Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 70

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

Comment Re:Soo (Score 2) 86

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

Comment Re:I'm German (Score 2) 86

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.

Comment Re:Payday Loans *2 (Score 1) 150

Unfortunately debt is wealth for those who can manage to convince those who loan money to make those loans to them, particularly if one can find a way to convert the borrowed money into one's personal money while shedding the debts in specially-tailored bankruptcies.

This is partly why there are whole classes of investors that buy struggling companies, separate them into business-units where one unit gets saddled with basically all the debts, sells-off the good bits for profit, and sends the red-ink business unit into bankruptcy.

This is also why some businessmen will set up company after company and leverage naming rights and other costs to said companies to have those companies pay-out to said businessmen, then let the companies die on the vine and go into bankruptcy after extracting as much wealth out of the other investors and lenders. And they are allowed to do this again and again and again since these aren't personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy process needs significant reform. Those who engage in these practices one time need to be barred from serving in or owning new corporations in a controlling capacity after the second time. Once is a fluke, twice is the beginning of a pattern.

Comment Quote from the store and service company (Score 1) 119

A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager." A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. "A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store," they said.

That's frankly bullshit. The system put a red ring around his face on the security monitoring system. The system told the employees to treat him as a shoplifter and as dutiful employees of their company with the system their company told them to use, they complied.

This is almost the exact same excuse made in the movie Brazil by Michael Palin's character Jack Lint, "Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?" after torturing an innocent man to death.

It appears that the United Kingdom is becoming the very dystopia that speculative fiction writers and screenwriters have been warning about for the better part of a century now. And the rest of the world is right along with them to varying degrees.

Comment Re:Crisis of Trust but not in the way he thinks (Score 1) 90

I'm not actually going to dispute that developments in computing historically have led to reductions in particular types of jobs. It's clear that what used to take roomfuls of clerks to receive, sort, review, transcribe, and file got replaced by computers with minimal oversight by a handful of computer operators. That did lead to a lot of those file-clerks being laid off. Similarly we used to have both public and private telephone operators whose replacement started with the very idea of the dial-phone and the automated neighborhood exchange, central office, and PBX.

Thing is, these were not creative jobs. These were human-cogs in machines, and in many of these cases there were new jobs managing and maintaining the new systems in exchange, in addition to the jobs to create these systems and continue to refine them.

AI seems to be about replacing basically everyone in every job.

Comment Crisis of Trust but not in the way he thinks (Score 5, Insightful) 90

The only crisis of trust is all these techbro CEOs expecting us to trust them simply because they've concocted something and have started foisting it upon the public whether we want it or not.

Even if one removes all of the speculative-fiction comparisons to what authors and script writers come up with, we're still left with a bunch of companies trying to vacuum-up all of the stuff that we as human beings have created in order to emulate us, with the specific goal of replacing us for their own profit. why would we be okay with this?

Additionally AI as it was originally popularized when released to the public showed us that they are happy to replace actual human creativity with bad copies of human creativity, and they expect us to accept this. Human creativity is one of the reasons for living, and seeing the utter deluge of bad AI-slop content on various platforms like Youtube continues to prove that these tools are not good for us. Yet they expect us to trust them.

Comment If only all people were honest (Score 4, Interesting) 90

It's OK to use tools, but tool users should be honest about the tools they use.
Woodworkers have no problem with this. There is skill in using a tool like a wood lathe, and craftspeople proudly show their work.
The problem with AI is untalented people using the tool to defraud publishers.
I suspect that as the tool becomes more common, there will be an unmistakable difference between AI work made by a talented tool user and low effort slop.

Slashdot Top Deals

Blinding speed can compensate for a lot of deficiencies. -- David Nichols

Working...