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Comment Re:So what (Score 3, Insightful) 99

Well they've done 95% of the work required to make the books available to everybody.

Perhaps they could be persuaded to do the last 5% after some competitive advantage latency?

If I had to choose between preserving the physical book and allowing access for a billion people, I would sacrifice the paper.

"It belongs in a museum" is really dated and felt to be wrong today.

Why isn't anybody else making these books available? That's the bigger question.

Granted, modern Copyright Law is ruinous to society.

The Google Books project has many of the older ones. There is no moral case against duplication for books that are impossible to purchase but still "protected" by Copyright.

I would like to know the average price of these books. If they are $7 that means something very different than $700.

Comment Re:Breaking News (Score 1) 79

It's so obvious to me when a Youtube script is written by Claude, even when read by a human.

Odd that all that training still doesn't predict human-like next words. There must be prompts to favor certain voicings.

Enjoy your abysmal watch-percentage metrics
as we click away, boys.

It's sad when good old channels decide to cash-grab with slop and dishonesty.

Comment JHFC ACM (Score 1) 38

This is likely the proceedings with the paper:

https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/epd...

It appears the ACM PDF reader loaded an 850MB PDF into my phone's browser and has been stuck doing a search on "beam steering" for ten minutes.

No joke, I read ACM papers on information retrieval and human computer action three decades ago and this is just hostile design.

I'll try again on my desktop at home tomorrow but maybe somebody can extract the paper before then.

And, yeah, as others have said this is old (November 2025) but it would be handy to have integrated with my Home Assistant. Much better than setting up ESP-32's with 26Ghz radars in each room.

Comment Re:"Potentially" is doing a lot of work here (Score 1) 57

These missiles are known for evading Patriot PAC-3's with non-ballistic maneuvering.

That's at least part of what needs CPU. However a $6 233MHz ESP-32 could handle those calculations.

Those nVidia boards are often used for home video boxes, including transcoding. It's possible this was just a video uplink component.

Reportedly the Tomahawks used in the Minab Massacre were video-guided and did fly-arounds to time the double-tap and experimental use of thermobaric detonation of unspent fuel to incinerate the surviving girls and responding parents.

We should worry more about bringing those people to Justice than whatever Russia is doing.

Comment Re:It's PBS, there's no money for anything (Score 1) 101

Their finances have been widely covered in the news.

Their IT Lead is making ~$180K.

Their interest income alone was $500K.

They didn't have a local copy strategically, not for a lack of $5K.

Cloud backup is just another backup, not primary storage, if you care about your data.

Some of us have online, nearline, offline, offsite, and multiple cloud backups with much smaller budgets.

That's for people who care about their data (including the bean counters).

Many IT folks (most?) have had to "I told you so" after a bean counter said no to a small spend. I wouldn't assume the IT department is incompetent without evidence.

Comment Re:Bulk pricing? (Score 1) 98

As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

Comment Re:How about you just fuck right off? (Score 1) 50

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

Comment Re:Who really wants this tech? (Score 1) 50

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

Comment Re: If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score 1) 43

If the original ToS on Twitch grants Amazon a license to create derivative works then they don't have anything to worry about.

It's like your local superstation had the rights to run ads on Star Trek in addition to the license fee they paid but they didn't therefore get a right to create a new Star Trek series or publish a "Best Moments of STTNG 1989" show around the holidays.

Now if they had gone to Paramount about the Best-Of show in theory they could have negotiated a license for that, having already been media partners. Heck, some software company got Riker to pitch their product from the Bridge.

The big authors' settlement with OpenAI sets at least some precedent in this nascent field of IP law (which is enforced whether we like it or not).

But I've never heard of a Twitch streamer talking about a derivative work that Amazon created from their show using their words or likeness.

To be fair Youtube does indeed do a yearly "best of" show.

Who knows, maybe we'll see an AI Hassan Piker doing and saying some wildly ill-advised shit in the near future. Would not be entirety shocking.

Comment Re:Zoom Should Not Be Trusted (Score 2) 12

This is smart but harder than it needs to be.

Do we have a wrapper available that can let native Zoom launch and only have access to ~/.config/zoom and some USB input devices but not the rest of the machine?

Somehow building a custom MAC profile is expert-level stuff two decades on and not an end user's job.

An on-demand screen sharing permission popup should be achievable.

It's silly that a browser sandbox is better than any native sandbox available.

Perhaps such a tool readily exists and just needs to be mainstreamed into existing distros.

I know there was a Debian project a while back that aimed for all services to pass systemd strict security by default but nobody wanted to do the work.

That's the right mindset but separate from user apps.

Comment Atomic Structure (Score 1, Interesting) 22

There's some interesting stuff going on trying to understand more of the atomic structure beyond the current models.

The math on gluons has worked quite well but for some reason questions like, "OK, but what are gluons?" has been derided as "crank science" in Pergamon Press-gated Academia.

Such a diversion from Science from the beginning of Human history through the 1960's.

Structures like DeLay-Bendebury Fibers and other models of what's going on behind the math are happening outside of Academia where Physics PhD's are discarded and PhysEd BA's are celebrated.

Whichever model comes next will likely happen adjacent to the podcaster sphere and be reduced to useful engineering before Academics take a look at it.

There are plenty of good researchers working in institutions but for fundamental revisions at this point they all seem to need to leave Academia and go out on their own seeking private investment.

Which is fine except that we're all paying for the uninterested remainder. The great advancements that make our lives better always begin in fundamental science generating new models that better describe this reality. We don't get much from a jobs program for Mathematicians playing Physicists and it's very expensive.

It's quite strange that most people find the status quo completely acceptable and are willing to throw another $100B at a higher energy collider but are unwilling to grant base-layer investigations that are nearly free in comparison.

If we believe the former head of Skunkworks they've recruited the best and brightest since the 1970's and had made breakthroughs by the early 90's in at least topological physics. So we get to pay for that but aren't allowed to use it which is intolerable. But it's also understanble in a pre-Internet era where the only feasible choices were String Theory or black projects.

Comment Re:Landfills are such a bad idea (Score 1) 181

Is this something you do often?

No, it's pretty much one day a year (but usually several times on that day): spring cleanup (though my smizmar and I call it "truck day" (*)).

It's uncompostable/tainted yard waste, even furniture (if it's in truly horrible shape), and all sorts of other random trashy shit. When it happens, the amount of resulting trash is many times the size of our trash bin or what can even be put on on the curb for "large item pickup." The usual weekly process is overwhelmed and can't handle it; there simply isn't room. So we haul it.

* "Truck day" because I decided paying $72 to rent U-haul's big pickup truck for a few hours is preferable to paying $72k to buy a big pickup truck. And it usually gets used for more than just dumping trash; it's often a large-item shopping day too. (To be next decade's trash? Don't ask!)

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