Comment Re:Batteries (Score 1) 2
Even car-only phones would've benefited from early-1980s-style cellular analog radio if the tech was available in big cities in the 1950s.
Comment How to turn off an non-moving AI (Score 1) 1
1) assume the AI may or may not be lying, so ignore anything it says
2) remove or block connections to the outside world
3) remove electrical power
Really, only #3 is needed but #2 may be faster than removing batteries. #1 is only there as a reminder, in case what the AI is trying to stall you achieving #2 or #3.
Now, if your evil AI is moving around like a robot or drone, or replicating itself like a virus, then you have more work to do.
Comment Re:The cost of force (Score 1) 86
My personal favorite example of this is OpenAI's stated plan to have $1T per year in infrastructure spending. If you do the math, you will have to replace approximately 1/3rd of the entire productive US workforce and charge their former employers about $30k a year per displaced employee to break even. On the infrastructure. OPEX not included.
The math doesn't math.
Comment Pick a damn standard, you say? (Score 1) 121
Um, okay.
Comment The Sinclair telephone ... (Score 2) 121
... will be this but priced at $99.
Comment Re:Brand necrophilia at its worst (Score 2) 121
there are people who don't have any emotional investment in Commodore
People who are too young to have used a Commodore or who were adults when it came out and who never had one at home, university, or work come to mind.
But yeah just about any American who was school-aged between the late 1970s and the late 1980s probably used a Commodore computer or gaming system somewhere. Throw in the Amiga users, K-12 teachers, and it's a whole lot of people.
Comment Re:Huge Economic Indicator (Score 1) 39
Meh. Give me real AR glasses that let me display the stuff I want as an overlay on top of what I'm actually seeing, and I think $2k would almost certainly be worth it. I'm willing to bet the linked product isn't that, though.
Comment Re:Moon-sized impactor (Score 1) 27
Don't know, but the headline says "Moon", not "moon" even if TFA lowercases it.
The fact that the article uses lower case would tend to suggest that "moon" is correct. Title-case would capitalize the word in either case, so it isn't useful for inference.
Comment Corner case indeed (Score 1) 1
making Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussion corners
"Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussions" has been a corner case for well over a decade now.
Submission + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)
schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.
One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.
Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.
"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."
Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.
More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.
One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.
Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.
"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."
Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.
More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.
Comment Re:Appeasment (Score 1) 122
Hmm, let's check:
Big Sur
Monterey
Ventura
Sonoma
Sequoia
Tahoe
No, no, you're totally right, this has everything to do with McDonalds as some kind of appeasement to Darth Cheeto rather than referencing some location in California. Well spotted!
Comment Re:How long (Score 1) 155
Producing a lot of power for a few seconds is one thing, maintaining it for any significant length of time is quite another when you only have sunlight to rely on.
Do you actually need to do it for extended periods, though? All you have to do it make it intermittently unreliable for a few minutes at a time in order to potentially make it unusable in a war zone (if your GPS guided bombs/cruise missiles have a high probability of going off target, you're not going to use them and fall back on laser guided bombs / inertially guided cruise missiles, for example).
Comment Temporary workaround (Score 1) 120
On phone unlock and frequently thereafter, have the user prove they are over 18.
If they can't or won't, then the phone reverts to "text only" mode, where the only images you see are those provided by the OS or compiled in the apps. Web sites load with placeholder images. Images stored in the camera roll and in the SMS app are replaced with placeholders. The camera is turned off. You get the idea.
I call it a "temporary workaround" because ideally it will result in a political compromise.
Comment Re: Wait, what? (Score 1) 105
Are you people really that brainwashed, to the point where all you can do is do the "fuck AI companies" kneejerk, without any shred of rational thought?
It has nothing to do with "AI" at least for me. It has to do with being good corporate citizens. I'd make the same arguments if an aluminum smelter or other heavy-electricity-user was causing grid problems by suddenly turning the power demand from very high to very low in ways that are known to harm the grid when there are commercially available, economically feasible ways to ramp power up and down without hurting the grid.
Comment Yes, in part Re: Wait, what? (Score 1) 105
While the grid operator has the primary responsibility to care for the grid, all users have a responsibility to "play nice" with the grid and not do things that are known to be harmful to it.
It's reasonable for the grid operator to say "99.x% of the time we will be operating within y% of specifications, see that you behave well when we are operating within these specifications. When you do disconnect and reconnect, see that do do so in a manner that is no more harmful than throwing a switch (e.g. limit rushes of current)."
The problem with the data centers is they are disconnecting and reconnecting in ways that harm the grid even when the grid is operating within the specifications provided by the grid operator.
Going from using 100MW to using less than 1MW (or zero) in less than 1 second is going to harm the network. It's reasonable for the grid operator to tell you that you as a matter of contract that you are only allowed to do that if 1) you have a bona fide emergency, or 2) the grid itself is operating outside of specifications. Instead of going to zero in less than 1 second, it's reasonable for you to be required to ramp usage down slowly, in a manner that does not harm the grid.
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"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell
