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Comment Re:Why dont people like cameras? (Score 4, Informative) 58

> How can it be abused? I don't get it.

Really? You can't imagine a single way that a corporation or the government could abuse the ability to identify, track, and instantly locate any person at any time for any reason? Nothing at all, huh?

> yet I never heard of one case of a street camera being used to hurt someone let alone end lives

https://www.businessinsider.co...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cou...

https://coloradosun.com/2025/1...

https://www.dailyjournal.com/a...

https://www.americanpartisan.o...

Those examples took basically no effort to find; now imagine if they want to target someone ON PURPOSE, like a civil rights leader, or to harass/round up people who participated in a protest.

Or just be a creep and stalk their ex or random women;

https://www.theguardian.com/co...

Oh, also the system is hilariously insecure, so it's not just cops, corps, and spooks who can use it.

https://stateofsurveillance.or...

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Comment We already had grammar checking (Score 5, Insightful) 50

OpenLibre already had grammar checking. It was free, didn't require a lot of hard drive space (a few MB at most?), and ran locally and almost instantly without needing a high price graphics card.

In fact we've had that ability for over a decade now.

> Let's make LibreOffice and the free desktop AI-native!

Fuck you, Keith.

=Smidge=
/TexMaths is also an existing LibreOffice extension

Comment Re: If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 150

Okay so, thanks for tacitly admitting half your argument was bullshit by pretending it didn't exist when directly challenged. I'll take what I can get,

Most of Norway sees an annual high in the 10C/50F range. The highest seasonal temps in late summer is in the low 20C/70F range. Most of the country is at or below freezing most of the year.

Yes, they are driving them in the cold. You are doing a lie.
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Comment Re:If they can't figure out EV (Score 1) 150

"EREVs" also have a "full on engine" that needs just as much maintenance. They're also very inefficient because the conversion chain of fuel > mechanical > electrical > battery > electrical > mechanical is much worse than fuel > mechanical.

There are reasons to have that kind of system but efficiency ain't one of them, and if you aren't aiming for efficiency in a personal vehicle what the fuck are you even doing.
=Smidge=

Comment Re: It's all about definitions. (Score 1) 177

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

Comment Re: Well "just" vibe code you a new API, then eh? (Score 3, Informative) 46

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 193

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:I installed software... (Score 4, Informative) 160

You install software X, but without asking you software X silently installs additional software Y that is not necessary for software X to function, and if you try to remove software Y it gets re-installed without asking or alerting you.

We'd call that a trojan malware in any other context.
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Submission + - BFS: What the Textbook Says and What It Looks Like Running (rebraining.org)

fishbowl writes: A working lecture on breadth-first search, anchored to a real implementation — 22 lines of JavaScript from a single-file browser hex game. Walks through why every line is there and how you might have arrived at it yourself. Python and Java equivalents included. Cormen is waiting when you want it.

Comment Auto translation is worse (Score 1) 100

Opening a French video out of the blue and hearing some weird English translation no one asked for instead of simply adding subtitles is such an awful example of American exceptionalism...
I'm not necessarily going to set my browser to every language I want to hear with subtitles, but auto-voice translation is just wrong.
If you managed to get to Youtube, you can read and choose to activate it if you want, but stop with this English-centric view.

Comment Re:It's not about range (Score 1) 138

> The batteries bite into freight capacity and completely fuck up the economics of trucking in America.

They kinda don't because weight limits are higher for battery electric trucks for exactly this reason, and by the time you eliminate the fuel (200lbs), engine with accessories (3000lbs) and transmission (1000lbs) and add the batteries back in (up to 10000 lbs) minus the 2000lb additional weight allowance for EVs and you're not losing much if anything.

> So the relatively small reduction in capacity from adding a battery completely blows all of the calculations out of the water and breaks the system.

It absolutely does not. While it would be ideal to do so, not that many trucks routinely operate right at their max GVW. Again, electric long distance hauling is already a thing and has been for a few years now. Clearly the industry/reality knows something you don't.

> To be honest I don't follow things closely enough

Or at all, seemingly.

You still didn't touch upon the "specialized applications" comment though. What were you referring to when you said that?
=Smidge=

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