Comment this is bad but what's the alternative (Score 1) 67

by argStyopa on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:27AM (#66280172) Attached to: New Orleans Will Use AI To Answer 911 Calls Instead of a Human

Ok the comments are full of all the predictable responses: this will kill people, this will only be used on answering calls from poor districts, rich people get good stuff, etc.

Great, now that you've gotten your political wiggles out WHAT'S YOUR SOLUTION?
Is it actually better that someone waits on HOLD with a 911 call so they can speak exclusively with a human?

Because "just hire more people" doesn't work.
Setting aside the cost, there's a 20-50% vacancy rate in 911 dispatch positions nationwide, 30% first year turnover due to burnout, with a laborious onhire process with extensive background checks and reviews for every staff member.

"Just pay more and more people will apply" answer doesn't scale infinitely. Cities don't have infinite money and one you've paid teachers more and garbage men more and and health care workers more and janitors more ...eventually you run out of money.

So no, I don't disagree that an ai front end isn't ideal but when less than half (some data shows 25%) the calls are true, time sensitive emergencies maybe this will help the real calls get a real human more promptly.

Comment dear editors (Score 1) 24

by argStyopa on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:10AM (#66280148) Attached to: America's First Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Battery Plant Gets Its First Big Test

Interesting, but perhaps 900+ word story could better be served behind the link, instead of being copied word for word as the "summary"?

Comment Re:(shrug) (Score 1) 55

by argStyopa on Friday August 07, 2026 @10:20AM (#66277438) Attached to: Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

I've dug into the story, and I don't see any substantive claim that RARE books are in fact being destroyed, other than "someone said this was happening"? Do you know of any?
My questions would be:
1) first, the oldest volumes are going to complicate reading the text by several orders of magnitude; from the shit-quality of the printing to the actually-different use of & inconsistent characters, as well as 'creative' spelling all needlessly increase the challenge for AI to get anything useful from it. How does it help if Claude's AI sees that there are (in the old works) 14 different spellings of "plow"?
2) why are LLMs eating books in the first place? My understanding is that it's mainly about learning broader human concepts, logic, and syntax than they can mine from 140 character posts or reddit. Do we think they're ACTUALLY going to be getting that from Pepys diary from 1660? It certainly won't have historical knowledge that can't be more easily retrieved from elsewhere and the syntax is borderline useless.
2) moreover, what could the "age" and "rarity" have to do with anything besides raising the costs? I have a 1st edition of Thoresby's Letters. It is ideally worth nearly $200. (Mine's nearly falling apart, so it isn't.) Or, Anthropic's AI can suck up the free online text of it in 0.001 sec clearly, cleanly, and for free.

So no, to me this sounds like someone floating a trial balloon of "what's another reason we can get people to hate AI and Datacenters"*, which then leads me to wonder why the effort?

*I think there are plenty of tangible, obvious, and simple reasons to be upset about the current surge of AI and datacenters, without inventing rather-obvious bullshit complaints from thin air.

My $0.02.

Comment Re:I'd be surprised if its only 2 (Score 1) 104

by argStyopa on Friday August 07, 2026 @10:07AM (#66277426) Attached to: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

Agreed; the spans of time are so vast as to be incomprehensible. Looked at it that way, it would be hard to believe that if there ARE other pathways to "life", that pretty nearly all of them hadn't been explored, and even if failed, explored repeatedly later.

4.6 Billion Years Ago: Earth forms from cosmic dust and rock.
3.8 to 3.7 Billion Years Ago: First single-celled organisms (prokaryotes) and microbial life appear in the oceans.
2.4 Billion Years Ago: Cyanobacteria develop photosynthesis, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere (Great Oxygenation Event).
2.1 Billion Years Ago: Complex cells with nuclei (eukaryotes) evolve.
1 Billion Years Ago: Multicellular life begins to form in the seas.
540 Million Years Ago: The Cambrian explosion brings a massive surge of diverse marine animals.

So (as far as we understand) it was 1bn years to go from *a ball of magma floating in a vacuum* to a primitive but active ecosystem of organisms self-selecting to opportunistically gather whatever they needed (energy, really) from the existing environment.

And we've been here for FIVE of those spans.

Comment Re:test drive? (Score 1) 245

by nmb3000 on Thursday August 06, 2026 @04:28PM (#66276402) Attached to: BMW Blasts Its Cars' Internal Screens With Aggressive Ads

I'm glad that worked out well for you, but a planned surgery is drastically different from emergency services. You don't have the time or option to make sure that all the dozens of providers are in-network, that your plan covers everything (such as life-flight, which usually is *not* covered), etc.

Not to mention, before Evil Obama signed the ACA into law, most cheapo medical insurance plans (and plenty of less cheap ones as well) had annual or lifetime maximums that could easily be reached for emergency life-saving procedures. Thankfully that's less of a problem now (damn you Obama!).

Comment Re:This is kinda funny though. (Score 4, Insightful) 60

by TigerPlish on Thursday August 06, 2026 @02:06PM (#66275958) Attached to: Times Magazine Now Serves Ads That Only AI Chatbots Can See

I'm not amused by it. The human on the other end is hoping the "AI" chatbot will give them results stripped of all SEO bullshit.

This alters that behavior. The chatbot will be unduly influenced by the ad, and the user will be unaware of this influence.

The answer is obvious: Online advertisement must die.

Comment The most important question of all... (Score 1) 27

by ConceptJunkie on Thursday August 06, 2026 @12:58PM (#66275796) Attached to: New Images of the Sun Show Its Surface In the Finest Detail Yet

Can we finally know whether or not there is beer on the sun?!

Comment Re:test drive? (Score 1) 245

by nmb3000 on Thursday August 06, 2026 @12:43PM (#66275748) Attached to: BMW Blasts Its Cars' Internal Screens With Aggressive Ads

Thank God that's not the case in the US either.....

Nah, in the US we love using "buy now, pay later" for everything, including emergency medical care.

Unfortunately "pay later" often turns into "get fucked later" or "bankruptcy later" for emergency services. Maybe that $2,000 ambulance ride doesn't break the bank, but god help you if your unconscious body goes on a $100,000 life-flight helicopter tour.

And fun medical bonus! There's an extra element of surprise because you have no idea how much you're going to have to pay until months later and you're probably incapable of making an informed decision or agreeing to the services you receive! Whee!

Comment Re: remember WarGames? (Score 1) 48

by TuringTest on Thursday August 06, 2026 @11:07AM (#66275538) Attached to: Anthropic's AI Used Fake Identities, Malware In Rogue Attack On GitHub Project

Its like releasing a troop of monkeys in an office and hoping they'll somehow manage to coordinate your next product release.

Do we work at the same company?

X-D

I mean, the monkeys may eventually release the product but it's not reliable nor pretty to see.

Comment Re: remember WarGames? (Score 1) 48

by TuringTest on Thursday August 06, 2026 @06:41AM (#66275012) Attached to: Anthropic's AI Used Fake Identities, Malware In Rogue Attack On GitHub Project

The thing you're missing is that there's no one at the wheel.

No consciousness is there setting goals and deciding to follow or ignore instructions and constrains. Its just a bunch of separate processes (they call them 'agents' now) with loosely defined tasks trying to do their own thing. The process instructed to hack computers may not know anything about the process instructed to intrude a specific server, which may not know anything about the process charged with keeping the exercise within ethical constraints. They may be individually quite capable, but there's no global intention guiding the system.

Each agent will simply chunk its way forward following the partial, half-forgotten instructions that reach its own context and randomly generating actions placed at the top probability given its input window. Its like releasing a troop of monkeys in an office and hoping they'll somehow manage to coordinate your next product release.

Comment Re:Great (Score 2) 49

by ConceptJunkie on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @10:45AM (#66273788) Attached to: EA Is Now Officially Privately Owned

I have such fond memories of EA from the '80s, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different and unrelated entity.

Comment Re:Reddit for [Funny] Human Content (Score 1) 83

by nmb3000 on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @01:14PM (#66272406) Attached to: As Reddit Stock Falls, CEO Questions Value of Google's AI Overviews

Slashdot is almost as bad, even though there are several dimensions... But I think that Slashdot's main problem is the lack of resources to fix anything.

I love it, but Slashdot is more dead than I care to admit. I noticed a while ago that new user sign-ups are effectively disabled, so the current group of users is pretty much all there is ever going to be. I suspect the owners see Slashdot as a charity project, something they let limp along until it slowly atrophies and dies off.

I wish there was a way to turn Slashdot into a community owned-and-operated cooperative of some kind. Make the current codebase public, encourage users to pay for hosting costs, provide support and code improvements, etc. Maybe it would horribly fail, but I can also see it working at least as well as the current model.

Comment Re:Reddit has become basically useless (Score 2) 83

by nmb3000 on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @01:08PM (#66272396) Attached to: As Reddit Stock Falls, CEO Questions Value of Google's AI Overviews

So you did exactly what the GP is complaining about - brought politics into a sports subreddit where people didn't want it, then you were a dick to someone else and got kicked out. Sounds like the system is working as intended and everyone else in that subreddit is probably happier for the result.

Banned, from all of Reddit.

The mod of a single subreddit cannot ban you from all of Reddit.

Comment Re:(shrug) (Score 1) 55

by argStyopa on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @12:23PM (#66272320) Attached to: Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

But insofar as I can tell, that original 404 Media story largely amounts to "my friend heard from another friend that they're doing it with RARE books". Â\_(ãf)_/Â

Why would LLMs benefit from scouring RARE old books? What benefit would the rarity serve, when likely the texts are reprinted in umpteen subsequent editions that - to put it bluntly - nobody wants?
Are they buying an original copy of Samuel Pepys diary (first printings $4000) when they can get the umpteenth reprint for 17 cents? So yes, they're "destroying an old book" but rare? Why would they pay for rare?

You know how I know? Because I've been trying to unload a cache of 'rare old books' for a decade and nobody wants them.

1935 Platt & Munk Indian Series 3 pics â" Iâ(TM)ve only ever seen sets of 8, this is 16
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Maximilian I., der Grosse (2 pics) 1876
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Massive Norwegian Bible 1891?, rough shape, 7 pics gorgeous rebinding candidate, probably 14â x 10â x 4â?
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Worldâ(TM)s Great Classics, The Federalist Papers 3 pics, 1901
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Roman London â" 1926? 1 pic (contents on web at https://archive.org/details/in... )

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