Comment Re:So much for the free market (Score 1) 349
US businesses only cry "free market" when they're trying to kill regulatory legislation.
US businesses only cry "free market" when they're trying to kill regulatory legislation.
The US produces more manufacturing output than every other country on earth other than China.
If artificial superintelligence is a thing, we're going to need it to defend against it.
If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.
Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.
unless nature flicks us off like the fleas that we are, i’m pretty sure the planet is gonna sprint past that finish line.
Since all of the climate-warning cutoff values — 3C, 2C, and 1.5C — were taken from papers where they were tossed out as aspirational goals, each with no scientific justification for that value over any other, although dire predictions were ascribed to exceeding these values, such as a 2022 study published in Science titled Exceeding 1.5C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points. The IPCC parroted the study: "Exceeding 1.5C could also trigger multiple climate tipping points — such as breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems — with abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts for humanity." (1.5C: what it means and why it matters) And since the UN has declared we've already blown past this critical temperature goal, we can sit back and wait for the catastrophes that we have been repeatedly told, in increasingly apocalyptic warnings, would happen once we inched past the 1.5C breakpoint. Based on the accuracy of the 1982 declaration by the UN that the planet would be facing an ecological disaster within two decades, its 1989 warning of a 10-year tipping point, IPCC chief Pachauri's 2007 declaration that it would be "too late" if action wasn't taken by 2012, and its recent retirement of the IPCC's RCP 8.5 (aka SSP5-8.5) warming scenario as "implausible" (despite having been used for more than ten years as the foundation of other individuals' and organizations' apocalyptic claims, some of which continue to be made despite their foundation having been pulled out from under them), though, I'm not expecting much from this UN announcement, either.
"Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, it’s an initiation... What age should you start to see public executions?"
"We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately."
"You quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters... in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death."
Stoning gay people to death is "God's perfect law"
Trans people are to blame for inflation: "There's a direct connection to inflation and the trans issue. You say, Charlie, come on. They couldn't be further apart. No, they're exactly the same. They're the same in this aspect—when you believe that men can become women, why wouldn't you also believe that you could print wealth? If you believe that someone can change their gender, why wouldn't you also believe that money is wealth?"
Blacks "were actually better in the 1940s. It was bad. It was evil. But what happened? Something changed. They committed less crimes." (yes, despite the Piers Morgan "fact check", while his reasons for believing black people were better off under segregation was unrelated to segregation itself, he very much did repeatedly argue that black people were better off in the 1940s)
"If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’"
Juneteenth: "It is a neo-segregationist federal holiday, is what it is... The entire point of it, as per postmodernists do and deconstructionists, is to subvert July 4."
We should have "just took care of" trans people "the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and '60s"
"The Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night - it’s only gonna get worse.. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters."
"Haiti is legitimately infested with demonic voodoo. I’ve talked to missionaries that have gone there and they say they’ve seen the darkest stuff... people levitating and turning into cats at night."
"Jewish donors have a lot of explaining to do.. Because Jewish donors have been the No. 1 funding mechanism of radical, open border neoliberal quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews. And now it’s coming for Jews.. It’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it."
Calling Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown "affirmative action picks".
Calling the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer an "amazing patriot" and called on people to bail out the attacker.
"Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge. "
"Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more."
"MLK was awful. He’s not a good person... We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s."
"Transgenderism and gender 'fluidity' are lies that hurt people and abuse kids." Transgender identity is a "throbbing middle finger to God."
Gun violence as a "cost" to having no gun control: "I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."
"The 'Great Replacement' is not a theory, it's a reality."
"The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different."
"Islam is not compatible with Western civilization."
"Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America."
On and on. Man, such a moderate centrist who never espoused bigotry or promoted violence!
The one being incorrect is you. Archie's representation is quite accurate, in the US context.
Yes, a very "middle of the road" supporter of far-right Tommy Robinson (who has a 17% positivity ranking among Brits). The guy who said "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them." The guy who described diversity as an "ideological inferno", a "religion" led by "high priests". The guy who was so radical and repressive at Basecamp that at one point 1/3rd of its employees all walked out en masse. Truly, a remarkable centrist of our times!
I'm old enough to remember the data before it was 'adjusted' to create warming trends that weren't in the actual data from actual thermometers.
And I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't so goddamned hot.
Not talking about VRAM or unified memory. Regular DRAM.
There's been a lot of advancement recently on how to best manage MoE expert swapping (FreeToken is just one example).
So why does that mean that the licenses need to be uploaded into a central database? It's not enough for the clerk to just LOOK at the license?
Hertz was founded in 1918. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they didn't have central databases of driver license images back in 1918, and yet somehow Hertz seemed to operate just fine. I'd go so far as to say Hertz was operating in the 21st century without a third party central database of driver licenses.
From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.
This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.
IMO buying and selling are a matter of gambling on which way you think other people gamble.
fool me once, shame on you
fool me twice, shame on ME
How are you connecting to Slashdot from the year 2024?
If you have ~128 GB of RAM, consider Qwen 3.8 Flash + Freetoken. You'll only get half the tok/s as 27B but the quality is significantly higher than 27B - it beats it solidly in all compared benchmarks (for example, DeepSWE 1.1: 42,2% vs 58.7%).
Grok is a "discount model". It's cheaper than Claude Sonnet yet better than it. Doesn't compare to Fable or Opus, but then again, they're way more expensive models.
Note: I avoid using Grok - not just for the Musk factor, but because there are better options, e.g. GLM-5.3 and Qwen-3.8. Also, if you really want to save money, GLM-5.3 Flash and Qwen-3.8 Flash are amazingly good for their price range.
1 Dog Pound = 16 oz. of Alpo