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Comment Re:Three different reasons this is bad (Score 1) 110

I mean, I suppose I'm not sure. The UK had a similar system of course. But what I don't know if more robust systems actually do exist. My feeling is that once the country moves towards tearing it all up, actual laws are barely harder than convention.

It's a feeling I have, though, not a fact or anything.

Comment Re:The Fascist in the room (Score 1) 87

I think it's also encouraged. The term is flooding the zone. Every few days there new deeply irrational randomness. But it keeps changing and churning to keep the previous thing out of the news. Makes it easy to bury the really nasty stuff that's permanent.

Enjoy the probably deepest recession ever that this will cause

They'll blame it on the democrats. And woketrans.

Comment Re:Three different reasons this is bad (Score 1) 110

The problem is that our government has evolved well beyond what was spelled out in the constitution and said evolution was largely based on gentlemen's agreements and precedent to maintain the spirit of separation of powers. While this is sloppy as fuck what's happening now should not be celebrated.

I used to agree, but I'm not sure I do now. The world is too complex and there are too many loopholes for laws for this kind of thing to be iron clad. For example, take the Supreme court. In terms of iron clad laws the ones on not bribing public officials are actually pretty clear. But they ruled that a gratuity to a judge for a ruling you like isn't a bribe so they are now free to collect their bribes.

Society can only work if not too many people are trying to break it at the same time. Even with tighter laws, if enough people with enough power want them gone, they become nothing but a piece of paper.

Comment Limits of applied psychology? (Score 0) 34

Are you sure that you actually cancelled your Prime account? How long until you are sure that you really did it?

I think this is a sort of joke, but my guess is that you only got far enough to convince yourself that you could cancel it, but somewhere along the way you changed your mind and decided not to. Sort of like "I can quit gambling/drinking/gaming whenever I feel like it, so I'm not addicted." If you had gotten too close to actually cancelling your membership, then they would have pulled out the big psycho-weapons until you backed down.

In general I think psychology and psychiatry are full of BS, but the applied psychologists have gotten too good at pulling people's strings for the sake of selling deodorant, laundry soap, and politicians who really stink to high heaven notwithstanding any amount of deodorant and soap. The applied psychologists have an enormous advantage. They are basically behaviorists and they don't worry about the value of the human soul, the nature of evil, or collateral damage. None of that trivial stuff matters when you have widgets and snake oil to sell.

Disclaimer needed: I haven't had any direct contact with Amazon in decades. My second and final Amazon purchase was that long ago. I evaluated what Amazon was doing with my personal information and decided that I wanted no part of it. Nothing that I have seen in the years since has improved my opinion of the cancer.

Comment Measuring blood pressure indirectly (Score 1) 34

Even though you're apparently feeding a troll, I think there is a more substantive answer involving a solution approach that would involve 'light AI' technology. It's actually a topic I've been researching for some years, even though the doctors have never really convinced me I need to worry about my blood pressure.

So the fundamental problem is that most direct (external) measurements of blood pressure involve comparing the blood pressure to air pressure, so they take a substantial amount of power to pressurize some kind of balloon. Major problem for small battery devices like watches.

An alternative approach would involve timing, based on the variation in pulse timing, though maybe the approach flopped. Key term is HRV (Heart Rate Variability), which allows you to track and time individual pulses as they reach different parts of the body. Last research I read was a couple of years ago and I still don't haven't seen any products on the market. However the basic idea would be to take timing data from different locations and use it to calculate the blood pressure. You would need a couple of separate pulse detectors with stable locations, but the real problem is that the arteries are not uniform, either over distance or time. That means that you would need to train a fairly sophisticated model to figure out what blood pressures really correspond to what timing differences. Probably need to train it for each person, too.

Comment Three parrots flew into a bar (Score 1) 72

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Okay, you got your funny mod points, but did you have to propagate the vacuous Subject, too? On the grounds of your Funny, I forgive you for getting me to look at AC's tripe, though I didn't actually try to read it. Enough to know he was too ashamed to even attach a handle to the tripe...

(Now if I was an actual humorist I would have figured out a way to work a wind turbine into my joke, but that was just a replacement/filler joke because I couldn't figure out how to create a Subject full of punctuation in response to your joke. (And my replacement joke is really due to a similar joke I saw on another website.)

Comment Re:smoke and mirros (Score 2) 62

These days, though, the training part is outsourced to the education system. And that's just dumb in so many ways.

Never mind apprentices, even just normal on-the-job training. Personally, I've always been a fan, and if I can do it in a tiny startup, then bigger companies certainly can.

Comment Re:Overwrought (Score 4, Informative) 62

You can get a huge amount of good code out of LLM 's if you know what you're doing. An experienced programmer can just fly.

This does not appear to be holding up in practice, at least not reliably.

https://developers.slashdot.or...

Clearly the value being generated is very large. Not just my perception but in the opinion of the most wealthy investors.

You may have thought tulip bulb growing was generating very large value too...

The machines are already able to do most coding and in some cases all of it.

Again, not my experience. I'm inveterately lazy, and have tried it repeatedly. It's... OK I guess. Definitely faster for some stuff, seems more to actually slow me down on others. Trouble is you never know which in advance.

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