Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Turns out legislation works! (Score 2) 44

Not really.

"Stifling Innovation" is a dog whistle for "Stifles Shareholder Return".

Google is the progenitor of the panopticon, and its current leader is Palantir, who wants you, and everything about you, so that you can be manipulated and sold.

The EU has actual cojones to take on Google where the current extreme laissez faire 47 Gov tries to suck every puddle of cash available from crypto to Bibles to phones.

The answer is to stop being the product. EU thinking understands this. The rest of us are for sale. Hope you like your new master.

Comment Re:Perhaps Accenture, like any WITCH firm is usefu (Score 4, Insightful) 30

Many IT management folks need a third party consultant to ally their thinking, or even to point to when that allied thinking goes into a ditch at high speed.

Herd thinking still motivates decisions. This hits the wall of Not Invented Here decision making, requiring Nodding Heads to acknowledge the obvious and native awesome thinking (/snark) that IT management does on a day to day basis.

Circle jerking will continue, as it always has. AI is just today's trend and money burn. The name might change, the country to dodge taxes, but the game has been played for millennia.

Comment Re:OMG! (Score 1) 31

I know. My dream come true. I can sleep better tonight. It's worried me and driven me to drugs and quite dubious but unmentionable activities.

I've been begging for this for decades. I say prayers in church. I have eleven stickers on the back of my pickup truck hoping for this very thing. My life is complete.

And... hey, nothing else is interesting, amirite? No wars, nukes, and the grid is full of solar juice, right? Feeding us our daily bread of AI?

VCs will cash in on this. Wow. I can't wait for the IPO.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 1) 104

The reformulated Descovy is better than Truvada. DoxyPEP is also a great idea. My observation is that a combo of whatever works, statistically steepens the trajectory of infection and eventual mitigation/riddance.

The crisis could have an end; we agree that cutting science investigation costs more money, but also importantly quality of live over the long term.

And as a prophylactic, taking Truvada/Descovy doesn't have to be taken for life, rather, for as long as the risk is there in behavior and sex contact where partner status is unknown. For the promiscuous, that might be lifelong, but others age-out of a risky sexual contact profile, or cease for other reasons.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 1) 104

We totally agree these are worthwhile programs.

As this relates to the OP, it's still a breakthrough. I'm not interested in making Gilead rich, I'm interested in whatever mitigation strategy works.

Sadly, many people will not use condoms for whatever reasons. If we are an empathetic world, those that can mitigate HIV through whatever strategies are available, are obliged to do so. This is my entire point. Post-infection strategies are as important as prevention.

Comment Re:Oh well (Score 1) 104

No excuse?

You have to face reality. Your sense of propriety is not the sense of others, for better and worse.

You can yell at the sky for those rain drops to go back to the clouds of their origin, but it's not going to happen.

Face that. It is real. That's why this breakthrough is so important. The closer we get to statistical protection, the more the curve flattens. The fact that the curve flattens flies in the face of your sense of morality or of mine. It really flattens it. That's the entire point.

Neither you or I can change the herd's way of behavior. But we can lead the herd to better outcomes.

Comment Re:Oh well (Score 2) 104

In many places, it is indeed criminal to intentionally expose people to HIV. Problem is, few get tested. Outbreaks, especially with shared needles as an infection vector, happen somewhat frequently.

It's not ignorance, it's sloth and poverty, shame in finding public health clinics or telling a PCP.

There are people that also have (a lot) of casual sex. Or their partner secretly does, infecting them.

Education about partner protection does indeed help right now, but now all will learn the lesson, get motivated, or overcome their fear of admitting the nature of their sex life.

For this reason, the MIT breakthrough offers a lifeline against a disease that is silent, until symptomatic. When it becomes symptomatic, it's already done damage. Becoming poz is unlikely the death sentence it was a decade go, but it's a stigma even if undetectable. At the poz stage, it can't be cleared except under very rare circumstances.

Society does not at this time, tie people down and make them take their meds-- unless they're incarcerated and even then, it's tough. Sex drive is huge. So is drug dependency; you'll get rid of neither.

This breakthrough allows hope. It apologizes for being human, and having a sex drive. Shared needle behavior? No one wants to touch the subject of addiction. Just like they don't want to find ways to herd the unhoused, one individual at a time, back into a functional civil state.

Comment Re:Maybe Apple Is waiting for AI stability (Score 1) 24

Patently not so. There were a myriad BAD phones out there until the iPhone won it from a design perspective.

When Apple changed to OS/X, there was a huge wall of competition known as Windows stuff. Macs continue to thrive.

The iPad seemed like it was plainly stupid, until it took off.

Lots of watch markers until that worked for Apple.

Apple is excellent if TRAILING-EDGE. Let other titans fight and cross-fertilize themselves with deals, litigation, and harrumphing. My guess is that Apple waits for the dust to settle.

Unlike every other over-caffeinated PR minion in the world, Apple's don't get in a tizzy easily. Short game and long-game are two different beasts. Although I have much bad to say about Apple, they've learned how to avoid expensive catastrophe before; take driverless tech as an example.

Comment Maybe Apple Is waiting for AI stability (Score 0) 24

Training data litigation, model integrity, the plateau of model crash, all these are good reasons to wait until there are clear winners.

Microsoft and Google and Meta are pissing off the public with aggressive moves surrounding AI in apps.

A wait-and-see attitude isn't likely to leave Apple in the dust.

Comment Re: I wouldn't bet it'll take a long time (Score 1) 107

"Full Products" is a misnomer.

They believed that certain models would make money, and attempted to monetize them, which has been mildly successful.

There are certain models with great degrees of accuracy, but aren't really designed as LLMs. Most LLMs are embryonic and are fraught, despite what the marketing prattle will tell you.

There are a few LLMs that can accurately solve small problems consistently, and a few with what appears to be creativity.

LLMs as a whole, however, can solve a few tasks with confidence, but even with the seeming logarithmic gains, are starting to fumble because of lack of curation in input data. A new plateau has emerged, and isn't going to be easily solved, no matter how much GPU and training brilliance can be thrown at it.

Comment Re:Show, don’t tell (Score 2) 70

Operating systems that are siloed don't get much third party support. An OS is a platform for whatever variety of apps fill perceived needs.

While Apple built a huge ecosystem, so did Android, and there are other mildly competitive platforms to both. A monolithic platform is doomed to failure if its offerings don't match market demands, and AI isn't going to do the job for decades.

Nonetheless, every phone maker has wet dreams about the market control that Apple and Google assert, trying to invent new marketing hyperbole to sucker-bait new customers.

AI isn't trustworthy, won't build apps on demand in the vision he has, and his customers won't know how to ask for what they want. Attempts at this will lead to frustration and market share loss for OnePlus, because their real appeal is that their phones have high value compared to Samsung, Moto, and are well-built. He's going to screw up that value.

Slashdot Top Deals

You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer.

Working...