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Comment His Whole Pitch is Safety (Score 5, Interesting) 71

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

Comment Re:It's a Tool (Score 1) 45

Sure, but there's an additional problem which is that AI is very good at generating convincing looking PRs that turn out to be junk. The result is it can be quite a lot of work to figure out how junky the PR is. It kind of falls into the category of "and this is why we can't have nice things". There's nothing wrong in principle with submitting a PR with AI assistance, if the PR is sound. But unfortunately people looking to get their name on the kernel, for props or just frist psot will flood the mailing list with a tidal wave of slop.

It might be better as a result to implement something approximating an automatic blanket ban.

Comment Re:Electric engines are golden... (Score 3, Informative) 122

I need a 300 mile range

This exists.

range and a 4 hour turn around

You can just about do that at home on AC if you have a good connection. It's only a 32A 3 phase connection.

I want to take the wife out to a movie in the evening after a long commute.

You want a 300 mile range, right? If you're commuting 250 miles round trip and then another, say, 50 to the cinema, frankly you need to evaluate your life choices. You're wasting your life on the road.

Comment Re:10 years of brexit (Score 1) 116

Speaking of UKCA...

in my line if work is don't think I've had a single UK customer ask about it. CE is still valid here mostly and everyone still asks for CE marking. It's all B2B by the way.

But also since we can get away with just CE, why would we go for just the local one and have to recertify anyway for a bigger market.

Comment Re:10 years of brexit (Score 3, Interesting) 116

companies started planning their exit strategies.

The strategy was so crystal clear, "brexit means brexit" after all, that companies had no idea even what to plan for. The bad ones buried their heads in the sand, the good ones wasted avst amounts of time and money having to cover all reasonable contingencies.

Naturally, in keeping with the entire theme, it wasn't just planning for exit, it was an utter shitshow of trying to plan.

Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 2) 92

you get a very disorienting "why won't it slow down" feeling, and it's easy to panic.

You don't always even panic. It's weird: if you do something in muscle memory enough, you don't consciously think about doing it. This is why driving etc is smooth because you aren't thinking about every action. When something breaks [see what i did there!] you at best get a creeping feeling of wrongness that takes a while to percolate up to your conscious brain.

I can relate a few anecdotes.

One typically dismounts a bike by first lifting your foot up off the pedal before putting your foot down. After an accident where I slipped off a pedal climbing a hill, I switched to toe clips, which require you to tilt your foot down then slide it up and out. Lifting doesn't work. First time I came to a stop, I toppled over into a puddle while hauling my foot upwards, but not even thinking about it. I wasn't panicking because I hadn't even noticed until I was at about 45 degees at which point I had a brief flash of "oh shi..." before landing in the puddle. But it's funny: lower level part of my brain wanted to lift my foot and just kept applying increasing force to match the requirement, but didn't inform me.

Next (harmless) was on moving to the US. I was driving along and then my partner asked me what was wrong, which confused me. She then asked why I was batting at the door. I had *NO* idea I was doing that. I'd only ever driven a manual on the other side of the road. Based presumably on engine noise etc, my hand was searching continuously for the nonexistent gear stick on the wrong side of the car. The weird thing was it was going all of its own accord. And because nothing had gone really wrong, nothing jogged my low level brain out of that loop, so it was happily searching forever, and my conscious mind was completely unaware.

Third was in winter, wearing heavy boots driving an unfamiliar rental canyonero, and clipped the gas with the side of my boot while braking. The car wasn't slowing properly, and the low level feedback control part of my brain just kept commanding more force, so I kept kitting both pedals ever harder. I got a creeping feeling of wrongness as the car wasn't stopping, but it's basically of the form "why is my limb not working properly".

I then rear ended someone, and I can't remember how I realised what the fuck I was doing. Anyway the guy was really nice.

Comment Re:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 3, Interesting) 65

He used to win these market timing games because no one was paying attention to huge short positions. You could quietly bet against a company, or, better yet, you could quietly amass a short position and then release stunning negative news that you had uncovered and watch the stock price tank.

These days it is more likely that online investors will notice a large short, and drive the price of the stock up until the person holding the short gets margin called and loses all of their money. The shorters then provide the liquidity you need to get out of the position. There used to be good money in shorting terrible companies, but in an age where hordes of armchair investors can drive the price of GameStop to the moon that strategy is just too risky.

Comment Re:Isn't this the idea? (Score 1, Insightful) 113

If ffmpeg allows known and published vulnerabilities to languish, the risk here is that organizations that use their code will simply stop using it and will look for other solutions.

Orgs basically have a choice:

1. Suck it up and deal with the whims of people you are not paying a penny to
2. Cough up some cash and contribute
3. Develop their own completely in house/pay for a 3rd party one

2 is almost always way cheaper than 3. Option 4 of "whine incessantly that people you aren't paying aren't working for you fast enough" really needs to stop. I suspect a lot of companies would rather do 3 than 2, because they are not rational.

Comment Thanks Samsung (Score 1) 41

For coming up with such an uther useless idea, I even logged back in Slashdot, after several months, just to be able to comment mocking you!

  I mean -- I like Samsung Phones, and I had been in the Galaxys for almost a decade now.
Not ONCE I found out the bundled 'bixby" to do anything useful!.

Wait - I lie - at one time, there was an easter egg that could toggle the mobile flashlight by saying "Lumus".
That is long gone.

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