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Submission + - Elon Musk admits DOGE was a waste of time (and money) (yahoo.com)

echo123 writes: Elon Musk appeared to admit for the first time that his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was a total waste of time—which also destroyed his reputation.

He told Katie Miller, who is married to Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that he would not take the controversial post in Washington, D.C., if he had his time over again.

“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built—worked on my companies, essentially," he told The Katie Miller Podcast.

“If you could go back and start from scratch like it’s January 20th all again, would you go back and do it differently? And, knowing what you know now, do you think there’s ever a place to restart?”

After a deep sigh, Elon Musk, 54, replied, “I mean, no, I don’t think so.”

“You gave up a lot to DOGE,” she said.

“Yeah,” he conceded, sadly.

DOGE oversaw a $220 billion jump in federal spending—not including interest—in the fiscal year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Bill Gates has warned Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts will cause ‘millions of deaths’

Comment Re:Research specs carefully first. (Score 2) 147

RTSP is certainly useful! Wyze used to offer an unsupported firmware version of their -- at the time -- current firmware. But that didn't last long. I bought one and everything in my setup worked great 24/7 until the cheap camera died from the weather. The color video quality even at night, (with outdoor lights), was very, very good for such a cheap camera.

That being said, I never liked the idea of using Chinese firmware designed to phone home, (not necessarily to China, but to 'the cloud'). Since then I've looked into replacing the dead camera with something modern. All I have to show so far are some freshly googled, updated notes:

My use-case isn't as a security camera, but to make a live composite background to use in combination with a roll-down green screen setup above and behind my computer chair for online meetings with colleagues. This setup with the roll-down green screen actually hides most of my house, affording me privacy. The 'photoshopped' composite image looks like the inside of my house with focus on a window looking outdoors, with the outdoors supplied by the cheap RTSP camera feeding OBS Studio. It is easy to use OBS as 'the camera' used by Microsoft Teams, WebX, Zoom, etc. by clicking the 'Virtual Stream' button.

Using my smartphone gave me really good webcam quality. I use Droidcam for OBS in front of the green screen.

To replace the RTSP firmware I used, going forward I would look into a Docker WebRTC/RTSP/RTMP/HLS Bridge for Wyze Cam and maybe also this camera to RTSP project which also runs in Docker.

Comment Re:Half raisins? Grains of uncooked rice? Really? (Score 1) 48

Insects are a lot stronger than humans, relative to their weight. This may be simply because of the size difference or a combination of size and materials.
If you double the size of a butterfly, its weight will increase by a factor of 8, but the surface of its wings will increase only by a factor of 4.

Using a visualization of raisins and grains of rice is better than using humans. A picture of the device attached on a butterfly might be even better.

I just put a bunch of raisins on my kitchen scale, and they average 200 mg each, so Jonathan's raisins must be about six times bigger than mine. I'll weigh my grains of rice later.

How many fractions of a Library of Congress are we actually talking about?

Submission + - How Signal's CEO Remembers SignalGate: 'No Fucking Way' (wired.com)

echo123 writes: The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat.

...In fact, Signal’s user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It’s growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when “people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important.”


Comment Re:So am I a cave man ? (Score 1) 28

Anyone who can't write their own code without ChatGPT or its ilk needs to be either forced to take programming classes or to find another job.

I don't know. I'm torn over this. This could well be the future - not fully coding by AI, but commonly using AI to assist.

I've built an arithmetic logic unit using NAND gates. I've programmed in assembler. I've programmed in-line assembler in C programs. Sure, I have a good appreciation on what happens at a low level, but is that really relevant today? What benefit does someone starting today have if they know this sort of stuff?

Everyone today uses frameworks, huge libraries of pre-built functions, IDE's that refactor and lots of other magic that back in the day, editing C code in vi, I couldn't even dream of. I remember using Borland C for the first time when it was new, and being amazed at what the IDE could do, and how it improved my productivity.

Progress happens, we have to move with the times. If someone can complete the task, and uses some wiz-bang IDE with AI integration - then as long as what they create is fit for purpose, does it really matter that they have never soldered a circuit board?

AI like Anthropic is trained on open-source code at Github, GitLab, etc. If you're an open-source developer using the same framework the AI was trained on vociferously, AI can write good code. Trust me. True, one needs to be discerning as a professional what to ultimately accept, but it can have a programmer's multiplier effect, and the code can still be approved by the team before final repo commitment.

Using GIT and branches, one can be bold! Using AI one can also afford the time to experiment and then ultimately refine. The 'coding as cavemen in December 2024' comparison is apt.

Comment Re: No shit, Sherlock (Score 4, Insightful) 110

Biden's policies were trying to help them become accountable for our tax dollars, something you would think would be important in the age of DOGE.

You misunderstand the purpose of DOGE. DOGE is a bullshit Federal Agency invented out of air and without Congressional oversight to 'disrupt' the Federal government as much as possible before they could be reigned in, in order for the election winning donor class to extract as much profit as possible, one way or the other, period. Private Equity bought the feds. This is the price we're all paying so that 34x convicted, 90x indicted MoFo criminal won't have to die in jail.

Comment Re:Does it matter if you can't tell? (Score 1) 137

Amazon Music has an option to, "play similar music" with every playlist. Given all my options and tests at various services, this works best for me.

You can achieve similar results with Apple Music by creating a playlist, selecting the last song in the list and I can't remember exactly the option to select, I think it is infinity music, it works but with a serious messed up UI/UX.

Comment Re:Gemini 2.5 Pro (Score 1) 12

is there a way to know when the AI is losing the thread of conversation before it drops the ball?
can you monitor the context window?

I find it to be practical to ask the AI to summarize where we are and what have we been trying to do before 'we run out of tokens', so I can copy/paste the result to start a new thread to pick up where we left off.

Comment Re:Data centers in orbit... (Score 1) 76

MachineShedFred said:

I think it would also be an issue that when the a coronal mass ejection comes around at sufficient magnitude that your stupid orbital datacenter is in the path of, it would cook absolutely everything inside of it and your business is now done, and all of your customers are pissed off.

It's not like Cisco manufactures readymade radiation-hardened switches, and Dell doesn't make shielded blade computing chassis to my knowledge. And getting an on-site service call is a real bitch.

There's a reason satellites are so god damn expensive. Off-the-rack hardware isn't used in space applications by-and-large for good reasons.

Han Solo once said, "Hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy!"

Both of which roughly translate to, "And IT support ain't like lightsaber duels - you can't just brute Force your way through a data center meltdown in orbit!"

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