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Comment Delusional (Score 1) 183

If Bernie thinks the AI industry is going to cede control of their product after all the work put into it,
he's delusional.

I have my doubts these companies will even cede control of the private agent ( the one they keep
in house, vs the one they release to the public or private customers ) to anyone.

Including the Government.

They'll simply keep its existence a secret because they know a full power AGI under their control
can be used against anyone who would stand against them. Governments included.

Comment Perhaps (Score 1) 105

Just a thought but, perhaps it would be in the best interests of Social Media to prohibit anyone
under the age of eighteen ( or whatever age your country considers anyone an adult ) from
accessing their platforms.

Would solve the whole problem of lawsuits with " think of the children " running in the background.

Though I suppose they prefer to keep the kiddos on their platform because of the $$$$$ to be made.

They simply want to keep the $$$$ rolling in without the risk of lawsuits eating it all up.

Comment Image Generation (Score 1) 24

For image generation, you're better off using something like ComfyUI or any other system / model
combination that doesn't try to impose Adobe morals / rules upon your work.

I find it amusing that the industry standard content creation package now comes with its own built
in nanny to make sure you don't try to generate a pair of boobs or something :|

Them: Here's this amazing new image generation technology !
Me: Great
Them: It comes with a long list of restricted imagery types you aren't allow to generate !
Me: What the point of adding it to your software in the first place then if we have to ask permission to generate something ?
Them: But it's AI !
Me: It's also several hundred dollars per year for a bloated, digital content creation package with a nanny :|
Them: But it's AI !

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 1) 283

The concern that states don't have balanced budgets (and California, by law, does)

Umm...that's not how it works here. While they're "laws", they're not laws as you know them. They're more like...suggestions. For example, if somebody breaks into your car and steals your shit, you'd call the police right? Where you're from, they'll file a police report. But here? The police say "That'll teach you not to put valuables in your car, dingleberry."

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 1) 283

No, they're not secret beliefs. At all. I mean, I'm a diver, so I've mentioned how cold the water is even with a 7mm wetsuit before, and how I think I'm going to finally spend the money to get a drysuit.

Sometimes you'll have a situation like this: You're riding in the car with some friends, and the driver narrowly doesn't avoid a pothole. The same pothole that has been there for years. Somebody in the car bumps his head on the roof and says "Ow...Why don't they fix that shit? Our gas prices are supposed to be insanely high to pay the taxes that pay to fix that." So another one of us says "What DO our taxes pay for here?" and the answers range from "The high speed train to nowhere" to "Hell if I know"

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 1) 283

In my experience, everybody who isn't a politician and lives in this state has a much lower opinion of its politics than progressive idealists outside of California do. That includes actual card-carrying members of the Democratic Party residing in this state.

Case in point: rsilvergun loves the fuck out of California's politics, and he's never even set foot here.

Comment Re:taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 0) 283

Aside from the fact that they can't tax him because he isn't a California resident and hasn't been for years, that would require them to take ownership of it, which I don't believe the constitution allows on account of the fifth amendment. Even for property taxes, they don't get to just keep your house if you don't pay, rather it has to be sold, and from the sale proceeds they're only allowed to keep whatever money is owed.

And that's what they're doing here -- they're levying a tax in the form of cash. So even if he was a resident, they can't take his shares away, all they can do is a "fuck you, pay me" and he'd just have to find a way to come up with $200 billion in cash to pay with. And that won't be easy at all -- you're not going to find anybody with a billion in cash lying around to buy your portion with, let alone 200 billion. That leaves you in a position where any potential buyers are at an advantage. The kind of advantage where, because you need to liquidate quickly, the buyer is at a major negotiating advantage in terms of getting it at a lower price. On the public stock market, that translates to a lot of valuation disappearing into thin air, basically fucking over all the other shareholders, most of whom don't have anywhere near a billion dollars.

But it's also not just $200 billion in taxes you owe -- whatever gains you make from selling whatever it is you sell will in turn get taxed by the IRS, which means you owe even more, likely meaning you have to sell even more.

These reasons (and more) are why you're literally taxing against money that doesn't actually exist. At least with property tax, property is an illiquid asset, so its value is actually grounded in the reality of what somebody would actually pay for it if you were to sell, which is way different from highly liquid assets like stock in a publicly traded company, whose value tends to be based on emotion and is subject to wild swings from one minute to the next.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 4, Informative) 283

I don't expect you to comprehend any of this, but here goes:

They don't do that for billionaires or other members of the ruling class. Those guys get to keep the leverage assets.

They absolutely do, especially for loans against shares. Not only will they do that, they'll margin call your shares just because the value went too low -- whether you were making payments on time is notwithstanding. If you don't have enough to buy your shares back, they take your shares and flip them, which then turns it into a realized gain that you get taxed on. And if they're RSU/ISO shares, then you have other consequences on top of that, particularly a loss of future income. But for the fact that you can't live in your shares, it carries a higher risk than a mortgage does because all you have to be concerned with in a mortgage is paying the thing on time every month.

The advantage of taking out loans on your shares is that if you're confident your shares will increase in value, then you get to forgo selling your shares, which means potentially higher gains later than you have to pay in interest. If those shares do increase in value, eventually they get sold, so not only do you have higher earnings, but the IRS also gets more taxes out of you in the long run, the only thing is it comes much later.

I personally have operated under a similar theory but without taking out a loan, namely I underpay my taxes and just eat the 7% interest the IRS charges me, because the share price increase will greatly exceed that percentage if I had accepted the share withholding, where I lose the shares outright. And guess what else? Both me and the IRS get more out of it than we would have otherwise.

Regardless of whether you take out a loan or not, taxes get paid on any proceeds as soon as ownership is transferred.

Trump went bankrupt multiple times and nobody ever seized much of any of his property.

Two reasons for this:
1) He never filed for bankruptcy
2) It wasn't his property to begin with

His businesses were all set up as corporate entities, which isn't unique to him or billionaires or your "ruling class". You can literally create an LLC for $100, which while a fortune to you, isn't to a typical wage earner. That LLC can then own properties. If the LLC is insolvent, it can file for chapter 11, which is debt restructuring, not asset liquidation. That's exactly what he did, multiple times, keeping creditors at bay until the businesses were profitable again. Individual wage earners can do basically the same thing under chapter 13, but Trump did not.

They live in an economic system completely different than the one you live in.

They definitely live in the same one I and everybody else does.
The fact that you don't comprehend how any of it works is why you're kind of off in your own little reality, which you share with exactly nobody.

Comment Re: Inner monologue (Score 1) 71

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

The premotor cortex can't control dead neurons. It can fire synaptic signals, but that's it. If the neuron is dead, there isn't a functional dendrite to receive any signaling, let alone do anything with it.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

You're assuming the patient can still move their eyes. Or that their eyes aren't uncontrollably shaking (which precedes neuron death.) That's a pretty big assumption. It's also going to be a fair bit slower than what you can get from BCI. Once they reach locked-in syndrome, BCI is the only hope of communicating at all.

Comment Re: taxing unrealized gains is problematic (Score 3, Interesting) 283

They're not accruing anything other than speculative value. I honestly hope this bill passes anyway. It's better to perform these experiments at the state level before somebody tries it at the federal level. This might be for the best in the long run: This state's budget is fucked enough already, and the legislature will have no choice but to figure out how to do what the rest of us already have to do.

Comment Re: No thanks (Score 3, Informative) 183

Well let's examine it in more detail then:

Socialism is defined simply as government owned means of production. Go ahead and pull out a dictionary. Some argue "collective", "community", or some other doublespeak term, but if you look at what they intend that term to mean, it looks like a government and quacks like a government. That said:

Here you have a proposal where 50% of all revenue from sales (not profit) has to be turned over to the government in shares. The only realistic way to do that is by diluting existing shares by having the company issue new ones.

That means existing shares lose some of their value, because their slice of that pie gets reduced, while the government gets a slice. But remember, this goes on in perpetuity. Each time the tax is assessed, you repeat: Investors lose more of the company, government gets more of it.

This means: Government's ownership stake approaches 100% and private ownership approaches 0% as time approaches infinity. Sure, it never all goes to the government, but eventually private ownership becomes de-minimus, or effectively zero.

So there's two ways of looking at it: For those who understand the reality of how this is supposed to work, it's socialism. For those who don't, it's lipstick on a socialism.

Bernie also appears to contradict himself here by saying that if the valuation decreases, then the government doesn't lose anything, but actually it does: If this is supposed to be a "sovereign wealth fund", and the valuation decreases to zero, then what exactly is held by this fund? Some worthless shares?

Keep in mind too that Bernie was openly in favor of Soviet style command economy until the USSR eventually fell, then he "changed his mind", but every now and then, he makes public statements that suggests he still wants to cease the means of production, effectively pushing us in that direction, usually (but not always) with a "think of the children" argument in tow. This is simply the latest one.

Having said that, if you don't believe this is an attempt at socialism, do explain why.

Comment Re: I know where this is going (Score 1) 73

My thoughts were pretty much in line with this, though even before this shortage, apple's effective price for ram still makes today's ram prices look cheap. And they don't even use particularly good components, they use sk hynix, who makes the absolute shittiest ram you can buy. And then they convince their customers that it's a premium product worth paying a premium for -- basically selling their customers a polished turd.

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