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Comment Re:Vaccines work (Score 1) 51

There doesn't *need* to be a benefit - at this point, ani-vax is basically a religion. A kind of paranoid schizophrenia mixed with anti-government sentiment. It's become self sustaining.

That said, it started as a cash grab. Disgraced former doctor and un-indicted serial child abuser Andrew Wakefield pioneered the "research" associating the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccines and autism, and pushed that narrative hard, even though he himself was never anti-vax and openly advocated for separate vaccinations for those diseases. It was later discovered that he not only had a deal with an ambulance chasing lawyer named Richard Barr who was looking for any excuse to sue vaccine manufacturers (to the tune of nearly half a million GBP), but he also had a financial stake in a company that sold those separate vaccines he advocated for.

=Smidge=

Comment I like it but I'll mitigate risk (Score 1) 23

I've already equipped agents with access to credit cards that I generate at privacy.com and give budget caps to. It's just experimental amounts ($5-$50) and usually for paying for APIs or services to support the task. But it's all about risk management–I don't use models that train on my data, keep account and access contexts separate, and rely on service accounts for risky work instead of using my identity. We have to remind people that it's still the early days and things are changing rapidly. It reminds me of the early 90s and the flurry of innovation and the chaos that comes with change; this is all happening a lot faster.

Comment Re:Future tense [Re:FARA Foreign Agents Registrat. (Score 1) 76

I like to think the delay is justified by the fact that IF you think in terms of 1800s tech, America is huge and it can take a while for horses to pull a wagon from sea to shining sea.

It's November 1860 and you just won your election to be the new Senator from Oregon. You have two months to get to DC. Can you do it? (Yes, you can do it in a "mere" 3-4 weeks thanks to rail. But before rail? No way two months is enough.)

Comment Re:Things are going to get pretty messed up soon (Score 0) 44

The first thing will probably be to do something think of the children bullshit to ban local AI instances.

Are you seeing a lot of support for the "people should be forced to use a data center to run AIs, instead of being allowed to do it at home using solar power" position?

What I saw last week, is that "think of the children" means that no one should ever fucking ever let a Republican anywhere within ten feet of a child, rather than it meaning we need to give data centers a monopoly on running AI.

The RAM crisis is it. This is the high-water mark on suppressing competition. It was a clever move, but the consumer market isn't going to tolerate electronic gizmos and video games being expensive forever. As soon as someone decides they want money and opens another RAM factory, the AI companies are in trouble. They have this brief pre-Personal-Computer-Revolution situation going on like 1960s IBM, and the 1970s are coming to fuck their shit up.

Comment Accusations? (Score 2) 18

The law doesn't explicitly define the term repeat infringer, nor does it say how many piracy accusations it takes before a subscriber can be cut off.

[emphasis mine] Surely they mean convictions, no?

Why would accusations be relevant? I accuse every single member of the Mexican government of having violated the copyright on my work, four times each. They all did it four times. No, I can't prove it, but the accusation stands.

Comment Re:It is not AI (Score 1) 58

It's important to keep using accurate language if you want to think clearly about things.

That sounds like a good idea, until someone says the word "hacker" and then you realize you lost the debate decades ago.

Words' meanings change, and nobody can ever do anything about it.

Comment Re:Industrial applications only please (Score 3, Interesting) 21

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

Comment Re:Is any company managing to make AI anything pay (Score 5, Insightful) 96

Are you sure? There's so much money tied up in circular loans and IOUs based on potential profits that I'm not sure they are.

For example: NVidia invests billions into OpenAI and Anthropic, who then use that money to buy NVidia products. Has NVidia actually made any money, or does the "demand" for the product simply drive up the speculative stock price?

=Smidge=

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