Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Project, much? (Score 1) 172

Serious question - How does the Online Streaming Act work in practice for content on demand? When a Canadian tries to binge the latest season of Stranger Things, is NetFlix required to say "nope, go watch this Celine Dion concert first to get our CanCon ratio up"?

I get how it could apply to randomized content like streaming radio, but the very concept seems incompatible with "choice".

Comment Re:I'm not convinced QCs will ever work (Score 1) 45

Is 98 greater than 56? Yes? Okay then. It's still going up. So much vitriol from someone posting nothing but bare assertion - Cite please, beyond your fee-fees?

Let me 'splain it to you in simple language. The number of qubits doesn't need to scale exponentially on the short term for quantum computing to pose a very real threat; it only needs to hit the mid hundreds. As I mentioned, Grover's algorithm is O(n) - Meaning once we hit 256 qubits (plus some change for overhead), SHA256 is substantially weakened. Is that a full crack of AES, which you'll kindly notice I didn't previously claim, Mr. Goalposts? No. No it isn't - But it's arguably worse - SHA is almost ubiquitous and affects far more than encryption itself. You don't need to crack a tank's armor if you can convince its driver to piss in the fuel tank.

I also happen to think - and to be clear, what follows is my opinion, not psychic knowledge about the future - you're completely wrong on the bigger picture; and once QC hits its stride Gordon Moore will again be relevant. But critically, that's not necessary for it to cause some serious damage in the near future.

Comment Re:I'm not convinced QCs will ever work (Score 1) 45

You'll find a considerable number of elder geeks spent years gainfully employed working on 4 bit MCUs.

The key details here are the number of qubits steadily improving, and that throwaway comment about needing millions of qubits should be disregarded as utter nonsense. Sure, it's gonna be a while before "gcc -march=quantum" is an option, but Grover's algorithm has a space complexity of O(n); Shor's is O((log n)^2). Hand-turned implementations of those will be gutting virtually all of modern cryptography long before the script kiddies start trying to fork-bomb the entire universe.

Comment The short answer is "yes". (Score 1) 51

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

Comment Re:We put 8 protesters in jail for life (Score 1) 309

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

Comment sudo make me a data center (Score 1) 97

Step 1: Propose a new data center.
Step 2: Leak false information claiming the current city council is planning to approve it.
Step 3: Agitprop a recall election.
Step 4: Front two slates of staunchly anti-data-center sockpuppets, one liberal and one conservative.
Step 5: Have the winner approve your data center.

And that's why "betrayal of public office" needs to be a capital offense.

Comment We do not accept your lack of acceptance (Score 1) 19

The company disputed any characterization that the data was "exposed," saying that an "ordinary member of the public" would not have come across it.

Well then, it's a good thing only "ordinary members of the public" would ever dream of trying to crack your service to provide unintended access! Those pesky Russian hackers would never dream of using means "not discoverable through ordinary use", right?

Comment Re:Any way for both sides to lose? (Score 1) 115

I don't mean this to be pedantic, but humans do that as well. I'm singing along with what's on the radio as I write this; and someone far more musically talented than myself could no doubt substantially reproduce it word-for-word, note-for-note, and beat-for-beat.

If nothing else, I'm excited to see how the next decade of AI-related legal cases shines a spotlight on the (usually unspoken) legal assumption that only humans have agency.

Comment Don't complain about the flavor of the milk (Score 1, Informative) 153

There are at least four major Federal subsidy programs for providing high-speed internet access to rural and underserved populations - BEAD ($42.45B), ReConnect (open-ended), Community Connect (open-ended), and RDOF ($20.4B).

Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?

Comment Any way for both sides to lose? (Score 3, Interesting) 115

Can someone explain how this is a copyright issue? And I don't mean that in the angsty teen "everything should be free" sense, I sincerely don't get how this involves "copying" whatsoever.

AI companies may be playing fast and loose with IP, but using music for training is at worst a private performance for educational purposes. Or is the recording industry back to the good old days of claiming playing a CD is "copying" it into the air, and then our ears are "copying" into our brains? Because that's functionally what the likes of Anthropic are doing with it.

To be clear, I'm neither an AI apologist or fanboy. I find it extremely useful at work, while still fearing it will eventually put us all in a zoo for our own protection (and that's the good outcome).

Comment Re:New metric of AI company value needed (Score 1) 24

You're talking about P/E ratios in general, but there's an important distinction to be made when it comes to the likes of SpaceX.

SpaceX isn't a profitable company, so its P/E would technically be negative. That crazy high number around 200 we've seen is actually the P/S, which is kind of like P/E if you ignore expenses.

But to be clear - Higher isn't better. It theoretically means people have more faith in future earnings; in practice, it's purely a measure of hype, and higher is primarly worse.

Comment Says a lot that's an "incentive" (Score 1) 53

If working conditions are so deplorable they make a four day weekend seem worth literally risking death for another two years... Maybe that's not somewhere you want to be working in the first place?

Sure, a get-out-of-brimstone day pass might be nice once in a while, but having a chance to use it in the first place means you're still in hell.

Slashdot Top Deals

interlard - vt., to intersperse; diversify -- Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language

Working...