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Comment Re: They have to be (Score 3, Insightful) 116

The job is only dangerous in the big cities.

You have some weird conceptions about big cities. Homicide rates aren't an urban vs. rural thing, they're a north vs. south thing . It's the south that has the high per-capita murder rate. Which is in turn because said areas are the poorest places in the US. The trend holds true even in areas that are relatively culturally homogenous - for example, there's not much of a difference in culture between northwest Texas rural counties and northeast Texas rural counties, but northwest Texas is much wealthier per-capita, and also has a much lower homicide rate.

The TL/DR: crime correlates with despair, and places like the Mississippi Delta are characterized by chronic high unemployment, low wages, and limited access to quality education and resources. This combines with a legacy of racial violence/mistrust and lax firearm laws, and the result is exactly what one would expect.

One could make the argument that, well, okay, it may be the rural south that has a high murder rate per capita, okay, but there's lots of people in big cities, so it's a multiplier. Yes, that's true, but there's also lots of cops in big cities, so it doesn't change their odds of being the one responding to a situation where shots are fired, to the degree that police departments are equally well staffed per-capita.

It's also worth mentioning that the rural crime rate trends in the US are much worse than the urban crime rate trends. I hate to risk derailing this by the meremention of Trump, but he tapped into a very legitimate wellspring of anger; the economic growth in the US over the past several decades has been very uneven, and a lot of people, esp. in rural areas, the rust belt, and the south have felt left behind, with insufficient care from politicians as to their plight. While the ragebait media landscape has tended to try to focus their anger on cities and minorities, as "evil outsiders catered to by elites", US cities are, frankly, doing quite well on average, and have thrived in the US's growing service economy. But people in the rural south, the Mississippi Delta, the rust belt, etc (outside of the "energy belts", like in west Texas, that produce oil, gas, wind power, etc)... their lived experiences of a lack of opportunity and declining communities are very much real. They're just projecting them (wrongly) onto big cities outside of their region.

Comment Re:That's not AI failure! (Score 1) 116

From TFS, there's no indication either way of whether they had seen the picture before, and if I had to argue either way from the wording, I'd go with "yes, they had".

Also, when did we switch from calling weapons detections systems "weapons detections systems" to "artificial intelligence systems"? It's still true, but a much less useful choice of wording, and is probably going to make some readers think they were shoving video feeds through ChatGPT or something.

Also, in the picture, it was clearly their cell phone and how they were holding it that triggered the alert, not the Doritos bag.

Comment Re:Before you dunk all over this van... (Score 1) 93

You made a rather huge leap there, and I'm not sure why you committed to doing so.

I've never heard of this van. I work in several metropolitan areas on a regular basis and I've never seen one anywhere. I fully acknowledge they exist, but I've never seen one. I could well be unique in having never seen one, but if they aren't in any of the markets where I frequently drive then there are likely a lot of other people who have never seen them in the wild either.

The point I was after is that there are a lot of people who love to dunk on the automotive industry - particularly the American Big Three - any time they can. The Big Three are far from blameless. However, ripping to shreds a discontinued vehicle that you've never seen isn't exactly a fair thing to do.

Comment Re:Garbage (Score 3, Interesting) 34

Seriously, what's the point of using AI to generate details that even bleeding edge hardware can't run at a decent framerate

I don't know what you're talking about. This is as far as I can tell about the process of creating game assets in the first place - not about generating them in realtime. It doesn't have any impact on performance.

I've used AI model generators (mainly image-to-model), and for game-type assets, they're usually good enough, though you still of course want a human to exert control over them. But it's way faster than from-scratch modeling. For say 3d printing, though, you really need to decompose the image into smaller components, process each individually, and merge, because otherwise too much fine detail gets lost into the texture instead of being part of the actual model. Regardless, they've been improving at a good pace. I haven't tried (as I've not had a need) but I think they now have model generators that even rig the models.

Comment Re:What is allowed is healthy. (Score 1) 20

"Organic" means there is a specific list of SUBSTANCES that are allowed.

That's exactly what's wrong with USDA Organic and other similar labels. The founders of the Organic gardening movement absolutely did not mean that. Organic farming was envisioned as a cyclical system where human feces returned to fields and soil health and community health supported one another. We kind of, sort of do that with sewage sludge, but it's terrible. Even if you didn't mix in all the various stuff people pour down their drains (which is pretty much everything you can imagine, if it will go down a drain, someone is pouring it there) you'd still have to deal with modern pharmaceuticals, many of which survive intact through both the human body and the sewage processing system.

You cannot successfully reduce a concept like organic farming to a list of approved products and still have it be true to that concept.

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