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Comment Re: Enshittification marches ever onward (Score 1) 29

They removed something you never should have had, that your processor never should have done, and that they never, ever told you your processor should've could do.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.

Comment Re:Layoffs (Score 1) 61

Maybe Roku has been paying to carry Fox content, or Fox has been paying Roku to carry content (I don't know how their deals work), and now that doesn't have to happen anymore?

Let's do the math:

($Fox + $Payment) + ($Roku - $Payment) = $Fox + $Roku

That's a zero-sum transaction. No $400M savings there.

Nope. You forgot the government factor:

($Fox + $Payment - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment)) + ($Roku - $Payment = $Fox + $Roku - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment).

So depending on what state the income is earned in, Anywhere from about 21% to about 30% of that could be going to taxes. So they could easily save $400M in taxes if that payment happens to be at least $1.3 billion or so. I doubt that's the case, of course.

Comment Re:comms (Score 1) 160

IMHO the most important skill is being aware of what an AI can accomplish, which nowadays is a lot.

The most critical skill is knowing when you're going into an AI rathole, shutting it down, and coding the relevant bits from scratch. There's nothing like wasting more time on iterative refinement than it would take to write the code by hand to sour an engineer on the use of AI.

Comment Re:Yeah, closing in on this too. (Score 1) 160

No. We haven’t. Do the math. Liquidate every billionaire in the U.S. and the government would only get a few months respite.

The top 1% of the U.S. have $55 trillion dollars. The total U.S. national debt is only $38 trillion. That costs the government $1.4 trillion every year in interest alone. Leveling the playing field by capping everyone's total savings at 8 million per person would wipe out the national debt completely.

Mind you, wiping the national debt out still won't help as long as the Republicans keep overspending and undertaxing to the tune of two trillion a year, but even that should be easily fixable by more sound tax policy, coupled with laws mandating that the federal budget be revenue neutral or positive going forwards.

We've done the math. Have you?

Comment Re:Yeah, I Noped Out (Score 1) 160

That definitely makes a difference. The quality of response you see between something like Gemini Flash and Gemini Pro is astounding because it's indexing on getting it right rather than getting it fast.

I assume you're saying Pro is massively better for your workload. IMO, thinking is either good or bad, depending on whether it moves you closer to or farther away from correctness.

For example, I've seen certain types of workload (e.g. anything involving image recognition or image segmentation) be massively better with Flash, because Pro overthinks things and ends up changing perfectly correct answers to be wrong, either by coming up with creative ways to misinterpret the prompt or by screwing up the JSON image segmentation fragment so that it can no longer be parsed.

And I've also found that LLMs struggle to understand existing terms in a different context that they weren't trained on. As a result, I've had to substitute nonsense terms in place of terms based on common English words and phrases so that it won't ignore my definitions of those phrases in context and substitute its own understanding of their meaning and give incorrect results. The more thinking you allow, the more likely it is for that to occur.

Comment Glorious success! (Score 3, Funny) 170

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Comment Re:I'm wetting my pants now (Score 1) 60

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Comment Cost comparison? (Score 1) 60

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Comment Re:Bill Gates is so happy! (Score 1) 155

My response was specifically to the original poster who, for some reason, was taking a "we are losing the class wars; breed faster!" position rather than the "if you are already losing the class war why would you even think about putting in that much effort and cost so your children can deal with a bad or worse outcome?" position.

It would honestly not surprise me if that is a nontrivial contributing factor: If you aren't emotionally invested in children as an end in themselves the wage and cost of living numbers have done very little to encourage you to see them as affordable since roughly the late 70s(with a combination of substantial stagnation for anyone who is primarily wages rather than capital gains; and such good news as there is mostly confined to people who complete at least undergraduate education and remain in a career track full time) and people who are emotionally invested in children are often willing to go to considerable lengths to try to improve their children's outcomes; but are presumably discouraged by the prospect that they will most likely be downwardly mobile instead.

It's not a surprise that people who want labor, cannon fodder, or taxpayers to be abundant for them are fretting about it; but it's hard to see why most of us should care. Why do things that are good for society when society is pretty overtly disinterested in being good for you? You may be able to squeeze the current labor market a bit; because people who already exist tend to take the "or starve" possibility pretty seriously when deciding what they will put up with; but if you offer nothing but the demand for a toiling underclass to encourage people to have children that's not terribly compelling, either for those who aren't interested in sacrificing for children and see hitting education and career hard as increasingly existential or for people who would sacrifice a lot to better things for their children but are more or less accurate in seeing it as highly unlikely that they will be able to.

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 309

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

Comment Re:He hacked capitalism (Score 1) 309

The whole point of stock markets and such is that you have hard core rational investors ensuring valuations are accurate.

In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.

The result is the two most overvalued companies in history (Tesla and SpaceX).

True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.

Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.

Comment Re: Ban smartphones in school... (Score 1) 155

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

Indeed is USED to work this way....and if so, sure, cool.

The trouble is...it no longer works that way, there is no more 'melting pot'.

For various reasons, one being we've let WAY too many in at once....they do not come here to become Americans and assimilate, they are here to take over and make a Mini-whatever country they came from .

They segregate, they do NOT learn the language and in Muslim cases, they try to change our laws to fit their religion.

In the old days, you didn't see protests with migrants waving flags of their home land, but instead were waving the US flag....

So, no that old way isn't working....and if we don't stop the influx....we risk losing our country even more than we risk losing it right now.

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