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Comment No, and stop play-idiocy rhetoric please (Score 2) 97

Answer: No, using AI to write an op-ed has no impact on the report about dismal math skills, besides improving the organization and legibility of the report which is a positive. The most important point is that college students lack elementary school arithmetic skills, and no test is being used to replace SATs. Actually AI might be useful in both teaching remedial skills as well as in evaluating readiness for college. Maybe some effort could be put into developing free, online automated teaching assistance that does not track you, that can be used by any prospective student to see where they stand and attempt to advance. Maybe a non-judgemental, free AI tutor with multiple teaching methods available to it could teach kids fractions for example, and it could be done long before college entrance.

Comment Re:100M is enough (Score 2) 149

I have to disagree, for several reasons. First off, file sizes just keep increasing. Instead of people thinking their televisions at home look great in "full 1080 HD resolution"? Now, everyone's moving to 4K TV, with 8K being the high-end offering. That means streaming television supporting those higher resolutions is going to use 4x to 8x the bandwidth it used to.

Second, any avid gamer knows how big the downloads have gotten for modern games. The regular updates they push out, alone, are typically 35GB to 350GB+ in size. Now, imagine you've got a family at home with at least 2 or 3 people playing online games on their machines. They don't want to have to wait 20-25 minutes to start playing every time it says an update is required first.

Beyond all of that, though? I've found fiber connections used in an office environment are handled a little differently than what people have at home. EG. I can start uploading 4 or 5 large archives to, say, Microsoft Azure cloud storage, right in the middle of the workday -- and nobody else using the office network even notices. That's largely because we have multi-thousand dollar routers in the office and they're properly configured to prioritize certain types of traffic like VoIP phone calls, and to throttle connections intelligently so everyone gets a fairly equal piece of the total connection "pie" as they work. It's not that reasonable to expect residential users to have similar setups, or to even know how to configure them.

Comment 1GB should be the standard or goal, IMO (Score 1) 149

My cable provider now offers 2GB download speed service, but it's problematic in the sense most people still have devices with wired Ethernet ports that only handle up to 1 gig. speeds. I have a pretty expensive Linksys Atlas mesh router at home (cost $850 or so for the 3 piece set, a few years back), and it doesn't have a port on it faster than 1 gig. for the cable modem to attach to.

Obviously, the provider is happy to supply their own combo modem/router to use but with a monthly cost attached.

But there's just not a good reason in 2026 to not make a least gigabit connections a standard offering. Nobody's "unfairly discriminating" against services like satellite with any of this. Those technologies have always been considered wireless alternatives to use when you're in too rural of an area to expect anything else. Invest in building out fiber networks and those techs will just become what you use when you're mobile.

Comment Re:How this may play out (Score 1) 72

Honestly? I think your last statement there is a key point that should receive a little more attention. It seems possible --- heck, even prudent -- for a person to question possible negative outcomes from mRNA vaccines, while still fully recognizing that it makes good sense to use one on an existing disease. Even in a nearly worst-case scenario? You're talking about cancer, which surely kills a person if not treated, vs a theoretical risk of some long-term problems from an mRNA vaccine (some of which even anti-vax types admit aren't showing up except in a certain percentage of vaccinated people).

Comment Re:Drivers are stupid (Score 1) 86

That has much more to do with people being creatures of habit than being stupid.

I'm old enough to have spent a long time driving cars before voice recognition was a thing. Probably dating myself here, but I remember how excited my friend was when he got a new Nissan Z car and it actually spoke to him, saying things like "Your fuel is low!" and "The door is ajar!"

I spent years trying to utilize voice recognition systems when they came out, and was consistently frustrated. Some required I memorize their specific set of words they understood (cough, Chrysler ...) and didn't do anything else. Others just couldn't understand what I said half the time. By the time any of these systems in cars worked well, I'd given up on them as more hassle or gimmick than they were worth.

At least w/Infotainment touchscreens, you get visual confirmation of what you picked/selected. Voice commands get super annoying as soon as it misunderstands you once and starts the wrong process.

Comment DDR3 server still ticking (Score 0) 110

My home server is an old HP Proliant DL380P that's full of DDR3 memory and 18 LFF SATA drives. Even though it's probably circa 2014 or so, it just keeps on reliably doing what I need. Currently running TrueNAS Scale on it with Plex, NextCloud and a TailScale VPN. (May also spin up a dedicated game server for "Pal World" since our extended family have been playing it a lot lately.)

Every time I think about retiring it for something newer -- it just doesn't add up financially to do it. The crazy memory and mass storage prices right now will keep me away from that idea again for a while, I think ... baring a complete main board failure.

Comment re: K-Shaped economy (Score 2) 150

For what it's worth? The "K shaped economy" is something not all economists think is a "new normal" for America.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/e...

It's at least one possibility that the "K" is staring to reverse course a bit, with the "legs" of the K starting to move closer together again? "Income inequity" isn't necessarily a thing that needs to be stomped out/removed. But it's really important that the low to middle income people don't continue on a downward trend of losing purchasing power while doing the same amount of labor/work to try to earn it.

It's probably a core component of a free-market capitalist society that as you earn more money than you need to survive, you're able to leverage it via investing to potentially earn still more. That's where you'll always have some income inequity. The people who haven't been successful enough to invest surplus income will be behind those who do. Again though.... I'd say there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is when people do everything they're able to do to earn what they need and still keep falling short of their basic needs. There has to at least be some long-term path to "get ahead" if you're just treading water to survive.

Comment Smarter is safer? (Score 1) 70

Didn't see a link to the paper. It sounds a little like saying more advanced models are safer, but that seems to be an illusion. Perhaps a more capable model, or one with more computing resources behind it, can cause more damaged if badly aligned. But a better soul document should better align a weak model. It is not clear which is contributing to the more-aligned results, is it because the models have more collaboration built into their system prompts or is it because they become smart enough to model outcomes or otherwise realize that open warfare among agents (or between agents and humans) is neither desirable nor effective in achieving the stated goal. It also seems like the Rust agent is pretty sneaky if it made a seemingly fair rule that actually benefitted itself. The javascript one that gave up is the most trustworthy, I want that one!

Comment "The Nerd Reich" by Gil Duran (Score 1) 51

Author is on a book tour, so I've heard a couple interviews with him. Based on those, I'd characterize Duran's perspective as "Worst likely case", i.e. it's a plausible outcome. What I don't know is whether the people who have the beliefs described in that book are as organized as the book says.

And for at least 5 years, I've been saying "Palantir is the most dangerous company in America."

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