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Comment Re:Corpospeak... (Score 2) 26

Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.

Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.

Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 0) 122

While in general, I agree with your sentiment, you mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect is not appropriate here. Dunning and Kruger (1999) does not claim incompetent people would consider themselves above the experts. It's just that incompetent people do no consider themselves as incompetent as they really are, and competent people don't understand how far above the laymen their knowledge is. But both would agree, that the expert knows more about the topic than the layman, and both would sort themselves in the right categories.

You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".

Comment Re:Sad what happened to Toyota (Score 2) 52

They hired some uninspired losers to lead their self-driving efforts. They basically were weak, looked into it and figured it's impossible.

There's nothing wrong with knowing your own limitations and acting accordingly. Had Mr. Zuckerberg had that sort of self-knowledge, he might have avoided lighting 80-billion-with-a-b dollars on fire and renaming his social media company after a technology that nobody wanted.

Comment Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score 2) 241

And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.

The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.

Comment Re:what kind of bugs (Score 4, Insightful) 85

But I value even a 1 line change that clears a static analysis warning if even in practice it was impossible to trigger the issue in a real system.

Yes, I agree. The problem with thinking "this bug seems harmless, because I can't imagine how anyone could exploit it" is in the "I can't imagine" part; my imagination is limited to what is covered by my mental model of how computers work, but an attackers' ingenuity is not.

In particular, the C/C++ optimizer is a devious beast, and will exploit any opportunity to make the code more efficient, even if that means doing things that are wildly unintuitive to a naive human reader -- and it sees any instance of undefined behavior as an opportunity to exploit.

Comment Re:Three reasons (Score 5, Insightful) 75

(C) is the only one of those the AI companies are really concerned about -- they want to stave off model collapse for as long as possible. The problem is that AI generates so much content that the ratio of AI-generated data to human-generated data keeps rising, and sooner or later there simply won't be much human-generated data left to anything to consume. At that point they'll either have to figure out to ingest AI-generated content without causing degradation, or they'll have to accept that AIs have gotten as smart as they will ever get, and it's all downhill from there.

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 2) 75

When I am looking at the contracts my company has for our company phones, I doubt your promise. As an American company, it has decided that providing company phones to its employees is not a core competency of the company. So it outsourced the task to the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder has bought data plans for our phones which abruptly switch off everything above EDGE, as soon as the data allocation for the period has been exhausted. No warning. No graceful change. Just a hard cut-off. For everyone, including Field Service, who needs to have mobile internet connectivity to get and update trouble tickets.

Comment Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it. (Score 4, Insightful) 82

No one who owns fine art ever needs to sell it. No one who owns vintage cars ever needs to sell them etc.pp.. Of course, you don't need to sell your bitcoins. As long as they are non-distinguishable from random bit patterns, they don't affect anything. But as soon as you selling bitcoins affects the real world, the real world notices and keeps putting up rules, may they be physical realities or legal requirements.

Comment Re:When I read AI tech discussions ... (Score 1) 108

It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't. :/

Comment Re:Unpossible!11! (Score 4, Informative) 132

And yet it's Iran who can't get any oil out while other countries export millions of barrels a day.

They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.

Is that also why they have more inflation per week that America has per year?

They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.

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