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Comment Re:Why does anyone take this seriously? (Score 2, Insightful) 140

Remember when the Chinese destroyed that satellite in space a few years ago (2007 - geez, it's been a while) to "demonstrate their capabilities"? We NEED systems in space to defend/retaliate against that kind of stuff.

This isn't Reagan's "Star Wars" that was ridiculed. It's the new realpolitik.

Comment Re:insanity (Score 1) 129

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Comment insanity (Score 4, Interesting) 129

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 140

You're right: civilian nuclear programmes are not cost effective compared with renewables. But, there's also the military aspect to this too. Military nuclear benefits by hiding/sharing some of the costs, industrial infrastructure, training, expertise, supply chains, etc with a civilian programme. If there was no civilian nuclear programme, the defence budget would be much bigger to fund things like the nuclear navy.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 45

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

Comment Re: The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 140

The UK is at 46% renewables, and that number is increasing rapidly. Why hasn't it collapsed yet?
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Spain is at 56%:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Iceland is at 100% renewables:
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

You fail.

Comment Re:Ok, but⦠(Score 5, Insightful) 158

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

Comment agencies (Score 1) 170

agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Comment Re: Bullshit. (Score 1) 118

Can't do it. I'm refactoring on a large code base. I eventually had to tell it to work on just one task and ignore other concerns it had to prevent it from investigating until it got stuck in a cycle of investigation.

Understood, and yeah single tasking seems like a good workaround given the situation. Or switching to an LLM with a larger context window, if possible/practical. I was able to get about 7X more context window "runway" using the AST approach, but it's a relatively small code base to begin with.

Comment Re: Bullshit. (Score 1) 118

Sounds like you're running up against the context window of whatever LLM you're using. Try converting your code to a minified abstract syntax tree first and pass that to your LLM, and ask it what full text it needs in addition to that. It should stay within the context window much better that way.

Comment Re:Task is cheap (Score -1, Troll) 73

He seems like a real scumbag but it's worth keeping in mind that the people who told us that have a massive incentive to pin their crimes on a scapegoat.

Since we pretty much know that FTX was the #1 donor to a party's political action committee with money laundered through Ukraine, he would have been smarter to wait for that conflict to conclude.

The people who benefited from the crime also prosecuted him which is never reliable.

It might not be FedSlop but unless it is proven that both parties didn't benefit we shouldn't trust this government either.

We do know that Ladybug Graham got $18M straight into his bank account from Ukraine so there is certainly smoke.

It's only since a dead man can't sue for libel that people are willing to print that nugget now.

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