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Comment Yrefi? So they'll own your ass (Score 1) 147

These TV ads for Yrefi are just as ludicrous. They're pitching to "accredited" investors, whatever the hell that means, it give money to a company that is pitching mortgages to people who can't pay their existing mortgage. So, let me see if I understand this. Give us your money so we can loan it to other people who can't pay their loans. When the lendee goes BK, they take the house and tell the investor "Sorry, but your investment is now in the toilet." What a racket.

Comment Law enforcement isn't the only use-case (Score 1) 64

Getting a warrant isn't all that difficult. I've seen them get issued within an hour of determining a need for one. It sets a paper trail that has be defensible to a judge and later in court.

But that's just one use-case. If law enforcement were the only people allowed access to flock information, that would be one thing. These devices don't only get turned on when law enforcement gets a warrant. But nobody knows who has access to the information. Nobody knows who's made copies of it. Nobody knows who has the analytics. That's the scary part. These things aren't like cellphones. A cellphone's primary function isn't to track people. Flock cameras have no other application.

Comment Re:Let them choose (Score 1) 183

It wouldn't be so sacred if native Hawaiians got paid a lot of money. Apparently, having the TMT on Spanish territory means people would have to pay the Spanish government to use it. I guess that makes it "sacred" to them too given that they're going to have to pay for a whole lot of new "citizens".

But here's a question: is the TMT sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be installed? If not, what's the big deal?

Wait, I've got a solution. Let's move it to the Bear's Ears.

Comment Want to know why rich people are rich? (Score 2) 160

When my father was starting out as a young physician in the late 1950s, he had a meeting with the president of Chemical Bank to get a loan. The guy told my dad that the reason rich people are rich is because they watch the pennies.

People have gotten so used to renting every aspect of their lives that they have no clue why they feel poor. In this case, people keep their OnStar subscription even though they probably never use it and as good as cellular coverage is, the reason for having it is pretty much gone. Once SpaceX gets they tech into phones, there will be zero reason to have OnStar. But people are clueless. Wasting money on subscriptions has reached epidemic proportions.

The real concern is what happens when OnStar is totally obsolete. Is GM going to cheerfully give up all that free money? Hell no. They're going to find another way to nickle and dime their customers.

When I bought a new Toyota last year, I got a trial subscription to not just SiriusXM (which sucks, btw, compared to Spotify) and a one-year trial to their digital key nonsense on your phone (which also sucks, btw). I never started paying for those things.

There will come a day, not too long from now, when you won't be able to own a vehicle outright. You will only be able to rent it and every cool feature will be on a subscription basis.

Comment Who's monitoring the monitors of the monitors? (Score 1) 160

Here's my question: the AI doomsayers, particularly those in government, are demanding guardrails for security. In other words, mere mortals shouldn't be allowed access to sophisticated hacking functionality. Okay, but what if you want to use those tools to look for vulnerabilities in your own systems so nefarious entities won't be able to hack them? Will you have to go to some supposedly trusted government agency to have them tell you whether or not your systems are secure (for a nominal service fee)? How do you know you can trust them? Because they're the government?

Comment Can't be or won't be recycled? (Score 1) 118

That's the question. Is it truly that some plastic CAN'T be recycled or is it more likely that they aren't because it's too expensive or time consuming to do so and there's no market for it? Places like California love to stroke their own egos when they have 27 different trash containers for every conceivable use-case and then it's out-of-sight-out-of-mind. Just like everywhere else that uses one recycle container.

Comment AI does a LOT of grunt work (Score 2) 121

Let's say that you have 6 years worth of information about an organization. You want to create a year-over-year summary report that drills into what the organization did and more importantly, what all that cost. Could you hire a few of people to pour over that data and try to come up with something useful? Sure. They'd be expensive and they take a lot of time to do the job. Also, you never know if they're not cherry-picking the data or concealing some of it because they have a personal axe to grind. Humans have their own motivations or lack thereof. They might not actually do the work and instead come up with a report that's B.S while using the money you paid them to go to Tahiti. AI would do this task in a day or two and it won't conveniently forget to include data because of some ideological viewpoint.

At this point, you do have to iterate a few times and disambiguate the information so it can process it correctly. But it asks you for clarification instead of assuming. The models are going to become more efficient and require fewer iterations over the next couple of years.

Ultimately, you do have to have a pretty good understanding of the subject matter in order to collaborate well. If you don't know the first thing about electronics and you asked AI to design a circuit to do something, it probably won't work. But if you know how to tell AI what you're seeing on scopes and meters, it can help you make modifications to get it to work. That applies to pretty much any subject. The people using AI to make a lot of money in the market most likely already have a good understanding of how the market works.

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