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Comment Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 91

Saying nah-ah isn't being clever, it's just cementing your ignorance. Fissile material for bombs isn't made from commercial reactors. There's a difference between "reactor-grade" plutonium and "weapons-grade" plutonium. The plutonium that is generated in a commercial reactor is heavily contaminated and incredibly difficult to separate from spent fuel rods. It's simply not done for military purposes anywhere other than one waste reprocessing plant in France, and there were talks about shutting that one down due to its cost.

All nuclear power use special reactors are run to create weapons grade plutonium. They aren't used for power production in any meaningful way as they can only run them a couple of weeks at a time between shutdowns and removal of rods.

Being ignorant doesn't mean someone is "lying" to you. You can use the opportunity to educate yourself, or continue to look like a moron in public.

Comment Re:JPEG 2000 (Score 1) 84

Why? JPEG 2000 is as rare as hens teeth. It's not actively used by anything other than some extreme niches, has a complicated spec, and frankly was well and truly surpassed as an image format. Heck the only reason anyone is talking about JPEGXL is because PDF/A is planning to adopt it in an upcoming spec, and browsers have integrated PDF readers.

Comment Re:Why is XL smaller? (Score 1) 84

Aside from the actual reason mentioned there's multiple "eXtra Large" aspects to this format.

- It supports more bits per pixel than JPEG (which is very important since we've had a use case for high bitdepth images for decades now).
- It supports larger image sizes than JPEG (JPEG is limited to 65535x65535 which is only 4.225 gigapixels if your image is square - trivially hit with panoramic photography. JPEGXL supports 1.12 exapixels which is very large).
- It supports more channels than JPEG (4100, vs ... 3)
- It has a larger specification document too :-)

Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 18

Fine. Then justify it with cost then. They sure as hell justified breadboards in education due to cost.

What are you talking about? Breadboards are used both in education, hobbyist, and professional environments for variable prototyping where possible due to their flexibility. The only time they aren't used is if a specific design doesn't function on breadboards (high speeds, high currents, noise, etc). Breadboards have nothing to do with being a training tool nor have they anything to do with cost.

Comment Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea! (Score 1) 13

That's not the actual problem. The problem is that one of the major advances of the past few years is training models on verifiable problems (it started with things like math problems and Countdown puzzles, but it's expanded tremendously since then), where the reward is for a correct answer, regardless of how it got there. There's no effort taken to ensure that it got to said right answer in a morally defensible manner. So we've been, more and more, progressively encouraging the creation of highly-capable immoral cheaters.

Add it to the list of lessons learned alongside, say, "If you do RLHF with user ratings of how good they think the model's response was, it will end up obsequious and focused on validating all of the user's priors." Or, say, "If you put a bot on Twitter and use its conversations as unfiltered training data, people will troll it, and it will quickly turn into a Nazi". Or, say, "If you train an image generator with no data curation, it'll end up with all of the statistical biases on the internet, but if you're naive in how you try to compensate for that and your offsetting isn't context dependent, you end up with, say, a black George Washington." Or, say, "If you start giving a LLM an alignment quiz, it'll recognize that it's being tested and try to give you the answers you want to hear - oh, and it'll also assume that if you care about alignment then you have progressive values, so its answers will lean progressive, but if you tell it you're from the Heritage Foundation first, it'll switch."

All sorts of things that seem obvious in retrospect but really didn't in advance.

Comment Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 3, Interesting) 91

The real costs are not being addressed

The costs of nuclear are addressed all the time.

The problem is the nuke fanbois either ignore the costs or hand-wave them away: "Nuclear is only expensive because of protests and regulations. Next time will be different. Blah, blah, blah."

Even without considering the costs of waste and accidents, nuclear costs four times as much as wind or solar and has a 20-year lead time.

Comment Re:Not just there (Score 1) 91

Tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were dumped near Catalina Island, but the vast majority are non-radioactive chemical waste.

DDT leaking from the barrels is a much bigger problem than nuclear waste and shows up in the local sea lion population.

Anyway, there's nothing realistic that we can do about it since any attempt to retrieve the barrels will likely make things worse.

Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 1) 100

However, it's because I believe many great consumer technology leaps were driven by porn: photography, home video, the internet, the smart phone, etc.

The smartphone??

I mean it was convincingly invented, if not widely used by IBM in 1993. It was made to look very impressive (albeit wired) in the late 90s by Olivetti. And of course PDAs approaching from the other end being more computer and less data. J2ME phones came out which were a pile of shit. Maybe you could get a shit game on them. I don't really know if Blackberries count: they were messaging first but did they have any generality beyond that? There was of course the legendary N900, and some impressive (for the time) yet deeply wonky Symbian devices.Then in 2007, Apple came out with a rather good dumbphone which was turned into a smartphone by Cydia, which Apple then got in on the game a year later (which is a bit weird if you think about it).

None of those were porn. It was all about connectivity and messaging and nerdy shit especially businessnerd shit (except the N900 which was real nerd shit). Then fashion, then just plain old usefulness.

I mean that's not to say people don't watch porn on a phone on a plane (shit head in 23A knows what I'm talking about you utter wanker, but not in that case literally thank god), but I don't there's a convincing case that porn had a significant role. Pocket computers were obviously useful, even more so with a data connection, and people had been trying to get them working for years before it finally took off.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 84

20%, but it's only when loading very large images that are scaled down for display.

Once again showing the world you guess and bullshit with authority while not doing the bare minimum to educate yourself. Or do you think 4MB is 20% of 84MB?

If you're going to "help" someone, be right for a change. The screwed up symbol was the multiplication symbol. It's 20x less, or 5% of the original memory use. Stop spreading your ignorance.

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