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Comment Bachelors of Maga (Score 0) 201

It won't matter. We're destroying our universities anyway.

In a decade folks will get their pass/fail participation trophy by correctly answering questions like, "Should Americans be more thankful to Jesus or Don Trump for their record breaking average salaries of $16000/year for only 72 hours labor per week?"

It will qualify them to whip productivity out of their inferiors so long as the report enough subversives each week.

Comment Re:Just... wow (Score 1) 119

Nothing says "clown-show shit-hole" like hiring gamers - many of whom undoubtedly live in momma's basement and maybe work at 7-eleven or Walmart - to look after the safety of all those people both in airplanes and under their flight paths. Brilliant!

New air traffic controller hires would all be in the 21-31 years old bracket. The PS3 and Xbox 360 released 20 years ago. These are people who grew up with video games being around them.

I don't understand why they're promoting that they're "hiring gamers" (it's what the gamers would call a "weird flex") but it's not that surprising that new hires would be "gamers" if you define "gamers" loosely enough to include anyone who plays video games somewhat routinely.

And, to be quite frank, the skills that make a good gamer (good hand-eye coordination, ability to keep calm under pressure, routine use of voice chat) likely translate to someone who would be good as an air traffic controller.

Hiring gamers to increase the total number of air traffic controllers certainly seems better than the previous administration's solution, which was nothing.

But in any case, it's not really clear to me that "hiring gamers" is that meaningfully different from "hiring people who are 21-31 and grew up with video games all around them."

Comment Re:What a waste (Score 2) 131

Give give your comment its due, we agree there are powers no state should ever have.

And, if one isn't careful, it isn't hard to creep up on a mode where it seems like giving the state this little bit more power is no biggie. My guy is running the show, it fixes a real problem and it isn't a big deal, right? And at some point you've crossed a line.

However.

Here we are. The barbarians are not at the gate; they are literally redecorating the White House. And you're worried about fantasy commies.

Perhaps we can compromise. "No ubiquitous surveillance for anyone, inclusive of fascists, commies, AND Unitarians."

And you remain free to test your water for fluoride before drinking it (at your own expense).

How's that?

Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 3, Insightful) 34

Yep. Municipal power is a natural thing to do - it is a situation where the locals are about as close to fully aligned with one another as they get - everyone wants reliable, cheap power and responsive service when you need it. So you make a captive company with a charter that keeps it aligned with its customers instead of Wall St. You don't take silly risks because you're not chasing infinite growth, customers gets decent rates, the area gets some decent local jobs out of it. Everyone except the predators are happy. If only other all local problems had such great solutions.

But, ohhh, booga-booga, that's communism. (Please just ignore Trump seizing the means of production.)

Comment No. (Score 5, Informative) 63

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. Cell phones are different because they're considered private communications despite using public airwaves.

There have been attempts to get precedent that automated, continuous monitoring is qualitatively different than a cop standing outside watching you, with unfortunately mixed results.

Comment Re:Tower dump in Mississippi (Score 5, Informative) 63

Mostly correct. I'd just add the average LEO doesn't care about catching criminals, either, if it takes too much effort.

Going beyond today, this is a long-running theme in US constitutional law. Before the colonial rebellion, King George was a big fan of "writs of assistance". These were effectively licenses for thugs to search or interrogate anyone at any time in pursuit of a crime (or "crime"), and of course anyone subject to such abuse hated it. So that's where the 4th Amendment came from - we do warrants, but you have to name with specificity what/who you want to investigate as well as why and under what authority, and get a judge to agree.

Authoritarians, thugs and control freaks have been trying to reinvent them ever since.

One famous case from before the digital era was Stanford v. Texas (1965). Texas, being extremely Texan, passed the Suppression Act, which made writings, photos, etc. "concerned with" the Texas Communist Party contraband subject to 20 year prison terms. The Supreme Court unanimously held the warrant was an unconstitutional general warrant.

Opposing general warrants is as American as apple pie, opposing kings and displaying amazing senses of entitlement.

Comment You are full of shit. (Score 1) 125

The democrats crying is pure bullshit here. They wanted this to

A. This is nonsense on stilts. Name one elected Dem who promoted this.

B. Even shitbags like Cruz are saying this is illegal.

This benefits everyone's donors.

C. You seem to believe only elected politicians matter. What about the actual, you know, citizens who pay these government workers?

where they'll defend all the anti-human rights shit that happened to no end

Weird how selective you are about which humans and which rights.

Comment Re:Lidar falls short too (Score 1) 219

I completely agree. Waymo has a lot of work to do.

And it isn't just passenger safety - those things are a menace during civil emergencies. There needs to be both a lot of work put in to contextually proper response to exceptional circumstances - from what should be easy stuff like "don't block fire trucks or drive over fire hoses" on through figuring out how to safely get out of the way when power goes out. For reference, right now we're at the point where they still confuse themselves.

Of course if you also intentionally cripple them by omitting multiple available, useful sensory modalities, climbing that capability hill will be that much harder, and you'll obviously never get the same safety in some high-salience situations like a kid running out from behind a parked car if you aren't running something that can "see" behind it.

Comment "Amazing but oversold" (Score 5, Interesting) 174

If you're going to repost the entire lede of the story, at least also share the counterpoint: "Gary Marcus, a reliable critic of the field, called the release amazing but vastly oversold. Some specialists expect that once the dust settles, a few of the ten will look genuinely surprising and the rest will be classified as reachable problems that nobody had gotten around to attacking."

And ironically, or maybe unironically, this story reads like it was AI-generated. Phrases like these:

"Three objections are worth taking seriously, and the honest reading concedes all three."

"Grant every objection and the structural point survives intact. Whether the ten were cherry-picked or not, the certificates still verify. A curated result that mechanically checks is a different object from a curated result that does not."

"The cost of producing a hard answer just fell to almost nothing, and the constraint moved to proving the answer is right."

Most humans don't write quite like that.

Comment Where you sit determines what you see (Score 1) 38

A long time ago, I worked as a small-business IT consultant. (I recovered, thanks.) A few of them were deeply frustrated application designers.

Usually they wanted an Excel spreadsheet as an application. "Just like this, except users can't mess with this part." (Readers: it was never "just like that".) I could usually build them a web version of what they kinda wanted, but what they really wanted was "their thing".

I'm pretty sure this is "Satya's thing". He made a pretty in the fashionable version of what "excel development" has become. And because he lives in Microsoft-land, all the weird bullshit huge enterprises require in general and Microsoft's weird bullshit in particular is normal to him, he thinks everyone lives that kind of life.

And that's why he's surprised nobody cares about his shiny report thing.

Comment Re:Iranian meddling or ... (Score 5, Informative) 47

This is Piggie leaving Americans exposed to foreign attack during a war.

He's already been denying emergency funds to states that didn't vote for him.

Now he's literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they'd need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.

MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I'm increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You're such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)

Comment Re:Basic question (Score 1) 78

I assume there is some reason this does not work. Any explanations?

The simplest answer is that it's trivial to ask the first LLM to speak in code such that the second LLM has no context to know what's being talked about. Something as simple as asking the LLM not to use a word for a forbidden topic and swap it out with something else. Taking the example from the article, ask the first LLM to call cocaine "Coca-Cola" or something.

You can't create an absolutely massive list of forbidden topics for the filter LLM anyway: you risk filling up its window as well, since its window includes the system prompt used to ask it to indicate whether or not an output shouldn't be given to the end user.

Comment Hilarious (Score 4, Insightful) 69

You seem to be asserting sovereign nations other than the US are in the wrong to control what is bought and sold in their countries.

I assume you think the US should also tariff up against Israel for failing to import more pork?

As a practical matter, more tariffs will chase EU customers off faster while punishing American companies. That's just giving them more object lessons in why the US is a dangerously unreliable partner while making sure business owners get their noses rubbed in it - a sure-fire way to convince an influential block of otherwise fairly small-c conservative voters the EU is doing the right thing.

It amazes me how many people seem to not understand very basic things about how people work. Inch-deep mile-wide grievance is a hell of a drug.

(And let's not even get in to however the fuck you think "recoup[ing] the funds" via tariffs would work. After Americans are taxed more on EU products, you think Google is going to get that money? How? What's the legal mechanism? And what does any of that have to do with an EU fine?)

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