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Comment Re:wow! That's terrible (Score 4, Insightful) 137

You jest, but it truly is terrible. Take this bit (if true): "(According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two." My immediate reaction to that was "WTF!?" You just need to double the denominator and simplify if possible and it's all integers no matter what, but, even if you don't simplify, 2/6 and 1/3 both answer the question "what is half of 2/3?".

That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic comprehension and ability to conceptualise a problem, which is far more wide-ranging and impactful than just being bad at math.

Comment Re:Does this mean it'll stop sucking? (Score 1) 25

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Comment Re: Hardware will be fine (Score 1) 56

Sure, but nothing tangible would be lost - just some notional "Market Cap" reduction which is only really meaningful to Wall Street types, although that would also impact people's pension's etc.

Where nVidia would be exposed would be is companies have bought significant quantities of their chips, but go bust when the bubble pops without settling their invoices from nVidia first. Best case that ties up nVidia's cash while the bankruptcy process happens and they get a significant slice of the outstanding financial pie. Worst case the companies in question all implode with significant debts to multiple parties, their assets (mostly nVidia's chips) get sold off to pay off those debts, but nVidia still gets next to nothing once the assets are divied up. Combined with a heavily reduced market cap, that leaves nVidia with a significant reduction in cash-in-hand and a lack of value with which to help secure loans and investment, which in any case would need to come from a financial market reeling from a multi-trillion dollar bubble pop. The reality is more likely to be somewhere in the middle, but nVidia isn't going to sail through this completely unscathed either.

Comment Re:Do your research (Score 3, Interesting) 11

It's not just about the packages and whether they are malicious or not. These, so far at least, are not - AFAICT they don't even *claim* do anything at all that is functionally useful to a coder so they are never going to get downloaded; their sole purpose is to earn the uploader some of these TEA tokens which, when amalgamated across a few hundred thousand packages, is presumably worth something to them, or why bother? Now that the jig is up, the people that do like to peddle such malware are probably not looking too kindly on whoever pulled this off.

That's the secondary issue here ; like many similar things, whoever came up with this TEA token either didn't consider, or didn't care about, human nature. Anyone with half a clue, or the slightest care about the integrity of such a scheme, should be well aware by now that if you can earn something of value (which need not be monetary) by doing some online clicks, likes, shares, uploads, or whatever then some asshat is going to try and exploit the system so they can get all the benefits without the effort. If your system isn't baking in countermeasures against that kind of abuse, then it's a PoS that should never have left the drawing board but, all too often, human nature rears its head again and says "ship it anyway!" and the enshitification continues.

Comment Re:AI headline not spell checked (Score 1) 88

They hyperscalers are building out (or re-activating) grid-level power supplies for DCs that are not online yet, so are essentially not included in the 2025 figures. All Electrek (a pro-green energy site with a very obvious bias to that effect) are saying is that we collectively built out enough solar and wind to exceed the overall global increase in demand during 2025. Sure, that's a good thing, but it says nothing about how much excess non-green capacity was decomissioned last year (relatively speaking, hardly any), or by just how much that annual green capacity roll out will need to ramp-up to avoid building/re-activating additional non-green power plants to power the new hyperscaler DCs over the next few years (quite a lot, unless the AI bubble pops and most of them never get built).

Frankly, I'd prefer it if they just stopped trying to put a positive spin on everything green and told it like it is for those too dumb/lazy to read between the lines. Yes, we're collectively rolling out greener energy sources at a decent clip, but still far, far, below the rate needed to achieve any meaningful mitigation of mankind's effect on the climate in the timescales that are probably required. According to Electrek nearly everything moving us towards a net zero economy automatically gets an A+ when the reality is probably closer to a B-, or even a C+, must try harder.

Comment Re:Thanks for the research data (Score -1, Troll) 116

The entire EU is a protectionist bloc Canada is protectionist coffee. Tariffs are wonderful, useful tools when other countries use them. But when Trump does them they're bad. As are so many other policies like deporting illegal aliens. Obama and Biden did more and entire states and cities did not rebelv and nullify federal authority like it was fort Sumter 1865. Pure TDS.

Comment Re:How Big and How Short? (Score 2) 60

It wasn't hard to tell that the emperor in the fable was naked at the equivalent point in the tale either, but it still took that lone voice to pipe up and say so. In the case of sub-prime, the smart people (or at least their smart financial advisors) sat up, paid attention to what Burry was saying and took some mitigating action, everyone else took a bath or, if they had the right contacts and leverage, got a government bailout.

In my mind, AI is just about at that point but is still suffering from a combination of the Greater Fool theory and Dunning-Kruger syndrome. The people backing the AI bros and the bros themselves all know it's a bubble (Sam Altman even flat out said so), but as long as they can keep pulling in money from the pool of Greater Fools to pay the bills, and their Dunning-Kruger leads them to believe they will be the select few that realise it's time to bail right before the bubble pops to maximise their profits and avoid taking the hit, unlike all the other losers, they're going to keep pumping air into it.

Comment Nudge (Score 1) 113

I've noticed this kind of thing a LOT lately. Evidently this book is out called Nudge that tells its readers to annoy the shit out of their customers until they 'install the app". Because evidently running in the background and draining your battery constantly harvesting your data and monitoring your location is more profitable than actually selling the service.

I booked air tickets on a website and it was deliberately irritating, pausing for a long time between screens, showing a QR code and saying, 'tired of waiting? our app is much faster!" Hell, even Youtube is unwatchable without a Google account and giving them your real name, address, phone number for 2FA, email, backup email to cross-check databases. And once you've done all that. the jack-in-the-box pops open and it's like, let's get your social, your tax return info for last year, last three places of employment, and then upload a photo of yourself holding your ID. And your selfie cam photo wasn't clear, our facial recognition can't read it. Nice try scammer, your application has been denied. We'll be keeping the info you already entered, though.

China is like this, an entirely real-name internet. You can't so much as order food delivery without all of this. Simply entering the country requires facial scan and fingerprints.

1984 was a warning, not a role model.

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