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Comment Re:The CTO? (Score 1) 33

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a real shame for him to be vague CTO of cloud stuff. I don't begrudge him the money the promotion presumably involved; but going from actually interesting things to sending copilot to double booked meetings is kind of grim.

Comment Re:Wha (Score 3, Informative) 20

"while state officials deny that residential or rural water supplies will be tapped."

What's that leave? Are they going to build their own catchments?

Closed-loop water cooling? Heat pump cooling? Immersion cooling? A lot of things, really.

Companies use water for cooling when it is cheap and plentiful. When it isn't cheap or plentiful, there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve any ongoing water use.

Now if you ask how the construction company is going to build concrete floors without water... that's a different question. :-)

Comment Re:This is good here's why (Score 1) 112

The law is not absurd. About a third of poor people are on metered cell phones for their home Internet connections. OTA TV is free. So consolidation of the OTA spectrum massively reduces access to a diverse panoply of voices for the poorest Americans.

The law wasn't written to protect the top 5% of Americans' ability to get news from a large number of sources. People with wealthy always had that ability.

Comment Re:This is good here's why (Score 1) 112

That's an absurd comparison, because the Internet is not a limited spectrum. Your analogy is like arguing that there should be no regulation of airline mergers, because you can always walk or drive. They're not equivalent, they don't have equivalent costs or benefits, and from a legal perspective, they're not even the same market, or at least not meaningfully so.

Comment Re:This is good here's why (Score 2) 112

TV was roughly 6 over the air channels and it was regulated monopoly - now its dying and thanks to the internet everyone has infinite channels. Today this rule would be like saying "California, you can't have Netflix because Netflix already reaches 39% of American's, you have to purchase Prime Video instead."

Not at all. TV is still a finite spectrum. There will never be any more over-the-air TV channels than there are now, realistically speaking. Not everyone has high-speed Internet. 7% can't get it at all, at least by the FCC's definition.

Another 16% use their cell phones for Internet, which means their data is likely metered. This number balloons all the way up to 34% when you look at low-income Americans.

Those folks don't have access to "infinite channels".

You're right that over-the-air TV is dying because of competition, but it's also the only remaining lifeline for the poorest Americans. And that's exactly why the Republicans want more control. They've made manipulating poor people with below-average education into an art form, and being able to get more stations in more markets owned by large right-wing conglomerates means more people who can be easily manipulated.

That's why, believe it or not, right now, in the dying days of TV, those rules are more important than ever.

There's no evidence that consolidation will reduce cost of operation enough to be meaningful, but there is evidence that consolidation results in fewer voices reaching the poorest and often least-educated Americans. And this is unquestionably a bad thing.

Comment Re:Meaningless statements? (Score 2) 202

I agree that he was making empirical claims as though they were first-principle claims, and ignoring the fact that cameras are better optical sensors than the human eye,

Not necessarily. Pretty sure the older HW3 sensors from Tesla had considerably less instantaneous dynamic range than the human eye — probably not enough to be a problem most of the time, but still...

But more than that, cameras are notably worse than eyes, because they're in the wrong spot. A pair of eyes three feet back from the window sees the scene and focuses through whatever is hitting the glass, so unless it's a deluge, the contents of the glass are largely out of focus. With small sensors mounted close to the glass, you don't have the depth of field helping you in the same way. With cameras outside the car, it's even worse, and they get blinded constantly.

What cameras do have is quantity. Your eyes can look in only one direction at a time. Cameras can look in every direction. They can see that something is coming at you from the side or behind. They can see around corners better, if placed correctly. They can judge distance and speed of oncoming vehicles with mathematical precision that human brains can't consistently match.

They also don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted. They don't start burning when sweat gets in them. And so on.

These things can make camera-based cars considerably safer than human drivers, at least in theory, particularly once you consider that the average contains drunk drivers, tired drivers, distracted drivers, etc. And most driving accidents are not caused by loss of visibility, statistically speaking.

Comment Re:The "data center" hot topic... (Score 1) 51

The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.

In the worst case, they'll add interior walls (and maybe add some windows to the exterior walls), and resell it as office space, residential space, factory space, retail distribution space, or even a community library. After all, floors built to support racks of equipment should handle the weight and distribution of stacks of books without breaking a sweat.

So the construction might be overkill for what they eventually get used for, but it's not like a newly built, solid building isn't going to find a use. Maybe a quarter of the effort is wasted? Just guessing.

Comment Re:Pretty simple (Score 1) 125

Easy to read "Prop 13 (1978)" between the lines, which is California specific. IIRC[citation needed], Prop 19 (2020) while eliminating inheriting the assessed value (Prop 58 (1986)) make it possible to transfer the assessed value to another property statewide (previously available only where individual counties had made agreements). Why Modoc isn't being bought up in order to transfer the assessments to Beverley Hills is a mystery.

The main impact of prop 19 is making it possible for the elderly to not be forced to move to another state if they decide to downgrade to a smaller home. It likely has minimal impact on people's ability to move closer to their jobs, because it is limited to people 55 and older, so less than a quarter of California's workforce qualifies for transferring the cost basis to a new property.

More to the point, the people most likely to change jobs are younger workers, and none of them qualify.

As for Modoc to Beverly Hills, the difference in market value is added to your assessment. So if you bought a $50,000 home in the middle of nowhere that has appreciated to $300,000, and you trade up to a $3 million home, your new tax basis value is $2.75 million ($3 million minus $300k plus $50k). So it really doesn't make much difference in that case, practically speaking.

Comment Re:Defective by design (Score 1) 57

Which doesn't really work as users routine confuse their accounts and upload files to the wrong account, and then confusion ensues when files are stored partially on a work account and on a personal account.

And that's when the corporate systems are configured to warn if you try to share something with or from the wrong account, and you shame the user into doing it right. Besides, this is usually only a problem for brand new users. Once you have a bunch of files uploaded to both accounts, you're not going to suddenly see the files from your personal account, and think, "Oh, this is where my work stuff goes".

It's only confusing if you have access to the same files from both accounts. And then, yeah, you'll get confused about which account is editing the file, but it's not as if it really matters in that situation.

Comment Re: If I were OpenAI... (Score 2) 16

If Apple wasn't able to keep their critical employees from jumping ship, then that's really on Apple for not recognizing or being willing to retain their employees at market price.

And now, by suing a bunch of former employees, they're giving employees who might be thinking about jumping ship a reason to pause. Whether Apple wins or loses the lawsuit, Apple wins.

Comment Re:End of End-to-End Encryption (Score 1) 28

So the UK is doing a great disservice to citizens of all countries, not just their own, by pushing on this.

They know what they are doing. The UK government has never believed in privacy rights. They know they're doing a disservice to everyone. They don't care.

And the only rational answer is to cut them off. No more iCloud storage for anyone residing in the UK. And for anyone else, immediate denial of access from the minute you set foot in that country to the minute you leave. This is the only reasonable option.

E2EE is really a dog and pony show, not real math, because the apps we install are all opaque and built by opaque build systems we inherently trust, whose vendors can insert a new backdoor any time they want.

And ultimately, this is the reason why Cloud storage shouldn't even exist. The minute you depend on someone else for storage, you can't completely 100% guarantee that your data is not in someone else's hands. If you store it on hardware you own, not built by the company that sold the backup software, then people will be able to verify that data is getting pushed to only a single destination, and if they started cheating and sending it to two different services, folks would likely notice. It's not perfect, but it makes back doors a lot harder to pull off without detection.

We need Time Machine for iOS, backing up over encrypted SMB to servers on our home network that we control. Fix that gap, and none of this matters anymore.

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