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Comment Re:Let it burn (Score 1) 39

The non-Fox-News viewpoints of CNN seem to me to be worth preserving. And it's doubtful they would be if Paramount takes over Warner's portfolio, which includes CNN.

Look at what happened to CBS, in particular 60 Minutes, when the Ellisons' Skydance Media took over. One of the most venerable investigative-journalism shows in history has been run into the gutter.

Yeah..sad to see a lesbian liberal take two networks of "news" and try to make them more center based and less left leaning and try to report all news fairly....how dare they.

Comment "The" or "A"? (Score 2) 3

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) 75

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:whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also rea (Score 1) 230

Well, we didn't have childcare provisions or maternity leave laws forty years ago when things were booming, so those aren't likely to have any causal bearing. It's also the same healthcare system; the difference is that there have been 30 years of legislative attempts to make it "more affordable". Interestingly, the only sector of the economy where costs have increased at a similar rate to healthcare is higher education, which has seen over forty years of "affordability" action. And please note the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

Wish I had mod points....spot on everything.

Comment Re:The alternative title (Score 1) 65

Chances are, those full-time jobs would effectively quash their food stamps and medicaid because some places have a clause where those benefits go once you exceed 40 hours or so.

But gig shifts will let you maintain SNAP or EBT, and medicaid. The employer won't have to set aside some budget for benefits they offer regular employees for these "temp" workers

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.

Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 117

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Comment Re:Carmack makes a good point (Score 1) 56

There's also the issue of cost/scope. I'm not sure that Id is atypical for a studio of its age and size in terms of how its games have gotten more costly over time; but it's still very much the case that Quake was about a dozen guys crunching and Trent Reznor making creepy industrial noises; while Doom: The Dark Ages was closer to feature film level budget.

More potential players now than there were in 1996; but the production cost increase has still, on the balance, likely done bad things to your ability to turn a profit on the basis of a relatively small slice of the market thinking that your game fucking rules; rather than making a major seller more or less mandatory.

In Id's case specifically I'd also be curious if they are somewhat victims of their own legend. Basically every "boomer shooter" going is absolutely mainlining some combination of doom and quake nostalgia(often doom aesthetics but with quake's actually-3d to better render how you remember them rather than how the weird 2.5d stuff actually behaved); and a lot of those actually have dev teams closer in size to Quake; presumably with the expected effect on how many units they have to sell to remain viable.

Comment Re:Picking on Cuba (Score 2) 113

"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

Comment Re:Picking on Cuba (Score 1) 113

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

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