I have no particular love for Intel or its products, but I do hope this is the beginning of a turnaround for them, for no other reason than their strategic importance to the U.S. domestic IC industry.

On the other hand, I've seen no compelling evidence so far that they've really learned from their previous mistakes. Only time will tell.

Good job Intel, but I don't think most people bought a Neo over a comparable Windows laptop just because of the processor. It's more the whole package (i.e.great build quality). Now if Intel stuffs their new Neo killer processor in a machine that looks and feels like a Neo in terms of overall hardware, then they might have a shot.

The thing is, in the long run I can't see this new processor having any legs at Intel. Intel's bread and butter is high-end, high-margin products. Working on those chips is what advances your career at Intel. Working on the low-margin products will never get you noticed or rewarded.

They've never had any appetite for competing in the low-end market, and in fact have repeatedly flubbed every attempt to gain a foothold. I have to wonder how many good engineers at Intel found their careers going off a cliff after being assigned to the purgatory of discount microprocessor design.

This is the most California thing I've ever read. Unconstitutional, unenforceable, and a massive increase in costs and bureaucracy; they hit the trifecta! I wonder if printer manufacturers that bake their own bread will be exempt once their checks to the governor's presidential campaign clear.

Incidentally, this is the kind of stupid shit that helps Trump and people like him get elected over and over.

I know a romance novelist quite well. She is a very successful, very intelligent professional who decided to go down the rabbit hole and start writing after years of reading romance novels.

What I've learned is that becoming a romance novelist is like joining a giant sorority. There are hundreds of women in the industry who constantly go to the same conventions and book signing events. They spend lots of time reading and critiquing each other's work in a giant support network.

I question if any of them really make much money at what they do, but I doubt that makes a difference. For them, it's a community they love to be a part of.

Even if most of them turn to AI to write their novels, it won't make much difference. The social aspect is what draws the writers in.

There's a very clear pattern when we look at who benefits in any given gold rush and while there's a few big winners that fuel the mania, the vast, vast majority are losers.

And then there's Nvidia, happily selling shovels all day.

Shouldn't the headline actually read, "Waymo vehicle saves child from serious injury"? Because that's pretty much what happened.

A human driver probably would have hit that kid and knocked him 20 feet, or even run him over. Instead, the child gets up and walks away after doing something incredibly dangerous.

The latest version of Gemini is causing quite a stir in our engineering school. We've been testing it by snapping images of problems from exams on cell phones and asking Gemini to solve them. The worst exam performance we've seen so far is an overall grade of B-, and that includes graduate-level exams. Gemini even helpfully provides all of its intermediate work to show how it got the solution.

Gemini can even (correctly) find a solution for many simple design problems. We're scrambling to adapt to what's happening, and wondering what we'll be dealing with a year (or two) from now.

We had hoped that engineering (as opposed to computer science) would be relatively immune to AI disruption for at least a few more years, but we were very much mistaken. If all one evaluated was homeworks and exams, the best AIs are already capable of earning an engineering degree in most disciplines.

No, of course not, because he's stuck in his dogmatic viewpoint. He doesn't actually know much about LLMs, but he's got a ton of beliefs about them. And you have a hard time changing peoples' beliefs.

That was definitely a problem two years ago. I did just check in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and all reported 3 correctly. The problem with people throwing out these sorts of criticisms isn't that they're all wrong; it's that they're ignorant of the leaps in progress being made. These models are rapidly improving and it's getting harder to find serious gotchas with them. They're still weak in some areas (e.g., spatial reasoning), but for serious power users who know how to prompt them well? They've become insanely powerful tools.

Not gods; tools. But really, really strong tools for huge variety of tasks.

It turns out there's a big difference between you having data, and some US company having data. The government isn't tracking your phone. Private companies are. Hence LPR.

You're right, there's something magical about a cell phone provider that prevents an authoritarian government from simply demanding access to all location data at any time. Oh, wait ... there isn't.

My point being that if an authoritarian government does want to track everyone's location, LPR cameras would be only one tool in a much larger toolbox available to them - and frankly, not a particularly effective one.

The premise of this article makes no sense at all. Why would Uzbekistan need LPR cameras to track citizens when everyone is already carrying personal tracking devices in the form of smartphones? And unlike an LPR camera that only records when your vehicle is on the road, a smartphone reveals your personal location. Why even bother to query LPR camera records when the police can just ping the local cell phone provider and learn exactly where you are and where you have been for several months?

I see this same bizarre doublethink in my own city, where critics of LPR cameras decry their deployment while simultaneously recommending that everyone should be riding mass transit in the first place, where all passengers are placed under constant video and audio surveillance.

If you truly hate government surveillance, why do you tolerate it in mass transit? Read a little about the capabilities of the systems installed and maintained by March Networks in mass transit systems. LPR cameras are a joke compared to what our government leaders subject us to when we hop on a bus or a subway.

I've used ChatGPT to write code and Gemini to debug it. If you pass the feedback back and forth, it takes a couple iterations but they'll eventually agree that it's all good and I find that's about 90-95% of the way to where I need it to be. Earlier today I took a 6kb script that had been used as something fast and dirty for years - written by someone long gone from the company - and completely revamped it into something much more powerful, robust, and polished in both its code and its output. Script grew to about 20kb, but it's 10x better and I only had to make minor tweaks. Between the two, they found all sorts of hidden bugs and problems with it.

"I'm not sure a human driver would have avoided the dog either, though I do know that a human would have responded differently to a 'bump' followed by a car full of screaming people," the Waymo passenger wrote on Reddit.

I can tell you exsctly how many human drivers would respond in a situation like this, because I've seen it happen and have heard about it enough times: the driver would have accelerated away from the incident at high speed.

Lots of people are jerks. And others don't want to take the risk of confronting an angry (possibly armed) person who blames the driver for running over their pet.

The dog was unleashed. The legal fault lies with the owner. This was an unfortunate accident, but it is hardly Wayno's fault.

I'll counter your anecdote with my own. I know quite a few homeschooled kids who are now adults who are homeschooling their own children.

Religious motivations aside, those children can all read, write, and perform basic mathematics far above equivalent public school levels. Their grasp of basic science is pretty good, too, at least when it doesn't conflict with religious beliefs. And every one of them plays some sort of musical instrument, and is active in sports.

I was once a homeschooling skeptic myself, but the results speak for themselves. Done right, homeschooling provides excellent outcomes. Done poorly, not so much. But in that respect, it's certainly no different than a whole lot of public schools.

Shouldn't the ACLU and EFF be devoting their efforts to ending the Valley Transit Authority's comprehensive video surveillance of all its bus and light rail passengers first?

https://www.marchnetworks.com/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What's been going on with the VTA over the past twenty years makes the deployment of LPR cameras in San Jose look like a joke. An LPR system records license plates, but the VTA records comprehensive video and audio of every single passenger who rides on it. That includes where those passengers get on on off - exactly the sort of "tracking" that the ACLU and EFF condemn.

Exactly when did all those MTA passengers consent to give up their privacy? If privacy is sacrosanct for people driving on public roads, what about people on public transit?