Do fuck off.
Okay. I fucked off, and now I'm back.
Was that supposed to make your comment somehow become less poorly executed? I'm asking because as far as I can tell, it hasn't. I even fucked off twice, just to be sure.
So he's paid to do nothing for 5 years then ?
That's an even cushier job than Slashdot "editor".
Your premise is offensively stupid. The idea that the director of a 27km particle-accelerator undergoing an upgrade to 10x its efficacy will be idle during that time is absurd. This guy will make more, and more impactful decisions in this period than you will in your entire lifetime. One action, one phone call, one assignment of staff to address something like a cost overrun or delay or equipment shortage or accident will outweigh your impact on humanity. And - to be clear - mine.
By all means, make fun of Slashdot's editors. But please try to not use a colossally moronic foundation for doing so. It changes what could have been a funny comment into one that is exceptionally dumb.
Writing Software: which if you aren't familiar can do pretty much everything knowledge related and produce any ditigal artifact. Still more: software can generate control instructions for physical media - like a fork lift - just as easily as it can crank out a PDF, and we have Language models that can already generate the code for that. So think bigger.
I hear you, but I don't personally categorize that as "bigger". It's just more of the same. Writing code is just language automation. Writing code to control physical objects - like Boston Dynamics' Spot - is just writing code. Its results are still - in my eye - predictable. Not at the specific item level; I can't tell you what the name or number of ailments that will have treatments by 2040 because of this, but I can tell you Big Pharma will get bigger. I can't tell you how extensive job loss in the arts will be, but it will happen. I can't tell you exactly when companies will use it for psyops to optimize manipulating consumers into maximal spending, but I suspect it rhymes with "boo house-sand band live".
Unpredictable would be... the gravitational constant changes. Or grass becomes sentient overnight, travels back in time and tells Shakespeare the precise words to write. Or everyone who is left-handed says the word "dog" at the exact same moment June 3rd, 2029 and never use the word again for the rest of their lives. No. This isn't as revolutionary as the Internet. It's evolutionary. It's automation, and the results of that have precedent.
Future AI will change everything in unpredictable ways.
Oh, I don't know that's true unless by "future AI" you mean "a hypothetical thing that we currently do not have, nor have any prospects of having anytime soon". The software currently labeled "AI" are - I think - predictable.
They fall into four categories:
1} Language automation.
2} Visual media automation.
3} Audio media automation.
4} Statistical analysis/modeling tools.
#1 through #3 pretty obviously will do what physical robots did to manufacturing. Anyone working in those fields is about to be replaced by automation.
#4 is going to assist us in finding things in data that we couldn't practically do before. From predicting earthquakes to modeling new medications to manipulating the stock market to biological warfare... lots of things will rapidly be discovered.
I have deliberately not said if any of this is good or bad. It is both, depending on where you stand.
And three more steps away from trusting and reconnecting to the USA if and when Republicans are no longer in control.
If.
There's no sign that the Republican party or right-leaning citizens of the country are interested in ever hearing from, compromising with, or being led by civilized people in the future.
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 hear what you're saying but I think there's a false dichotomy: that one thing is bad does not preclude another being bad.
What I mean is that I agree that cell phone tracking is a problem. A big one. Government / LEO shouldn't have access to that data except in very specific, very clear circumstances. It shouldn't be "who was in the area when this random car was stolen" or "where was the woman I'm stalking last night?" Maybe in cases like... a school shooting and the suspect got away, but you think you know who they are, and you're trying to track their whereabouts.
But that's that problem. It should be handled in addition to mass transit surveillance and LPRs. LPRs should load a list of plates they are looking for daily, and any scan that isn't on that list never gets logged in the first place. That would be a totally legit use. Transit recordings should be local accessible only, and only for resolving incidents. Facial recognition in a casino? In an airport? Again, these should be legally mandated to not record anything except hits for known targets.
All I'm saying is that you don't stop researching cures for cancer in children just because the leading cause of deaths in kids 1-4 is swimming pools. You keep researching while simultaneously educating people to properly secure their pools.
Take a large code base that works fine now, with the occasional memory overrun, and make massive changes to it. "Works fine" will become a distant memory.
There are two reasons why the 1980s thought process of "change your passwords frequently" is no longer advised:
1} Users will revolt and end up doing stuff like "password1", "password2", or writing it on a sticky note.
2} If a password is compromised, it should be changed immediately, not in 90 days, and if it's not compromised it shouldn't be changed, because of #1.
Rewriting the entire codebase when the vast, vast, vast majority of it has an insane number of people-hours testing it and vetting it is insane. This has got to be a marketing ploy so they can say "we re-wrote every product you use using our AI, so you should give us lots of money and use our AI for everything!"
The reality is that this has far less to do with "national security" than it does ensuring that certain people's pockets get lined with cash.
Oh... I imagine it's more about "national security" in the sense of "keeping citizens from tracking what ICE is doing, and who they're doing it to" than lining anyone's pockets. Also "national security" in the sense of "making sure the citizenry don't have things that Ukraine has proved are easily weaponizable if/when there's serious civil disobedience."
Some people like Ikea Other people like mass produced no name furniture.
That is an excellent analogy and I appreciate it.
My biggest long-term concern about AI is the long-term Ikea-ification of "everything" (books, movies, TV, music etc). I grant that 90% of "everything" is already highly derivative. Movie plots are highly recycled. Musicians are always "deeply inspired" by someone.
But then there's those gems... the handful of guitarists that can be identified in a few bars just because of the distinct, unique, special way. The handful of authors like Douglas Adams whose turn of phrase was uniquely his. The handful of performers like Monty Python, or Christopher Walken. Andrew Scott in Sherlock did something brand new and sublime with his Moriarty, in my opinion eclipsing the merely fantastic Benedict Cumberbatch.
What happens when artists, authors, musicians, writers, directors and the like are out of a job? What happens when all we can hope for is a recombination of what we've already got? Lego is awesome, but human creativity results in a steady flow of new parts that can in turn drive fresh assemblies.
Ikea has its place. But when it's impossible to get a shelf that fits an unusual room layout because nobody on the planet can make furniture that is off-menu... how boring is that? When once-in-a-lifetime talents like Freddy Mercury end up in a factory assembling Amazon delivery drones while we're all listening to some mashup of Taylor Swift, Eminem and Rammstein, haven't we made a mistake? When all penguins look the same because Berke Breathed couldn't get paid to invent Opus from Bloom County, didn't we make a mistake?
My concern isn't people using LLMs to "make my resume not look like shit because I'm only semi-illiterate but good at something else." My concern is Mozart, Weird Al, George Carlin, and da Vinci being members of a never-growing list of epic talents.
Maybe some day genAI will actually be able to truly invent and there will be a golden age of new and great material. But then... why do we even exist then, when we've outsourced not only the doing, but the inventing of "Everything"?
Why not strip an award because the creator has the wrong political affiliation or anything else you don't like. Game awards should just evaluate the quality of the game not make political statements.
If you are really convinced generative AI makes games shitty then what's the problem? Presumably those games won't get the awards because they suck. The only reason for this policy is because you think it *will* make for good games but you want to stop its use anyway.
I'm not certain I agree with that standpoint. If a company puts out a game that is technically, thematically, and visually excellent, they're worth of awards, granted. But if it then comes out that the company itself funds a nation-wide program called Terror for Toddlers, where people drive by daycares with pictures of disturbing-but-legal things, I'd reconsider that award. I'm trying to generate an example of some position or act that is reprehensible but not punishable by law, which unfortunately is subjective, so insert your own example that fits that model.
I kind of think we have a social obligation to "encourage" companies to hold to societal standards. AI content is a new topic and it's unclear what society as a whole holds as a position. But there are definitely several concerning aspects to its use and personally I think companies should be slow-adopters as we all work out the details. If they're not, it's totally legit for some to call for pulling awards.
You're absolutely right, and it sucks that I fell for that trap.
In regard to long-haul trucking, I think there's some merit to the idea of having swappable batteries, since presumably the capacities are larger than in consumer vehicles. But since truckers are already spending stretches of time at rest stops, the benefit is incremental, as you noted.
Along those lines, there might be applications for taxi fleets--short range personal transit where the vehicles are all uniformly the same and operated out of a central hub. But again, if the capacity is big enough that a car could just be charged every night, why build these complicated stations?
Totally agreed.
This idea has always smelled like a scam--a bad faith argument pushed by EV proponents to try to convince people to buy or invest in EVs now.
I disagree with the bold bit. This has never been a thing people serious about EVs have pushed. This is a thing that folks that hate the idea of EVs have pushed as "if they did this, then I'd suddenly be interested." The companies that have (claimed to) make an attempt at it were always scam artists pandering to that crowd, not the people who like EVs and understand them.
That all said, if there was a major manufacturer of fleet trucks and they designed their vehicles for this and had a division rolling it out, that'd be a different thing. A monoculture of hardware, the ability to track inputs and outputs (the "my brand new battery just got replaced with one that's nearly EoL!") and tooling... along with massive battery packs meant for long hauls... that could potentially make sense. But given drivers have limited road-hours per day by law... I'm skeptical even there.
Without a doubt, but the editors at NOAA are also. Adjusting the start dates of graphs can make them show what you want. If you compare graphs from the NOAA data, going back to the advent of satellite data, and compare those graphs to those most recently on the NOAA website. The recently edited graphs all start at the lowest point (temp) in the last 30 years when data with the same validity but doesn't show what they want to show.
Debunked.
https://science.feedback.org/r...
The Loudness Wars were compression of dynamic range- reduction. Increasing display brightness is the literal exact opposite- allowing for larger dynamic range. Where the Loudness Wars sought to increase the loudness of a medium with a fixed dynamic range, TVs are increasing the dynamic range so that a TV-equivalent Loudness War doesn't need to happen. Article was written by an idiot.
I don't disagree, at least based on the summary. How is "there's new technology this year and next that is brighter than ever before" somehow either an end of escalating brightness or an inflection point? That's not what either of those mean.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
