, the top Chinese companies have a CCP member in an executive level position. The top US companies have a Trump family member doing the same thing.

Comment Re:How abysmally stupid do you have to be ... (Score 1) 61

Ignorance, really. The ads for Muse do stuff like asking it to help you shop for gifts and other things, as well as deal with customer service agents if you get wrongly billed.

So it's kind of obvious they gave up the password so the agent could peruse the account charges and then do stuff like challenge them on your behalf.

The way the ad makes it seem is that it happens automatically and takes a few minutes, instead of spending hours on the phone trying to deal with the charges.

So people are being pulled into it simply for the convenience factor.

Comment Re:features a light-up Apple logo (Score 1) 73

I suppose - Apple can't copy that feature from everyone else....

The light-up Apple logo has been around for decades.Back when Jobs was around the Apple logo lit up as well because the white plastic Apple logo would let the LCD backlight spill out causing it to light up.

Of course, with OLED this isn't possible anymore so they actually would need to have LEDs behind it to light it up.

Comment Re:vi is the best editor (Score 4, Informative) 101

Also vi came out that exact same year: Bill Joy wrote it at Berkeley. So I suppose you could argue that your choice is a bit like early rapper culture: east coast vs west coast!

vi is a patch to ed. Remember most terminals were teletypes that output a line at a time, so you used "ed" to edit lines one line at a time. (And likely an inspiration for the brilliant MS-DOS edlin editor). But fancy new video teletypes were becoming a thing, and it was actually possible to display multiple lines of text on the screen at a time. Bill Joy added visual mode to ed to take advantage of this so you can visually display and edit blocks of text rather than a line at a time.

Tools like grep came about from ed as well.

ed-mode is fundamental to vi when doing commands like search and replace.

Want some fun? Set your terminal to TTY mode and try using vi. Depending on how good the emulation of vi is, it might work in line-at-a-time mode or not at all.

Comment Re:Not What You Hoped For (Score 2) 65

So this is a Snapdragon CPU laptop that will be targeted at the military. This is not a replacement for a Dell XPS or a Lenovo Yoga, if that's what you hoped.

But, this is a start in the right direction with regard to the U.S. on-shoring computer manufacture.

Not really. It's a military thing, so it's more like the military is paying $10,000 for a laptop with specs that cost $2000. Sure, there's ruggedization and all that, but most of it is just profit as well.

As much as on-shoring is, I don't think the American public will be amenable to paying twice as much for a laptop as they used to, even with the increased RAM costs driving prices even higher.

Sure, for military use, fine, it makes a lot of sense, and paying way too much for goods has been the MO for the military since forever. But for the consumer, not so much - especially when the costs of everything is so high already.

And never forget that these Snapdragon laptops haven't generally reviewed that well either - usually along the lines of "sluggish", which is why they haven't really taken over the market with the exception of Apple.

It's on-shoring as much as tariffs have on-shored everything else. It just raised the prices of everything you're paying for, and nothing new is happening.

Comment Re:It never ceases to amaze me... (Score 1, Flamebait) 42

.... how Gen Z and general idiots dont seem to have figured out that if you turn your phone by 90 degrees then it records in landscape mode. Theres a reason TV and film are recorded that way - that's how we see the world. Our eyes are side by side, not above and below.

Have you walked around with your phone in your hand? Your phone is most likely in portrait orientation while you do this as it lets you operate it single-handedly. If you watch people, they're doing stuff on their phones, including watching video in portrait orientation. Turning their phone just makes it really inconvenient to use single-handed.

Comment Re:What's The Average? (Score 1) 109

What is the historical average rate of truck freight theft?

This headline sounds like an Oceans Eleven fantasy. The actual article more mundane than the headline. But the story is still interesting and oddly sophisticated for truck freight theft. Despite that, I have a nagging feeling that this isn't really novel or an increase and that it is being reported simply because data centers are the current news cycle.

Trailer theft is a huge thing. Drivers may have parked their rigs on the side of the highway and then woken up to their trailer missing.

Most trailers contain between $20-100K worth of goods, the more expensive ones may have just shy of half a million dollars worth of freight. But that's rare.

But with the AI hype, trailers containing servers, RAM, etc, which may have cost $300K a few years ago now costs over a million dollars. And with the demand, it's fairly easy to fence.

You might steal a trailer that is full of nickels. But now you need to somehow get rid of $50K worth of nickels. (That's a million nickels). Just think how difficult a mission that is.

But computer servers? Much easier thanks to demand, and you likely can get close to retail prices.

Comment Re:This will certainly be great discussion (Score 1) 42

SystemD isn't a monolithic application. It's a collection of utilities that all share the SystemD banner. You can pick and choose what bits of the SystemD utility set you wish to use. It is entirely possible to not use the init portion but use the system logging daemon, for example. Or other bits and pieces.

In fact, there's no distribution out there that uses everything SystemD has to offer. Most use a majority of the components, but there's often a few that are not used. systemd-networkd versus Network Manager versus interfaces, for example to manage network interfaces.

I think there was also talk of SystemD trying to replace dbus as well, but not getting any traction on that.

Heck, I think there was one now-deprecated component of KDE that was dependent on one SystemD utility that was Linux-specific. It got dropped over a more generic version that used more portable components.

Comment Re:Good (Score 5, Insightful) 151

When I was in university, homework was at most 10% of your grade. The midterm exam was often worth 45%, and the final the other 45%. Often with the stipulation that you must pass the final to pass the course.

I had classes where homework was assigned but not graded. It was obvious who did the homework and who didn't - you just didn't do very well on the final or midterm if you didn't do the optional homework.

Everyone's an adult. You don't do the assigned homework at your own risk, even if it isn't graded. Midterms and final exam correspond to the biggest influence on your grade.

Heck, sometimes the midterm mark can be dropped as well - I've had plenty of professors simply say because we scored badly on the midterms, they'll use the final exam mark if we do better. So if you scored a 30% on the midterm but then get an 80% on the exam, you get an 80% on the class.

Stop the coddling and just treat everyone as an adult. Assign homework, but don't mark it. You can ask if people had a problem they got stuck on so they could work it out as part of the lecture, but not part of the grade. The final grade you get depends solely on the midterm and/or the final exam.

(I got a D on a class where I didn't do the homework. The second semester the followup course I did the homework and got an A-)

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