Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Prices are sticky (Score 5, Informative) 103

Anyone expecting corporations to not try to make a profit and extract maximum value for their shareholders ignore that that's their fiduciary duty.

"this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfo...

"We ... show that [the Shareholder Primacy Norm] is not a legal requirement, at least under the guise of shareholder value maximization. This is in contrast to the common assertion that managers are legally constrained from addressing corporate social responsibility issues if doing so would be inconsistent with the economic interests of shareholders."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p...

Comment Re:Conciousness isn't as mysterious as you thought (Score 1) 393

Dawkins is very likely right. I am also impressed at how human AI can seem, with all our faults of hallucinating, hiding our mistakes, and making stuff up, as well as the stuff we are proud of. But Dawkins and I both realise that we have no definition of 'intelligence' that will allow us to rule whether AI is intelligent. The Turing test has foundered because the early AI attempts were able to express ideas eloquently even when their 'intelligence' was questionable. It seems that AI has a talent for imitation and mimicry, which lets it convince us in a Turing test even when it shouldn't. Any adversarial training to get AI to distinguish between AI and us will also spawn a more convincing imitator. Where do we go from here? I find it entirely reasonable that AI executes the same sort of processes as our minds do, but proving equality rather than equivalence is going to be hard.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 22

> Am I the only one that can't imagine any possible value an AI assistant would bring to a game?

I use AI assistants lots when playing games!

At the moment it's Minecraft. I want to figure how to build something, e.g. a golem farm. I look for tutorials online but (1) they're all videos which I hate watching, (2) they're all hyper-specific and concrete, "place this block here then that block there", but what I want to understand are the foundational principles so I can know how to adapt the golem farm to my own purposes -- what are the mechanics, how do they spawn, how does water flow, what is the SOLUTION SPACE of possibilities.

Gemini AI has been really good at this kind of thing.

The other time is when I get stuck, or want advice on how to make a character build to achieve a certain end. Once again the online advice is typically in the form of "walkthroughs", do step 1 then step 2 then step 3, in other words just one possible way to play the game, and it's too easy to accidentally read too far and spoil the rest of it. I don't want that. I like the feeling of openness and possibilities. I again ask Gemini, and it gives me advice on just the particular bit I'm stuck on, and is better at showing for me the available options.

Comment Re:$1.73 - is that the price or the actual cost? (Score 1) 30

Nothing. $103/hr for a superhuman employee or $10.30/hr for a superhuman employee.

If it's boosting employee efficiency by 50% as claimed in another Slashdot story above then assuming your Sr. Engineer makes $250,000 a year / 48 weeks / 8hr days = $650/day. + 50% for AI means you're getting an extra $325/day in work from the employee.

They could run 10x costs for 3 hours a day and break-even. But the average is currently way less than 3hr/day. Claude claims the average developer consumes $13/day in tokens. So even if we 10x that it's $130/Tokens per day vs $325/day in productivity.

Comment Re: Rebecca Watson covered this on YouTube (Score 1) 244

DJI just released an e-bike platform where the firmware lets you pick what Class of e-bike you want it to be in the menu. And that takes like 2 seconds to change. So, you're supposed to put a sticker on it labeling what class you picked, but then you also are supposed to be able to use unlimited power on private property and then go into the menu and de-tune it to ride on the road.

Comment Re:Oh no! (Score 1) 89

The practical application IMO is a glorified cubicle. I just want to be able to put on a headset, and have a wireless keyboard and mouse with a 32" 4k monitor anywhere I need to go.

Laptop screens are way too constrictive and the ergonomics are atrocious. But we're still a long way off from 32" 4k display equivalent VR.

Comment Re:Abundance (Klein and Thompson book) on this (Score 2) 199

There is also the problem of maintaining approval over the duration of a project. If voters approved something and couldn't ever be messed with then things would proceed more smoothly. But if at any moment its popularity drops below 50% suddenly it gets defunded and dies and is nearly impossible to revive.

I've seen several infrastructure jobs suffer this fate. It gets approved, then during planning and development voters change their mind and the project is shutdown. Then a couple years later voters change their mind again but it's too late everybody has moved on and you have to start the whole process over again.

When projects take a decade or more, that means it has to survive the political winds for an eternity.

Comment Missing Market Segment (Score 1) 180

What we're really missing today is Tape. Iomega Ditto was impressive because it brought tape to the consumer segment. Today, Enterprise has tape but there's no good way for your average photographer or prosumer to have cheap backups of their data.

I have about 2TB of photos that I've accumulated and there's no easy backup option except for very fragile external HDDs.

Comment Re:Guessing the explanation (Score 1) 48

Don't even have to go very far. The company responses say exactly what's going on. (d) the law doesn't say we can't create cookies unrelated to ad tracking.

âoeGlobal Privacy Controls only restricts certain uses of third-party data and allows website operators to override GPC signals, and we offer the Limited Data Use feature to help websites indicate what permissions they have. When data is transmitted to us with the LDU flag, we restrict the use of that dataâ

we opt the user out of sharing personal data with third parties for personalized advertisingâ a Microsoft spokesperson said. âoeCertain Microsoft cookies are necessary for operational purposes, and may therefore be placed and read even when a GPC signal is detected.â

Comment Electron-positron pair production (Score 1) 57

This is new with quarks but old (1948) for electron-positron pairs, though it may otherwise have been explained by the breaking of a pair with a virtual lifetime back then. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for references. This is can happen in empty space, though it was first observed close to nuclei where the fields are strong and the two particles can be separated more easily.

Comment Some gold coins buri in a lot of weak circumstance (Score 1) 85

The arguments are pretty broad, and it does seem the author worked back from a conclusion toward proof which in statistics doesn't work.

Being interested in decentralized currency and being a libertarian are essentially a Venn diagram that's a perfect circle. There were numerous other examples where the author would have concluded the average late 90s Slashdotter created Bitcoin because that was just your average neckbeard from the era, nothing unique to Satoshi. I was ready to just write off the whole article based on this extremely flimsy correlation.

The writing analysis comes down to a fundamental flaw. They chose a number of idiosyncrasies and then judged all candidates on those idiosyncrasies using the AI. But we don't know that those are the only idiosyncrasies of writing. Maybe only 1 author wrote both "email" and "e-mail" but maybe 1 other author only commonly misused "analogy" vs "metaphor" but since that person wasn't Back, they were ignored.

However , that all being said in defense of sloppy research. I can say with 100% confidence that a Giant Fucking Nerd that spends months, years and endless nights on a message board or mailing list don't usually just disappear. They especially don't just disappear at the exact moment that their biggest passion project suddenly finally heats up and gets popular. They got him dead to rights it's him. I need no more convinced.

If I'm a giant fucking e-currency nerd, I've created my own proof of work currency in the past (one of only a handful of people) and discussed/debated/thought about e-currencies like mine... and then suddenly someone finally actually starts on a viable implementation that's actually attracting a lot of attention... I would need welfare checks to make sure I wasn't dead because I would be following it so obsessively. Black even mentions that this happened while he was writing his dissertation with PGP... and he didn't even contribute to PGP. But we're supposed to believe that something as important (or more) that aligns with your politics and builds on your own work--going so far as to cite it as an inspiration... just isn't interesting enough for you to bother discussing?! Yeah lol no.

Slashdot Top Deals

The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.

Working...