Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Why is suicide bad? (Score 1) 44

If it's the will of the person?

Because people aren't solitary islands whose deaths harm only themselves. Anyone who has lived on Earth for more than a few days has formed relationships with other people, and suicide is the murder of a person those people have a relationship with. Suicide harms everyone who interacts with or depends on that suicider for anything, in much the same way that the murder of that person would.

Being dead, after all, is just like being stupid, only people around you are bothered by it.

Yes, that is precisely the problem.

Comment Microsoft could avoid a lot of this.... (Score 5, Insightful) 60

The machines that can run Windows 10 but not 11 really have no legitimate reasons they're incapable of using 11. It's generally artificial barriers put up by Microsoft because the chips lack a feature or two they're trying to make a new standard.

In a few cases, it's literally nothing more than an oversight! My co-worker was just telling me about a specific model of Xeon CPU he's got that has some long "sub-model" vs a simple model number like 5360 or 5500 or what-not. It has every single function in it that Microsoft says is needed by Win 11, yet you can't put 11 on it. Why? Only because Microsoft neglected to list its specific model/sub-model in its database it uses to determine the machines capable of installing 11 on them.

If they want all these people off Windows 10, they could design 11 so it runs more like 10, with a few of the features disabled that require the instructions the older CPUs lack, when it detects those processors.

Apple did this with iOS multiple times already. A new iOS version still runs on older phones but with a few features disabled if those specific features need the newer phone's CPU to work.

Comment This one is frustrating ... (Score 1) 36

On one hand, every parent of kids or teens today has to feel the struggle with social media influencing their journey to adulthood. Sometimes it's just a harmless fad that generates a ton of sales for some useless toy or gadget. But often, it's about the added complexity of a world where their "friends" can be people anywhere in the world who they only communicate with online, and who parents are often powerless to "vet". It's about questions of "bullying" and how far an institution like a public school can really reach to address it, when it starts happening online. It's about uncertainties of whether all the "screen time" creates real mental or physical health threats.

But when it comes to technologies like a chat bot? I don't think there should be these legal expectations that they do such things as guiding people to other resources to get help for the issues they talk to them about. I don't even think the authors of these chat bots necessarily considered the idea a pre-teen would confide everything in one and treat it as their "only true friend"? As a rule, they're harmless as long as they're not actively suggesting adult or illegal activities, so giving them "age ratings" of 12+ makes perfect sense.

Troubled kids or teens need to be given REAL help and warned away from relying on automated AI solutions.

Comment Teetering on the edge of relevance anyway (Score 1, Troll) 50

BL was groundbreaking as a looter-shooter.
BL2 was probably the pinnacle of the franchise. Great writing, great characters, good story. Child Schmafficking.
Tales was probably the peak writing/narrative delivery.
PreSequel was...we don't talk about the pre-sequel.
BL3 was completely disappointing.
BL4 The fact that Gearbox was militantly woke by this time is basically irrelevant (wrap your trannie franken-unit in the pride flag, I don't care I just want a good game) but their writing has been utter shit since TT. That a $3k PC chugs to run it - is asinine.

Comment Re:apple profits from scams (Score 1) 38

Apple isn't responding to requests to remove it though it's clearly fraudulent (it's even using a version of the same name) which can only be because they get a cut of the fees.

I can think of other possible explanations.

- If they are unfamiliar with your application, it's not trivial for them to definitively determine that yours is the real one.
- The app store is huge and they don't adequately staff the group responsible for investigating these sorts of claims.
- Some combination of the above explanations (including yours).

Comment Re: The only way to clean this up (Score 1) 64

I only care insofar as truth matters? Does it to you?

And I don't care what pronouns THEY use; I'm going to use the one that's descriptively factually appropriate. If it upsets them, maybe their bitch is with reality, not me.

I don't give the faintest shit what sort of role-playing someone wants to do in their life.
OTOH If a dude in a dress pretending to be a woman walks into the bathroom while my wife or daughters are in there, I'll make sure he's exiting that bathroom immediately. IDGAF about his kink.

Comment Re: Donâ(TM)t Forget Us! (Score 1) 176

You mean the democratically elected president and congress?
"Authoritarian" does not mean "someone who disagrees with me that is in power".

Maybe if your team stopped loosely throwing around terms like 'authoritarian' 'fascist' and 'nazi' because you're either disingenuous or too stupid to know what real ones look like, fewer people would get assassinated by your psycho crazy allies?

You want to see actual authoritarianism? Watch all 9 hours of Shoah, maybe you'll grow up a little at the same time?

Comment Re:I never answer them... (Score 2, Funny) 147

Fully agree.

Pollsters generally are finding people are growing unresponsive to polling generally. Their task relies on the largesse of people's voluntary participation and that's been badly damaged by:
- fatigue: ain't nobody got time for that shit anyway.
- robocalls: nobody, I mean nobody, is going to wait to hear if it's a "real" survey or some marketing bullshit
- political everything: elections now never seem to end
- deliberate skew to polls: I don't know about you, but the last handful of times I bothered to listen, the polls were skewed in a way a 3 year old could tell the way they "wanted" you to answer. "Who will you vote for, our guy that loves puppies or that despicable Nazi?"
- deliberate skew to answers: it's a well-demonstrated effect that one side of the political fence in the US *loves* to overshare their opinions about everything, and the other tends to tell pollsters to fuck off.* This leads to a strong political cleave-line in the responses, and the near-impossibilty of getting an actual representative sample. On this basis, if I were asking a polling company to answer a question for me, I'd be highly suspicious of any answer essentially coming from one voice, not a bellcurve of the population generally.

*fwiw, when I do amuse myself by not hanging up immediately, I generally give them an answer based on a coinflip, to taint their data with noise as best I can. It's mildly amusing to do this as I have to often hastily give contrarian answers to the previous answer I just gave them. Call it an exercise in rhetorical nimbleness. I hate polls.

Comment Re: Adapter (Score 1) 234

It seems you donâ(TM)t have a clue. If you have a USB-C port you can plug in anything from 40 or 80 gigabit USB-4 (display port), 20 Gbit USB 3.2, 10 Gbit USB 3.1, or 480Mbit USB-2, and it will all work. Thatâ(TM)s what you want. The USB-C ports are identical. You cannot confuse them. You get the speed of the plugged-in device.

Comment Am I missing something here? (Score 3, Insightful) 84

After reading the title (mistake #1, I know), I assumed this was a story about how people employed in senior positions at large companies are finding themselves stuck babysitting newly-hired "vibe coders". Instead, I find a story about a former web developer who's apparently now trying to develop and sell LLMs.

I have no idea what her skill level was as a web developer, but - it sounds like she has zero experience with the sort of thing she's trying to do now. Which is fine, I guess, but she isn't a "senior developer" by any stretch of the imagination.

Slashdot Top Deals

If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will serve us right. -- Alistair Cooke

Working...