Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Ha. Old hat... (Score 1) 74

More than 35 years ago, well before the Internet, BBSes ruled.

One I was a pillar of was nothing but a wall where you would post anonymously (or not).
The software was written to verify the typing rate to make sure that no text was uploaded

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

I wrote a special terminal program that would randomize the time between characters to foil that BBS's rejection of uploads...

(Oh, it worked, and the dude running the show never found out).

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 1) 242

They can work, but they have major issues.

1)For at least the first 6 months, if not the first several years, it will take more time and money to teach them than they generate. Why would any company do this?

2)As a hiring manager at company B, I see you apprenticed at company A. I have no idea if that means you're qualified. I can't trust company A to tell me, they're a competitor. Schools stand as a neutral 3rd party telling me that they've completed a set curriculum and should know that much. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

3)Some fields just have a huge amount of up front learning before you can be useful at all. Apprentice plumber? You can run and fetch tools and hold things in place while you watch and learn. Apprentice electrical engineer? You have no idea what inductance is on day one. There's literally nothing you can do. So basically at this point you're hoping the company sets up a school.

Comment "The" or "A"? (Score 4, Insightful) 9

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

Comment The large print giveth; the small print taketh... (Score 1) 100

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

Comment Re:From the article it's just browser fingerprinti (Score 2) 74

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 4, Insightful) 242

my oldest is 26, and my next is 22. oldest was told to go into cyberseurity , get a degree in it, gets out, no one will even interview without 5 years experience. no feeder jobs or anything that would give them that experience, just magically you need experience. they've been a supervisor at a fast food place for some time now, applying to 100-150 roles all over the USA and not getting a response, let alone a rejection.

My next just graduated in May, he has a little more of a plan, wants to be a professor and teach English to autistic kids (as he is one, but graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English)

Just wanting to work for a year to save up for his master program, finally found a job for $9.50 an hour at a movie theater, no other place would call him back as he has a BA in English and 'is over qualified' or doesn't have grocery store experience.

This is what happens when you don't hire people for the long haul, everything is transactional. I don't think you should work same place until you die but now business is so unwilling to invest in someone for them to leave, they won't invest.

Comment Re:"the most extreme and troubling end" (Score 1) 69

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Comment "the most extreme and troubling end" (Score 3, Informative) 69

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

Slashdot Top Deals

You can't go home again, unless you set $HOME.

Working...