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Comment Re:AI has no value my ass!!! (Score 1) 23

And now a 19 year old FOSS grapghics driver is still getting software improvements thanks to AI!

Is it? Getting improvements?

I read the summary and yeah, it uses that word but... what - specifically - does it mean? The code was "cleaned up" and "restructured". So... were any bugs fixed? Is there any real-world performance increase? In what way has this driver improved?

This is elderly code which likely has had any impactful errors discovered and corrected. Any major changes at this juncture risk introducing new problems regardless of if they're made by a human or an AI coding tool. While restructuring the code may make it easier to maintain, at this late date there shouldn't be much maintaining.

Unless there is concrete, measurable improvement, this is just PR AI cheerleadership.

Comment Re: The have the best comedy writers... (Score 2) 53

This deal, as you imagine it, has foreign BUYERS investing in a US company - how is that NOT America First? It would not be America First if U.S. buyers were investing in a foreign company...

A foreign company buying output from an American company is profitable to America. Selling the company itself isn't.

Let's simplify and imagine a Hollywood studio that produces say... sitcoms. Money comes in from viewership... either from advertising income or streaming subscriptions. Money goes out to the employees that create the sitcoms and the profit pile.

If the company is American-owned, the profit says in America and is spent on (mostly) American stuff. Sure, the C-suite folk may buy some yachts made in other countries, but mostly they'll buy mansions and whatnot where they live: America. If the company is foreign-owned, the profit will be spent (mostly) on stuff where its owners live.

Imagine if the Americans owned those oil companies in the Middle East. Imagine if they owned TSMC and Samsung. Foreign investment can be good, to produce liquidity allowing projects that you can't fund yourself, but in this case, Warner Bros could have remained domestically-owned.

Comment The have the best comedy writers... (Score 2) 53

"Paramount maintained that the merger would strengthen competition rather than diminish it, creating a media company better positioned to compete with streaming leaders and deep-pocketed technology rivals."

They'd otherwise continue to struggle to compete. This time they only had* $111 billion dollars available to buy a massive collection of Hollywood properties, out-bidding the streaming leaders they will finally be able to compete with.

*"Had", as in "don't actually have, so need to sell lots of shares to Saudi Arabia despite the current America-First agenda that has slapped massive tariffs on almost every former ally.

Hahahahahaa. That's so funny.

Comment Re:I don't buy the assumptions (Score 1) 50

"the probabilities of all possible outcomes of an event add up to 100%, and that the laws of physics are consistent for observers moving at different speeds." -- I'm neither a physicist nor a mathematician, but both of these seem debatable to me. If our notion of causality and time is correct, the first one might be true, but I've heard those things being questioned. And what 'requires' the laws of physics to remain stable? Those laws were formulated by scientists to explain things they don't fully understand. What if the scientists were wrong?

What if, indeed?

I suppose they'll continue to revise and refine their models, teaching, and textbooks as information arises. As science does.

You and I are as Bonobos weighing in on if the guys who designed the SR-71 are right about this flight thing. We're no more equipped to weigh in on quantum physics than my cats are to opine on the efficacy of mRNA vaccines. Science is a process and that process involves peer-review, and constant checking for flaws. This isn't multi-level marketing or religion where we just take it on faith that the invisible sky-man is why seasons happen. Many tiers of experts test the veracity and plausibility of the work of those above and below their own level of expertise.

This is all my way of trying to politely saying the question is not useful. Come back when you are a physicist and a mathematician and wax poetic to us.

Comment Re: Life Expectancy Study. (Score 1) 115

My dad wasn't comfortable with the fact that he may drive to our cabin for a day trip and then be stranded with no charge at night. They are getting on in years so may need a hospital.

First up, I need to preface this with conceding that I absolutely, positively do not claim EVs are suitable for all use-cases, all drivers, and all trips.

That said, am I understanding the invalidating scenario here is:
Father drives ~500km round-trip to and from the cabin, draining the battery.
Father is concerned about a medical event that he'd have to drive to hospital for, where the hospital is more than about 50km away, and this medical event is happening within an hour of returning home:?

I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. Because many EVs have around 500km range these days and a level 2 charger will get you to 10% in an hour no problem. This just seems an odd worry for someone who's willing to drive 250km away from civilization in the first place. And willing to live somewhere that you'd drive to the hospital in a life-threatening circumstance instead of waiting for ambulance service.

I'm not criticizing or even arguing. I'm just trying to wrap my head around the parameters of this particular "an EV can't work for reason X" scenario.

Comment Re: Life Expectancy Study. (Score 4, Insightful) 115

Feel free to cite references if it is wrong.

Nope. Doesn't work that way. You get to cite your references. LLMs scrape the Internet at large, including FUD and troll content and assemble plausible responses based on linguistic probability, in addition to be being biased by whatever prompt they're given. They aren't primary sources.

Comment Re:Raising an army of incels (Score 2) 106

No wonder it's on Slashdot

They won't be involuntarily celibate. In fact part of the point is that they - in sheer numbers - cuck the existing, fertile male population.

Now.. if you'd made a joke about there being so many of them running a train on the unsuspecting females and maybe mentioned your mom, that might've been funny, if only speculatively more accurate.

Submission + - Wi-Fi Routers Can Scan Your Body to Identify Exactly Who You Are (futurism.com) 1

JoeyRox writes: New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.

The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.

While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.

Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.

Comment Re: Huh (Score 3, Interesting) 36

To be fair, nobody ever should think "we lost the election so everything the winners do should be accept unopposed no matter how much harm it does." As long as the opposition means are legal, they shouldn't be scoffed at. Some are deliberate checks and balances against abuse by the elected. On-topic, why datacenters - which contribute nothing but tax money to a community - should be enticed with... a tax break is questionable at best. It's almost like building a landfill solely to accept someone else's waste at a discount under the rate your own waste costs to dispose of. Vacant land won't remain vacant forever.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

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