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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: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:Translation (Score 1) 48

We need to funnel more money into our AI, games be damned.

The Games and Entertainment division has always been a loss for Microsoft. Long before AI came along it was supported by the more profitable divisions (OS and Applications). It's the same story over at Sony with the Playstation losing money and being funded by more profitable things.

It's just after 25 years of making a loss, the M$ management aren't seeing any benefit from it.

Comment The problem is arseholes. (Score 3, Insightful) 103

This. The problem isn't the technology; that can demonstrably be shown to work in models and simulations because of things like - as you say - needing less space between vehicles, and also more complex things like reducing capillary action in the overall traffic flow (the stop-start effect you often get in heavy traffic). The reason why you don't see those benefits is the growing number of entitled drivers who ignore the signage in the hope of gaming the system for personal gain (e.g. shorter travel time), so you do need robust enforcement with stricter tolerances and more punitive fines to try and deter that.

It's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The best solution for the greater good is to obey the signage, but the best solution for the individual is almost always to look out for Number One. Smart traffic flow systems do still seem to improve things, despite entitled drivers, although that's probably more down to the enforcement measures keeping those bending the rules from bending them as far as they'd like to.

Algorithms also assume that people know what they're doing and will act rationally. If anyone thinks people drive this way they are clearly not paying attention to the roads.

Every traffic jam starts with just one arsehole, just one who thinks they're different, special, above it all. One arsehole who decides that 30 is fast enough for everyone. One arsehole who sits on the phone, One arsehole who cuts people up, straddles two lanes, doesn't proceed at a green light. One arsehole who thinks the rules don't apply to him (and only him) and refuses to fit into traffic.

The kicker is, there are a lot more than just one arsehole on the roads.

And don't think that autonomous cars will save us, first off, they'll never work in our lifetimes but ignoring that they will be programmed to follow the rules to the letter (not the least important reason is to ensure the manufacture is as indemnified as possible from any blame), they will wait for a large enough gap, they will ignore faster moving lanes, they will wait for intersections to be clear, they won't speed... So the arsehole will decide that they know how to drive better because they will force their way into traffic, tailgate, so on and so forth.

Comment Re:Shots Fired! (Score 1) 75

This discussion is about what Apple would need to do to satisfy people with privacy concerns when it comes to third-party replacements for Siri on devices that Apple makes. Arguing that you don't trust Apple because parts of the OS are closed source is irrelevant, because you won't ever trust their device in the first place (or any devices, in all likelihood).

That's why I don't trust them, or anyone. You especially cannot trust phones, since you don't get the code running on the baseband processor even in the best cases — they're not allowed to give it to you.

Ostensibly, Apple could open source the code running on their own baseband hardware (Apple C1). I'm pretty sure the hardware requires signed code for FCC compliance reasons, so you'd never be able to modify it, but as far as I know, nothing prevents them from making the code available.

Comment Re:Shots Fired! (Score 1) 75

Well, that rules out 99.9999% of all mobile phones for you, then, with a +/- .0001% margin of error. :-)

I don't "trust" any of these providers. I expect them to fuck me. I just don't get the option to use none of them if I want to participate in modern society.

Open source is not even slightly immune to those sorts of issues.

Which issues? Not being able to trust that the code doesn't do things which are intentionally malicious? It's as close as you can get. Literally all closed source software is less trustworthy.

You're missing my point. To the best of my knowledge, you can't buy a phone that has an entirely open source operating system now; the phone hardware vendors provide closed-source bits preinstalled, and nuking them is problematic at best. More importantly, even if that were not true, you still would not be able to buy an Apple iPhone or iPad with an OS that is pure open source, which makes your concern entirely irrelevant in this context.

This discussion is about what Apple would need to do to satisfy people with privacy concerns when it comes to third-party replacements for Siri on devices that Apple makes. Arguing that you don't trust Apple because parts of the OS are closed source is irrelevant, because you won't ever trust their device in the first place (or any devices, in all likelihood).

Either way, the automatic presumption is that if a consumer does not trust the device maker, that person will buy a device from some other manufacturer. So for the purposes of this discussion, the decision by the consumer to trust Apple is in the past. It was made when they bought the device with a preinstalled OS. Thus we can presume that the consumer in question therefore trusts Apple to a great extent.

What remains, then, is what Apple, as a presumptively trusted party, would have to do to continue to maintain that level of trust in their devices while allowing third parties to inject code that deeply integrates with every app on the system in a highly invasive way.

Comment Re:Shots Fired! (Score 1) 75

It's fundamentally impossible for an operating system to protect you from the manufacturer of that operating system. That trust is unavoidable.

Apple made their OS open, then closed portions of it, so you cannot trust them, just like all of the other closed source vendors. That doesn't mean no operating system is trustworthy, only that Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft.

Well, that rules out 99.9999% of all mobile phones for you, then, with a +/- .0001% margin of error. :-)

That's an arbitrary distinction, though. What percentage of even the most tech-savvy users would actually take the time to audit every source code change to every software update to their phone to make sure it doesn't do something questionable? How many people would be capable of doing it successfully? I'm thinking back to the obfuscated C contest, not to mention thousands of examples of just how easy is to introduce a vulnerability that will get missed by code reviewers for years.

Open source is not even slightly immune to those sorts of issues. It could reasonably be argued, at least on an epidemic level, that we're better off with a larger number of different OS vendors, so that compromising a single vendor will compromise a smaller percentage of devices, but other than the high level of platform divergence that open source tends to bring with it (which has negative consequences for security, too), Open Source really isn't a panacea in a world where vulnerability discoveries are weaponized almost overnight.

If anything, big companies at least have the resources to throw huge amounts of money at prevention, which is something that open source likely does not have.

Comment Re:How? (Score 1) 120

So you're back to requiring individual apps to enable support, which is kind of my point. There's no easy universal way to stop kiddies doing things you don't want them to do.

Correct. There's absolutely no plausible way to do it at an OS level except *maybe* for the camera, and even that can likely be thwarted by recording a video that starts on something innocuous and ends on nudity, because by the time the monitoring algorithm notices the nudity, many frames would already have been sent to the recording app.

But what the device manufacturer can do is require that all apps submitted for app review must comply with those standards and use those tools to check for disallowed content, and block any apps that do not comply from being installed on a device that is owned by someone under 18 (or whatever age is specified by the law in question), including blocking side-loading. You'd still have a handful of parents who unlock the devices for development so that their kids can write apps, but all other young people's devices would presumably be locked down (assuming the parents don't or can't turn that off).

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