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Comment Re:Slashdot method (Score 3, Interesting) 39

by FunkSoulBrother (#66040680) Attached to: Digg Relaunch Fails

SA has its history but the people who are left grew the fuck up and are by and large decent people. Seriously.

When I was in college I really admired Slashdot's anonymous posting / dedication to free speech, but at some point you learn the ironic Nazis are just real Nazis always feeling around to see how far they can push their limits.

With age and wisdom I'm convinced a paywall + relative freedom to ban paying users is the way to go. At least if people want to burn their venture capital money (or their personal money) to run bot or humans with an agenda on your site, they are paying handsomely for the privilege.

Comment Re:Slashdot method (Score 5, Informative) 39

by FunkSoulBrother (#66039912) Attached to: Digg Relaunch Fails

This is actually the answer though. SomethingAwful (for whatever you think of it) charges $10 since forever and its provided money for the site and for the most part kept out spam and bots. Combine that with human moderators who have the authority to ban people (or robots) if they pay that and start acting like a piece of shit anyway, and you walk away with a decent online community.
Portables (Apple)

Apple MacBook Neo Beats Every Single x86 PC CPU For Single-Core Performance (notebookcheck.net) 329

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
Early benchmarks show the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo beating every current x86 CPU in single-core Cinebench performance, including chips from Intel and AMD. Notebookcheck reports: We have performed a couple of benchmarks and were particularly impressed by the single-core performance. Not in the short Geekbench test, but in Cinebench 2024, where a single-core test takes about 10 minutes. The A18 Pro consumes between 3.5-4 Watts in this scenario and scores 147 points. This means it is faster than every other x86 processor in our database, including the two desktop processors Intel Core Ultra 9 285K & AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This also means the MacBook Neo beats every modern mobile processor from AMD, Intel and also Qualcomm, even though the upcoming Snapdragon X2 chips should be a bit faster. The A18 Pro is also slightly faster than Apple's own M3 generation in this scenario. Further reading: ASUS Executive Says MacBook Neo is 'Shock' to PC Industry
Oracle

OpenAI Is Walking Away From Expanding Its Stargate Data Center With Oracle (cnbc.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the logical-decisions dept.
OpenAI is reportedly backing away from expanding its AI data center partnership with Oracle because newer generations of Nvidia GPUs may arrive before the facility is even operational. CNBC reports: Artificial intelligence chips are getting upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built, a market reality that exposes a key risk to the AI trade and Oracle's debt-fueled expansion. OpenAI is no longer planning to expand its partnership with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, home to the Stargate data center, because it wants clusters with newer generations of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The current Abilene site is expected to use Nvidia's Blackwell processors, and the power isn't projected to come online for a year. By then, OpenAI is hoping to have expanded access to Nvidia's next-generation chips in bigger clusters elsewhere, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. In a post on X, Oracle called the reports "false and incorrect." However, it only said existing projects are on track and didn't address expansion plans.

CNBC notes: "Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger."

Comment Re:First Hand Experience? (Score 1) 167

I rode a few while on a trip to Phoenix and it was way better than the average Lyft or Uber ride I've taken.

It drove defensively, I got to choose my own music and climate control, I didn't have an driver tapping on their phone to plan out new rides, or high, or bragging about how they've been driving since 5am, or complaining about how they've been driving since 5am.

This is coming from someone who is typically pretty skeptical of big tech bullshit and a fan of labor. I still use the cashier when there is a self checkout, etc. But the tech here is so good that its going to destroy all of those uber drivers (assuming it can sort of handle weather -- I can't speak to that)
Programming

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero (stackexchange.com) 125

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Stack Overflow's monthly question volume has collapsed to about 300 -- levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform's activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. By May 2025, monthly questions had fallen to early-2009 levels, and the latest data through early 2026 shows the collapse has only continued -- the line now sits near the bottom of the chart, barely registering.

The decline predates LLMs. Questions began dropping around 2014 when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively. In mid-2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. The founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, exited before the terminal decline became apparent. ChatGPT accelerated what was already underway. The chatbot answers programming questions faster, draws on Stack Overflow's own corpus for training data, and doesn't close questions for being duplicates.
AI

'AI Can't Think' (theverge.com) 289

Posted by BeauHD from the language-doesn't-equal-intelligence dept.
In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today's AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. "The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language -- and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own," writes Riley. A user shares: The article goes on to point out that we use language to communicate. We use it to create metaphors to describe our reasoning. That people who have lost their language ability can still show reasoning. That human beings create knowledge when they become dissatisfied with the current metaphor. Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research. He developed it as thought experiment because he was dissatisfied with the existing metaphor. It quotes someone who said, "common sense is a collection of dead metaphors." And that AI, at best, can rearrange those dead metaphors in interesting ways. But it will never be dissatisfied with the data it has or an existing metaphor.

A different critique (PDF) has pointed out that even as a language model AI is flawed by its reliance on the internet. The languages used on the internet are unrepresentative of the languages in the world. And other languages contain unique descriptions/metaphors that are not found on the internet. My metaphor for what was discussed was the descriptions of the kinds of snow that exist in Inuit languages that describe qualities nowhere found in European languages. If those metaphors aren't found on the internet, AI will never be able create them.

This does not mean that AI isn't useful. But it is not remotely human intelligence. That is just a poor metaphor. We need a better one. Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture to improve understanding of human cognition and generative AI.

Comment Re:Excellent (Score 1) 50

by FunkSoulBrother (#65756092) Attached to: Amazon Says It Will Cut 14,000 Corporate Roles To Remove Layers

I'm legitimately "Steve" at a much smaller tech company. I also do product management (lol) and QA (a cursory check before the customers really QA it for us).

I will never get any help, the only answer is to build out a magical LLM automation at the same time as responding to a flood of emails/tickets/meetings/calls.

I've learned not to ask for help as that turns into a homework assignment with due dates.

At least I still have a well paying tech job in 2025, until the house of cards collapses.
AI

Mira Murati's Stealth AI Lab Launches Its First Product (wired.com) 33

Posted by BeauHD from the less-of-a-black-box dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thinking Machines Lab,a heavily funded startup cofounded by prominent researchers from OpenAI, has revealed its first product -- a tool called Tinker that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. "We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines, in an interview with WIRED ahead of the announcement.

Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks, like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient. Tinker promises to allow more businesses, researchers, and even hobbyists to fine-tune their own AI models by automating much of this work.

Essentially, the team is betting that helping people fine-tune frontier models will be the next big thing in AI. And there's reason to believe they might be right. Thinking Machines Lab is helmed by researchers who played a core role in the creation of ChatGPT. And, compared to similar tools on the market, Tinker is more powerful and user friendly, according to beta testers I spoke with. Murati says that Thinking Machines Lab hopes to demystify the work involved in tuning the world's most powerful AI models and make it possible for more people to explore the outer limits of AI. "We're making what is otherwise a frontier capability accessible to all, and that is completely game-changing," she says. "There are a ton of smart people out there, and we need as many smart people as possible to do frontier AI research." "There's a bunch of secret magic, but we give people full control over the training loop," OpenAI veteran John Schulman says. "We abstract away the distributed training details, but we still give people full control over the data and the algorithms."

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