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Comment Re:We need public transit (Score 4, Interesting) 26

San Francisco has a strong Waymo presence (I think we were the first market to get public access to them). But we also believe in public transit; in fact, the Bay Area just voted for two important transit measures that will increase costs to taxpayers and property owners, but are designed to make up for badly needed funding from the state and federal governments that just isn't forthcoming anymore. The alternative, we were told, was massive cuts to buses, light rail, and passenger rail across multiple cities and jurisdictions. I guess we decided that wasn't what we really wanted. But there's still room for Waymo, just like there used to be room for taxis.

Comment Re:I agree with the change... (Score 1) 127

True, but the term originates with computer science research that was trying to get a computer to do something that comes so naturally to a human.

Quite. Scientists and researchers have been using the term AI to describe this collection of technologies and algorithms since the 1950s. The field has (arguably) made great strides recently. Most of the current scientists and researchers have been perfectly content to continue to call it AI. But no! Now we're going to let somebody who was born stupid, dedicated his life to staying stupid, and now is seemingly in advanced stages of dementia tell us what we should call this field? What a bunch of bootlickers these tech execs are. I hope Trump has the good sense to walk through a cattle field before he asks these losers to get their tongues out.

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

No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

Comment That's not the point of turnitin (Score 2) 151

The last time I interacted with turnitin, I could easily see its shortcomings. That software is made to look for cheating and plagiarism. That works well for essays, but for math you're looking at a square peg - round hole problem. There are a lot of different ways to write a paragraph on an historical figure. There are only so many ways to solve a given practice math problem. It's easy to show that a history student copy / pasted from wikipedia, it's very difficult to show if a math student came up with the correct math answer on their own or googled it.

The proper way to asses learning in a math class is a live in-person test. Homework should be for the students to practice their learning, and if they choose to not learn while doing it that will be seen on the exam.

Comment Re: "Fun" fact (Score 2) 138

The only truly unique thing associated with Musk is Starship. That piece of tech is important for our species and everyone else is a solid 20 years behind.

"Important for our species" ... how? Trust me, our species ain't going anywhere. There's nowhere to go.

Comment Like so many other things... (Score 2) 6

Paypal used to be a useful tool that did useful things. Now it's just a way for rich people and con artists to extract money from others who apparently don't know better. It's infuriating how many nonprofits are losing truck loads of cash to paypal as the fees continue to climb. The ones I'm involved with switch to Zelle a while back for the majority of all transfers and that has been a huge step in the right direction though of course not without its own set of tax weirdness.

Comment So what's the "much better option"? (Score 1) 7

So while everyone seems to agree that building server-side applications with things like Node and Python is wrong, foolish, and that "there are much better options" ... does anyone care to tell me what those options are?

I mean ... aren't a lot of server-side apps basically just playing catch ("I'm tossing you a ball, now you toss me a ball back") and in between there, it interacts with a database? You really don't think you can do that with Node or Python? Does e.g. Java really give you so much more reliability, maintainability, performance, etc?

Comment Re: What a monumental historic relevant mistake (Score 1) 86

And here I thought Linux isn't Unix. But now the grognards tell me it is just a copy that didn't contribute anything new on its own.

Well, it wasn't Unix. But it was inspired by Minix, a widely-taught teaching operating system that Torvalds decided to make into a thing you could use every day.

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One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God. -- J. Gustav White

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