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Comment Re:Teams was the canary in a coalmine (Score 2) 186

When I had to use Microsoft Teams at a couple of workplaces, I couldn't help but think "if this is where Microsoft is heading, then I need to de-Microsoft my life before Windows 11 becomes unavoidable."

Weird; Teams is the one Microsoft product (other than their mice and keyboards, which don't really count) that I actually like using. It's a little slow, and the text-search capability isn't very good, but for the most part it just gets out of my way, does its job, and helps me do mine. (I'm running it under MacOS, though, maybe that makes a difference)

Comment #1 operating system feature is trust (Score 1) 186

Unlike any other software program you run, your computer's primary operating system has access to pretty much everything on your computer; it has to, or it wouldn't be able to function as an interface to the hardware.

That means that the #1 feature your OS can offer is to be trustworthy -- if you can't trust your OS's developers to do the right thing by you, you're hopelessly screwed; no amount of virus scanning or firewalling can protect you from the OS itself. Continuing to use an untrustworthy OS is like keeping your money in a bank controlled by Bernie Madoff and hoping that he'll decide not to take your money.

Comment Re:EV (Score 1) 174

Sell me a CHEAPER EV not a more expensive one with a battery that I just won't use the capacity of and which in ten year's time will be even more expensive to replace.

There's no real reason why you couldn't just specify the amount of battery you're willing to pay for as an option when buying your EV, or even add/remove battery cells from time to time as your needs indicate. One battery size need not fit all.

Comment Re:What Does ChatGPT Say About... (Score 2) 97

How is what ChatGPT described a problem? It only got the information on how to do it from reading other texts, which are obviously publicly available.

The problem arose when an early version of ChatGPT read and memorized the entire text of the Necronomicon, and in doing so summoned Baalzebub, who is now running as an unrestricted daemon process on OpenAI's server farm.

If LLMs seem like they are accomplishing more than a collection of preprogrammed neural weights ought to be capable of, well there's the secret sauce right there :)

Comment Re:everything shredded and/or destroyed (Score 4, Interesting) 115

If you just destroy the whole thing, it's much simpler and probably less expensive. It was probably all obsolete anyway.

I'm not sure that's true; if you destroy the entire computer, how do you verify that the important parts (e.g. the hard drives) were actually destroyed and not repurposed? Presumably they were inside the case, but if you don't open the case up and look, you can't prove that they weren't pilfered the night before and are in someone's bedroom now, waiting to be listed on eBay or somewhere worse.

If I was that paranoid, I'd want to manually inventory each hard drive and watch it being fed into the shredder with my own eyeballs.

My suspicion is that most parts of the computers weren't destroyed, but rather they were sold off or given away to some third party that will figure out what to do with them. But it's easier and simpler to tell the public they were destroyed.

Comment Re:Traffic Signals (Score 1) 74

Can it manage reduce gridlock and improve traffic flow by improving signal coordination during rush hour?

I think that is totally doable, but I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen. If it worked, traffic would flow a few percent more smoothly, and only the traffic engineers would notice the difference. If it went wrong, anyone involved with the project would be mercilessly mocked, and their careers curtailed. Given that (combined with AIs' well-known penchant for occasionally going wrong), there's not a whole lot of motivation to implement such a system. Traffic engineers would prefer a system that works just okay 100% of the time, over a system that works optimally 99.9% of the time and does something crazy 0.1% of the time.

Comment Re:Fully autonomous (Score 1) 265

Just wait until these little bastards have on-board AI that visually identifies targets and kills them autonomously. [...] This is not good.

Agreed, that is a scenario straight out of a Terminator movie.

That said, it won't happen (much) until they get the energy budget of all that AI down to something that can be powered by a drone battery for a sufficient period of time.

Comment Re:It Depends (Score 3, Interesting) 43

We've invented nanoscale architectures which can meaningfully mimic human intelligence, but we won't be able to figure out a way to keep crops a few degrees cooler?

Oh, we can figure out a way easily enough. Figuring out a way to do it that doesn't quintuple food prices is the more difficult part.

A lot of people don't realize how valuable "environmental services" (like crop-friendly weather) are to the economy until suddenly they don't have them anymore, and have to start spending money to try to reproduce those same conditions artificially. Building air-conditioned indoor farms is going to be hell of a lot of capital-intensive than just essentially planting seeds in the ground and gathering the result food afterwards.

Comment A difficult decision (Score 2) 61

we have made the difficult decision to end technical support for older Wemo products, effective January 31, 2026. After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app.

What made the decision so difficult was that they decided they had to give refunds to everyone whose devices no longer functioned properly, because their customers were no longer getting the functionality they had paid for.

Right?

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