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Comment Re:The ultimate spy tool (Score 3, Insightful) 17

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Comment Come now... (Score 1) 53

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Comment Re:Sounds doomed... (Score 1) 19

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

Comment Re:smoke and mirros (Score 3, Interesting) 46

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

Comment Re:Wrong again, idiot. You're really good at that. (Score 1) 149

Once again drinkypoo goes to great lengths to expose his stupidity for the world to see with another uninformed, idiotic Slashdot post.

Oh look, whoever you are. Nobody knows you.

The 90s and early 2000s was the peak of automotive engineering in the USA

And American cars were still shit. If you RTFA I linked you'll see that the best of the 90s and 2000s were not what was destroyed.

Now go off to cry to someone else about your tiny penis, you will not be missed.

Comment Russian nesting dolls of scams (Score 2) 46

The current crop of large correlation models being marketed as "AI" appears to be nothing but a Russian nesting doll of scams, with the difference from a piece of Russian artwork being the doll is normally displayed on an equally solid end table whereas "AI" is floating on an aerogel of baloney that is simultaneously rotting, melting in the sun, and being eaten by rats.

Oh yes, let's not forget the massive theft if the work of others that forms the basis of "LLM" "AI".

Comment Re:King George the Third... (Score 1) 261

We're already in a second civil war. It was started by the left years ago.

We never finished the first one. The losers were allowed to keep their flags and their guns. Instead of trying to be one big happy country we should have freed all the Africans and enslaved the Southerners, since they love slavery so much. Then we could have them picking fruit right now.

Comment Re:Astonishing one company can do this (Score 1) 149

In fact, a significant percentage of them will probably get Windows 11 installed on them using the bypasses...

If that's the case, why won't the current owners just do that? Are we too stupid/lazy/rich to do that

Mostly too rich. There are potential problems we don't want to deal with, and will pay to avoid it.

so they can be used by people that get their power from coal-fired power plants and run native language OS versions with English keyboards?

They can probably get local character set equipped key caps from China.

Comment Sounds doomed... (Score 2) 19

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

Comment Re:Of course... (Score 1) 74

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

Comment Re:Demo failure not a product failure (Score 1) 74

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 83

Closed world is like ethe transmission in a traditional car. All of the parts are created to exacting standards and fit together only one way. Transmissions are not user serviceable. Any modifications to the transmission likely degrade its functionality.

People can and do service their own transmissions, in particular doing a fluid and filter change is generally a pretty easy job. There are also modifications and upgrades to transmissions. You can buy "built" transmissions which include heavy duty parts which can handle larger power, torque, and/or shock loads than stock ones. There are "kits" of aftermarket parts which either address wear over time or even correct design deficiencies like either lazy or excessive engagement of clutches.

Comment Re:Kind of funny (Score 1) 75

He's talking about the money already spent and spending right now. Just the build out investments, given we're talking about trillions of dollars, must be boosting the economy.

What's the measurement? If it's "GDP" then sure, the economy is booming. But GDP is itself meaningless to sustainability, which is the most important thing to measure in anything you hope to keep doing. If you want to keep having an economy, for example, you have to keep having consumers who have money so they can participate in it...

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