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Comment Where you sit determines what you see (Score 1) 14

A long time ago, I worked as a small-business IT consultant. (I recovered, thanks.) A few of them were deeply frustrated application designers.

Usually they wanted an Excel spreadsheet as an application. "Just like this, except users can't mess with this part." (Readers: it was never "just like that".) I could usually build them a web version of what they kinda wanted, but what they really wanted was "their thing".

I'm pretty sure this is "Satya's thing". He made a pretty in the fashionable version of what "excel development" has become. And because he lives in Microsoft-land, all the weird bullshit huge enterprises require in general and Microsoft's weird bullshit in particular is normal to him, he thinks everyone lives that kind of life.

And that's why he's surprised nobody cares about his shiny report thing.

Comment (shrug) (Score 3, Interesting) 36

Millions of books are dumpstered every day. MILLIONS. Ever go to a library used book sale? Ever notice that - in MOST cases - 75%+ aren't purchased, even at 50-cents a book?

Sure, some get donated but a lot of book donation places are filtering as they don't need a 100th set of Encyclopedias from 1981.
I know of at least a couple of organizations that fill 20' containers and send to some associated groups in Africa to provide books for kids, but "Morning Glory Milking Farm" as well as Chilton's 1999 Pontiac Minivan manual isn't going to make the cut there either. It costs $ to ship them and they don't have money to waste.
Largely...they get thrown away/pulped. For some reason I'd once noticed that a local library (part of a county-wide metro association) was dumpstering books. Like... a LOT of books - talking a half-full 5 yard dumpster EVERY WEEK. I'd look and there were dozens of heavy duty black garbage bags FULL of books, and not just shitty old ones, there were multiple copies of popular fiction titles, NEW periodicals, all sorts of good stuff. I recognized the dumps were clearly by section as one night several bags would be "history" for example. In the bags they were totally clean too.
I probably dumpster dived 1000 books over the better part of a year, before my wife drew the line bringing home 1-2 shopping bags (eventually i just left a heavy-duty recycling tub in my car for it...) every week. I'm a big reader but that's a lot.
This was a library in an extremely wealthy suburb of 50,000. So I called them and asked about it. IMMEDIATELY the library *insisted* they only threw away damaged books. When I provided pictures, they claimed they were moving to a new facility and someone was just being a little overzealous in their cull.
Their new building was - I shit you not - MAYBE 50 yards away.

Anyway, the point is, I am saddened by the loss of any book, but let's not cry fake tears over this just because it's AI and people are 'shocked' to find out that the public doesn't give much of a shit about books anymore. Because they don't.

Comment Re:25 x per sec (Score 1) 49

but that's going to have to run on a motor spinning 25fps in the other direction. It could work if frictionless was possible though. I wonder if gyroscopes, low friction and a counter prop like a helicopter would make that feasible.

Comment Re: 25 x per sec (Score 1) 49

i was thinking something similar, then I realized that with a 25fps camera, it's made an entire rotation in the time the aperture was open. I was thinking more about taking pictures OF the drone. But if I was designing some automated machine to attack this thing, like another drone, putting a 120fps camera on it would give a decent picture of it. that's only about 1/5th of a rotation. Tracking software doesn't need to get a perfectly clear picture to track something.

Comment Yep (Score 2) 58

"Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future."

Yep. It's like claiming that you aren't going to use computers in the making of movies. It's just ridiculous posturing.

Comment Re:that's a dumb take (Score 1) 82

Maybe you're just committed to rage (look, it's Mr Social Media) but IT SEEMS like you're "too stupid" to see that I was very, very specifically criticizing the commenter in the story that complained "How many people does it take to run a data center after taking up all this property and all this land that could have been used for something else?" eg, that data centers don't provide satisfactory employees per area numbers (when that land likely was being used for agriculture, which is generally EVEN FEWER employees per area).

That IS a stupid take.
What's even stupider is misreading my comment as some sort of criticism about agriculture, which it wasn't even faintly.

L2READ, dipshit.

Comment Re:Governments don't have the right (Score 0) 131

I suppose if one were to ignore 250 years of constitutional law

What "Constitutional Law"? Citation needed. Needed so badly, I'll do it for you:

Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967)
Established the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. The Court held that what a person knowingly exposes to the public is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, laying the foundation for warrantless visual observation of people in public places.
United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983)
Held that police may use a beeper (tracking device) to follow a vehicle on public roads without a warrant. A person traveling on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements from one place to another; visual surveillance (or technological aids that merely enhance it) is not a Fourth Amendment “search.”
United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012)
While ruling that prolonged GPS tracking of a vehicle constitutes a search requiring a warrant (because of the physical attachment of the device), the Court reaffirmed that short-term visual or technological monitoring of movements on public roads remains permissible without a warrant under the principles of Knotts.

Oh, wait...

Comment Re:Iranian meddling or ... (Score 5, Informative) 47

This is Piggie leaving Americans exposed to foreign attack during a war.

He's already been denying emergency funds to states that didn't vote for him.

Now he's literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they'd need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.

MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I'm increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You're such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)

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