Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 1) 63
What's more, you really have to know what you're doing to coax it into re-using code, rather than rewriting the same functionality with each prompt.
Comment Tap or click to view article (Score 1) 23
No video (or animated image) should ever load/autoplay unless the user interacts with that element, indicating he/she wants to play it.
How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."
Comment Download with eager loading and read offline (Score 1) 23
In my experience on laptops and tablets, I've found the exact opposite (eager loading) helpful in some situations with limited or no data. I would download an entire page on unmetered Wi-Fi, go offline, and read while riding as a passenger in a car or bus.
Comment Re: Does the Pirate Party still exist? (Score 1) 23
The Privacy Act of 1974 technically restricts what personally identifiable information (PII) a federal agency can collect and retain.
Is that just directly or does it include data that can be purchased through third-part brokers? 'Cause some agencies seem to be using the latter.
Comment Re: Does the Pirate Party still exist? (Score 1) 23
The Privacy Act of 1974 technically restricts what personally identifable information (PII) a federal agency can collect and retain. I would be OK extending this to state and local agencies. That would potentially give us a way to go after state laws that require age verfication in devices and operating systems. But it seems that there is no political will to pump the brakes on the surveillance state.
Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 172
I sincerely doubt that 14,500 USD per year (full-time minimum wage) is near enough to pay for income tax, rent, food, health insurance, and a round-trip taxi ride every weekday in most of the United States. I'd be interested to read examples of budgets that you have in mind.
Comment With Linux, OS is not usually the issue (Score 2) 63
If you run a light desktop environment like XFCE or LXDE, 4GB is probably fine.
However, the instant you spin up a modern browser or office suite, you're cooked. It's the massive applications that are the problem on Linux, not the OS or desktop environment (if you pick a lightweight DE.)
Comment Shouldn't need to be said. (Score 4, Interesting) 38
As opposed to half-assed improvements? Obviously updates/patches pushed to end-users should be "production ready". It's sad that it had to be specifically stated that Microsoft actually worked on these. I imagine people will remain dubious anyway.
So much better than those updates designed to do the opposite.
So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process."
Ironic? Yes. Surprising? No.
Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 172
Recent graduates tend to be stuck with hourly food service and retail jobs. These tend to treat availability outside 9 to 5 as a condition for hiring, not to be doable from home, and not to pay enough for a taxi. Even a cyclist needs a backup during bad weather.
Comment Are we the baddied? (Score 3, Interesting) 91
SS Officer #2: Er, Hans?
SS Officer #1: Have courage, my friend.
SS Officer #2: Yeah. Er, Hans, I've just noticed something...
SS Officer #1: [Looking through binoculars] These communists are all cowards.
SS Officer #2: Have you looked at our caps recently?
SS Officer #1: Our caps?
SS Officer #2: The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?
SS Officer #1: What? No. A bit.
SS Officer #2: They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?
SS Officer #1: Uh, I don't...
SS Officer #2: Hans... are we the baddies?
Comment Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit? (Score 1) 172
If someone happens not to have this privilege, then how would they go about traveling to or from work at night or on Sundays, when all the bus drivers are at home with their families? (Source: Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA)
Comment Re:You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does. (Score 1) 30
I imagine that most gamers are unwilling to pay for business-class service if business-class service is the only "real" service offered at their home address.
Comment Exercise (Score 5, Insightful) 124
Imagine if a bunch of tech bros said: "Hey, you don't need exercise. It's totally fine if your muscles atrophy. After all, we have technology to move you around and it can do so much more quickly than your muscles ever could!" We'd laugh them out of town.
Well, guess what? If you don't exercise your brain, it atrophies. If you outsource your thinking, you eventually become unable to think.
Comment The biggest winner (Score 2) 80
SpaceX
If I worked at SpaceX I would be cheering every minute of this. Science and technical issues aside the Artemis mission proved that there is political and social interest in such an endeavor to the extent that it gets funded to the ludicrous scale this one did.
They proved there is a market.
So if you come up with a usable vehicle system at 1/10th the operational cost of what people are actually paying for that is as close to a guaranteed win in a business plan it is possible to get. I wish I had stock in that company.
'Cognitive Surrender' Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds (arstechnica.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision.
Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers.
Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.
Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this "demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism." In general, "fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation," they write. These kinds of effects weren't uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers.
Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that "cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational." While relying on an LLM that's wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a "statistically superior system" could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as "probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data," the researchers suggest. "As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality," the researchers write, "rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender." In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.
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