Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Might as well invest in tulips (Score 4, Insightful) 134

Crypto is useless. Do I really need to remind anyone that crypto is useless?
There is no specific need for bitcoin in the world, it's a solution looking for a problem.
If I had a bitcoin, I couldn't do anything with it other than sit on it and pray that it's worth more some day, but still, in order to derive concrete utility from it I would have to first get rid of it and convert to real money instead.
It's a very formidable waste of resources, akin to growing tulips instead of something useful.
You can't eat tulips. Well even with tulips they might be edible but you could probably grow a lot of potatoes for all the work you dedicate into cultivating a rare tulip.

Games

Call of Duty Co-Creator, Respawn Co-Founder, and EA Exec Vince Zampella Killed In Car Accident (ign.com) 24

Vince Zampella, the co-creator of Call of Duty and co-founder of Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment, died at 55 in a single-car accident in Los Angeles. According to NBC Los Angeles, "The single-car crash was reported at about 12:45 p.m. on the scenic road north of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains. The southbound car veered off the road, hit a concrete barrier and a passenger was ejected, the California Highway Patrol said. The driver was trapped in the ensuing car fire, the CHP said. The driver died at the scene and the passenger died at a hospital, authorities told NBC4 Investigates." IGN reports: Zampella was an incredibly talented game developer who changed the industry with Call of Duty, a franchise he co-created with Jason West in 2003 at Infinity Ward, the studio he co-founded with West, after previously serving as the lead designer for EA's Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Zampella was at the center of a high-profile lawsuit against Activision that alleged that the publisher owed Zampella and the Infinity Ward team millions of dollars in unpaid Call of Duty royalties. The bitter professional divorce led to Zampella and West taking a substantial number of the Infinity Ward team with them to EA, where they co-founded Respawn Entertainment, a studio that has produced nothing but critically acclaimed hits: Titanfall, Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Respawn's success under Zampella led to him getting promoted twice, eventually overseeing the Battlefield franchise within his role as Group General Manager at EA.

Comment Re:What I love about Git ... (Score 1) 68

Some of the command names that were chosen might be questionable, but the basic functionality of git works quite well. I just ported a personal project over from svn, made more complicated by not starting with a proper svn repo layout (git-svn would only import one half or the other depending on the options I chose), but I was able to wrangle the strings of commits into what I needed. And now that I've got the git repo constructed, I can replicate it easily.

(I was actually surprised that git-svn imports using deterministic hashes based on the original svn repo. And I understand why it happened, but I was a little sad when I moved the second chunk of my commits on top of the first, and those hashes all got rewritten.)

Comment Re:Can AI overcome GOP gerrymandering? (Score 1) 110

I don't know why you're so shocked by this. The Dem-controlled states have already done that long ago. Illinois, California, Massachusetts, etc. have already been gerrymandered way in favor of the party in control, out of proportion with the general voting population in the state. What's happening now is that the requirement for requiring the creation of explicit "minority" voting districts is going away, for which the red states had (unwillingly) been gerrymandered in favor of "minority" (aka Democrat) districts.

Comment Very impressive first attempt (Score 4, Interesting) 21

I watched it on a non-quite-live stream and it was really impressive for a first landing attempt. First of all, the rocket went on to a successful orbit, which is the first priority of a reusable rocket. The first stage came down like a fireball (a rocket going butt-first is quite harsh dynamically), and it crashed next to the landing pad. That's even better than New Glenn's first attempt.

The stream was quite an experience tool. A couple of Spanish (or were they Mexican?) guys checking whatever social media that video clips of the launch were being posted to, even a photo of a monitor at the space center showing a a drone view of the landing zone. At the same time people were posting the same video clips and photos on 4chan. All this just at my bedtime, I wouldn't have known if I hadn't checked minutes before.

Comment "What day is it?" (Score 1) 120

A few years ago, even before LLMs, I was getting concerned that I might be getting phone calls from/to computers. I came up with "What day is it?" as a mini Turing Test question. It was out-of-band information that a human would know and wouldn't get confused by time zones, yet would be unlikely that someone would go out of their way to add to a phone chat bot. The expected answer from a human would be something like "Saturday", or "the tenth". A computer not programmed for this would get confused, and too complicated of answer could potentially also indicate a computer. And now it seems like my old question is effective against LLM chat bots! Take that, clankers.

Comment Just use sea water. (Score 3, Interesting) 26

In Portugal we have a $10 billion datacenter being built by Microsoft where a large thermal power plant used to be... it uses sea water for cooling just like the power plant used to. Beachgoers love the warm water. Sea water is not exactly scarce and there's no shortage of shoreline in Malaysia...

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Working...