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Comment Re:"more semiconductors expertise on the board" (Score 1) 123

Yep, I had writeups from those flame wars. They *REALLY* did not want it discussed. Governors Brown and Kotek continued the pay-to-play system, which is what lost Oregon the Ohio CHIPs foundry campus (before they realized that Biden wasn't going to pay out CHIPs act at all).

Comment It's a lot harder to make 3000 glyphs (Score 1) 81

Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned) with manually-tuned slight variations to their shapes to make them fit next to each other in a character.

Comment Switching to kana is homophonic (Score 2) 81

you could still [write Japanese] in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.

Exclusive use of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) was common in games for MSX, Famicom, and other 8-bit platforms. The one problem with that is the sheer number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese, words spoken the same and written differently. Kana normally don't even distinguish which syllable a word is accented on, which would be like writing Chinese without its tones. Yet somehow Korean avoided this and switched from Chinese characters (Hanja) to a suitable phonetic alphabet (Hangul).

Comment Serious question (Score -1, Troll) 142

If i was considering buying Dell in the future I sure as hell ain't now.

But George Soros amirite folks?!

I am seriously confused about the rationale here.

You thought Dell was a good fit for your next purchase. You've done some research, and Dell appears to have met your needs for quality and price.

The owners of Dell pledged $625 billion to a system that should help children in various ways. There have been a lot of complaints recently from young people about how the system has failed them: housing is too expensive, not enough high paying jobs, they can't afford to get married, own a home, and have kids.

This donation seems like it would be a start towards fixing this. Perhaps other high-end donors will add to the accounts.

Having an easy way to add to your children's future over time seems like it would help fixing this, it's simple and a "no brainer" for parents: they don't have to learn financing or do research or set up accounts, everyone online will be analyzing the accounts and tell whether they are a good idea. Parents can focus on parenting and rely on expert analysis for whether this is a good idea.

And you are so miffed at this that... for some reason... you've decided to boycott Dell and spend your money elsewhere?

I'm completely at sea here. In what universe does your decision make sense?

Addendum: Looking over the edit page of this post, it occurs to me that there is a universe where "jacks smirking reven" is not a US citizen, and is just making troll posts to foment divisiveness in America. I've seen a lot of really funny news accounts (example) of political shitposters on X being from foreign nations. Are we in that universe?

And will Slashdot ever add the "account based in" feature?

(BTW, I'm from the US, I promise :-)

Comment Re:"Microsoft said it's working to resolve the iss (Score 1) 73

"even one time"

Unless you never use a password, in which case, you log in via all the other available options BUT password. You don't notice it missing. Passwords are so 1980s, get with the program.

I don't use biometrics because .. lets just say they are their own version of compromised. You cannot be compelled to give up your Password (legally) (hammer method is still valid) but a fingerprint, face ID etc that doesn't require you to speak can be compelled. I have no idea why people think it is "more secure" to use biometrics.

Comment Tablet as a substitute for a netbook (Score 1) 87

I distinctly remember people recommending use of a tablet with external keyboard as a substitute for entry-level subnotebook computers when the latter were discontinued in fourth quarter 2012. This despite that major tablets ship with operating systems locked down not to run the sort of lightweight software development environments that could run on the desktop operating system of a netbook.

Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 3, Insightful) 264

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Comment Re:AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 1) 34

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

Comment AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 5, Interesting) 34

At one point last week I pasted the first ~300 words or so of the King James Bible into an AI detector. It told me that over half of it was AI generated.

And seriously, considering some of the god-awful stuff passing peer review in "respectable" journals these days, like a paper in AIP Advances that claims God is a scalar field becoming a featured article, or a paper in Nature whose Figure 1 is an unusually-crappy AI image talking about "Runctitiononal Features", "Medical Fymblal", "1 Tol Line storee", etc... at the very least, getting a second opinion from an AI before approving a paper would be wise.

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