Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:WTAF? (Score 1) 154

Considering Fedora on an LTS server is an interesting choice, to say the least.

While I think replacing coreutils with uutils is pointless and a waste of precious resources, I don't think it would influence my choice of server distros. Especially if it's 99% compatible I doubt you'd ever know if you hadn't read this slashdot article.

Comment Re: Ok, but⦠(Score 1) 154

No I don't believe it ever did. The POSIX standard defined the behavior of > to truncate immediately decades ago, for particular reasons including proper error handling. I can find no evidence it was ever like that before on Linux. Maybe you used a shell that was not POSIX compatible.

And besides all that, it has nothing to do with coreutils or their rust equivalent. It's a shell-enforced thing.

Comment Re:root (Score 1) 119

Certainly AI is a powerful tool for the CCP to continue to control what people think and how they think. This is no doubt why the CCP is encouraging an increase in AI development under their control. It's a seductively powerful tool. For the good of the people of course. Honestly makes me wonder if some of Trump's inner circle are thinking the same thing, although their actions in the Trump Iran war suggest they might not.

Timothy Zahn wrote some very thought-provoking and disturbing words about this years ago (despite the em dashes it is not AI-generated!):

"What sort of power?"

For the first time since landing, Thrawn seemed taken aback. "The conquering of worlds, of course. The final defeat of the Rebellion. The reestablishment of the glory that was once the Empire's New Order."

C'baoth shook his head. "You don't understand power, Grand Admiral Thrawn. Conquering worlds you'll never even visit again isn't power. Neither is destroying ships and people and rebellions you haven't looked at face-to-face." He waved his hands in a sweeping gesture around him, his eyes glittering with an eerie fire. "This, Grand Admiral Thrawn, is power. This city---this planet---these people. Every human, Psa-dan, and Myneyrsh who live here are mine. Mine."

And then later:

"I told him at the very beginning that true power didn't lie in the conquering of distant worlds. Or in battles and war and the crushing of faceless rebellions."

He smiled, his eyes glittering brightly in Covell's mind. "No, General Covell," he said softly. "This---this---is true power. Holding another's life in the palm of your hand. Having the power to choose his path, and his thoughts, and his feelings. To rule his life, and decree his death."

Comment Re:ecurity by obscurity (Score 4, Interesting) 33

I've never heard of anyone extracting a key from a TPM chip, and no doubt Apple will be using a similar mechanism. This is pretty secure that way. The problem I have with it is it places verification in the hands of one company, Apple. And it requires a whole certificate infrastructure, similar to what SSL has. We'll have to have public lists of signed keys for verification, revocation lists, etc. If every camera maker adopts a similar system, will we have one big compatible system (sort of like SSL), or will it be lots of silos?

But yeah you're right about taking a picture of the screen or whatever.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 96

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 86

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

Comment Re:It's just like The Osbornes! (Score 1) 70

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 3, Interesting) 86

It doesn't make it *right*, but it does make claiming it is *wrong* inconsistent with their own behavior. This could prevent the US companies from suing the Chinese companies seeking an injunction (due to the "unclean hands" doctrine), and probably blocks them from seeking monetary damages in most US jurisdictions.

And suing may undermine the US companies own intellectual property claims by exposing their shaky foundations. An AI model isn't *expression*, so it can't be copyrighted. Insofar as the service allows the underlying model to be deduced through regular usage, trade secret protections don't apply because that's *reverse engineering*, which trade secrets don't prevent.

This leaves violations of terms of service. But setting aside the dubious enforceability of anti-reverse engineering provisions, the Chinese companies may not even be parties to the ToS agreement if they are obtaining the model data through a network of contractors and shell companies.With only moderate paranoia, they can effectively shield themselves from some kind of US tort claim.

Which leaves them with the model they've created from the US company's model, but which the US company has no IP claim upon. If I download a DeepSeek model that's been (hypothetically speaking) trained on Claude, Anthropic might not like that, but what can they do about it?

It's a strange situation. US investors are spending cumulatively on over half a trillion dollars a year in the hope of owning a breakthrough frontier model that is the end of the economic world as we know it. But the essence of the model might not be intellectual property at all.

Comment Re:Yes! Make cars expensive again! (Score 1) 504

Indeed. I say bring in the Chinese EVs at a 50% tariff rate. They will still be reasonably priced, but hopefully will grant domestic[1] auto makers a chance to change their ways.

[1] by that I mean American. Here in Canada we may make cars, but all factories are owned by and work for American companies. There is no Canadian auto sector in truth.

Comment Re:China Screwing the World (Score 1) 504

It's always been about American dominance at any cost, including doing exactly what China does. Sounds like they've learned from the best! The US can scream all they want about others playing fair when they have never been fair themselves. This whole idea the world economy is a zero sum game is highly detrimental to everyone.

Slashdot Top Deals

We are Microsoft. Unix is irrelevant. Openness is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

Working...