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Comment Re:Ticking time bomb (Score 1) 5

You know what I was just thinking? I want a nieve, blind, clueless, non-sentient army of cheap EV garbage to all charge at the same time after evening rush hour, blow up the local grid, and stop in their tracks every time there's a power/cell tower outage. That's exactly what my city needs.

Why do you think they would stop in their tracks every time there's a power or cell tower outage?

Yes, there have been some issues with widespread power outages causing the cars to get confused because things don't look right, but that's a bug, not expected behavior.

And although they won't have fares if they have no cell service, there's no reason to expect them to stop being able to drive. They will do whatever they normally do when they have no fare — find a place to park. Other than for learning about pickups and dropoffs, robotaxis use cellular networks only when they break down, to request remote driving assistance (i.e. relatively rarely).

Comment Re:Moslems (Score 1) 75

Romansch gets spoken in the valley west of Chur, essentially between Chur and Disentis. It may also be spoken in the valley S of Tamins but I've never been there so I don't know.
Speaking to a local in a small town (maybe Saas Fee) around 20 years ago, he said that the language spoken there had changed in his lifetime - it was German by then and I can't remember what it had been previously.

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 20

Are you sure?
I thought the ESR version was a Firefox version from the recent past with security updates released at the same time as the mainline Firefox gets updates. My version is 140.9.0 ESR but it may be a bit out of date, my Linux distribution has stopped providing updates for my release level and their new level pretty much bricked my test system when I tested it there.

Comment Re:Layoffs (Score 1) 72

Oh, yeah, I just realized that this is an expense on the Roku side, so the taxes would cancel out. Ugh.

Then yes, you're correct that there's no possible way for consolidating two businesses to save money without direct job loss, other than perhaps reducing payouts to external companies for things that they both do (e.g. accountants).

Comment Re: Enshittification marches ever onward (Score 1) 52

They removed something you never should have had, that your processor never should have done, and that they never, ever told you your processor should've could do.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.

Comment Re:Layoffs (Score 1) 72

Maybe Roku has been paying to carry Fox content, or Fox has been paying Roku to carry content (I don't know how their deals work), and now that doesn't have to happen anymore?

Let's do the math:

($Fox + $Payment) + ($Roku - $Payment) = $Fox + $Roku

That's a zero-sum transaction. No $400M savings there.

Nope. You forgot the government factor:

($Fox + $Payment - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment)) + ($Roku - $Payment = $Fox + $Roku - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment).

So depending on what state the income is earned in, Anywhere from about 21% to about 30% of that could be going to taxes. So they could easily save $400M in taxes if that payment happens to be at least $1.3 billion or so. I doubt that's the case, of course.

Comment Re:comms (Score 1) 163

IMHO the most important skill is being aware of what an AI can accomplish, which nowadays is a lot.

The most critical skill is knowing when you're going into an AI rathole, shutting it down, and coding the relevant bits from scratch. There's nothing like wasting more time on iterative refinement than it would take to write the code by hand to sour an engineer on the use of AI.

Comment Re:Yeah, closing in on this too. (Score 1) 163

No. We haven’t. Do the math. Liquidate every billionaire in the U.S. and the government would only get a few months respite.

The top 1% of the U.S. have $55 trillion dollars. The total U.S. national debt is only $38 trillion. That costs the government $1.4 trillion every year in interest alone. Leveling the playing field by capping everyone's total savings at 8 million per person would wipe out the national debt completely.

Mind you, wiping the national debt out still won't help as long as the Republicans keep overspending and undertaxing to the tune of two trillion a year, but even that should be easily fixable by more sound tax policy, coupled with laws mandating that the federal budget be revenue neutral or positive going forwards.

We've done the math. Have you?

Comment Re:Yeah, I Noped Out (Score 1) 163

That definitely makes a difference. The quality of response you see between something like Gemini Flash and Gemini Pro is astounding because it's indexing on getting it right rather than getting it fast.

I assume you're saying Pro is massively better for your workload. IMO, thinking is either good or bad, depending on whether it moves you closer to or farther away from correctness.

For example, I've seen certain types of workload (e.g. anything involving image recognition or image segmentation) be massively better with Flash, because Pro overthinks things and ends up changing perfectly correct answers to be wrong, either by coming up with creative ways to misinterpret the prompt or by screwing up the JSON image segmentation fragment so that it can no longer be parsed.

And I've also found that LLMs struggle to understand existing terms in a different context that they weren't trained on. As a result, I've had to substitute nonsense terms in place of terms based on common English words and phrases so that it won't ignore my definitions of those phrases in context and substitute its own understanding of their meaning and give incorrect results. The more thinking you allow, the more likely it is for that to occur.

Comment Re:Moslems (Score 1) 75

German-speaking Swiss, French-speaking Swiss, Italian-speaking Swiss. I have no idea how homogenous (aka "inbred") the country's citizens are.
I was speaking to one of the first category around 15 years ago and he said that on his travels within the country, he'd been somewhere where he did not recognise the language and he asked them - presumably in German - what they were speaking. It turned out that they were speaking the (very) local dialect of Swiss German.
3-4 years ago I was in a Ski resort and went into a local restaurant at lunchtime, ordering in the local language which is German. I was asked if I spoke English - 'cos they didn't speak German. Presumably that's the kind of thing the SVP moan about.

Comment Re:Moslems (Score 3, Insightful) 75

This has nothing at all to do with Moslems.
I'm not sure when things changed, but up until around 20 years ago it was quite difficult to move to Switzerland - you had to have some job skills that Swiss nationals didn't have, at least in sufficient quantity. Then they made an agreement with the EU which granted them access to the EU market (and vice versa) with free movement of population in both directions, I knew several people - mostly in Finance - who then moved to Zürich, Brits, Germans and French. There were presumably some Italians who also headed over.
The SVP is a classic xenophobic party and they've essentially been shouting "too many Germans, and other foreigners".

Comment Re:Flipping an effective tie (Score 1) 222

when in the most recent elections in Britain, SNP, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru all won victories. All parties that head movements to separate from England, and in Sein Fenn's case, rejoin Ireland.

Are you talking about the local elections? That was pretty much a vote against Keir Starmer's Labour along with the financial mess Britain is in. The financial mess has a lot to do with the mess David Cameron made of the country (Austerity and Brexit) so voting for Farage's party feels to me like turkeys voting for Christmas. (Yes, Cameron made the mess, but BoJo and Truss compounded it).
If Sinn Fein gets Northern Ireland to being part of Ireland again, NI is back in the EU anyway.
The last I heard, the SNP was pro-EU. They pretty much have to be, their electorate was very much in favour of remaining 10 years ago (I think it was 55:45).
I have no idea what Plaid Cymru wants.

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