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Comment IBM: The origins of THINK (Score 1) 60

https://www.ibm.com/history/th...
"An ad hoc lecture [from 1915] from IBMâ(TM)s future CEO spawned a slogan to guide the company through a century and beyond"

https://humancenteredlearning....
"And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think. And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.' (Thomas Watson, IBM)"

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/...
"All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work. (Nicholas Murray Butler, often misattributed to Thomas J. Watson)"

So, yeah, echoing your point, make programmers do the hardest parts of their job all the time -- especially reviewing code from inconsistent-to-put-it-politely AI contributors -- and no wonder they feel "fried".

Does AI support for programming need to be this way? I might hope not, but we are also mainly hearing about AI used within a short-term-profit-maximizing hyper-competitive corporate social context. Like I say in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Comment Re: How economic models work (Score 1) 88

Ideologues who think they help open source by placing demands on developers are hilarious.

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/...

"You guys need to perform work I'm not paying you for on MY terms!"

If I wanted money for my open source contributions, I would have asked for it. If the idea of somebody else making a billion dollars off of your work and paying you zero doesn't sit well with you, then simply say so in your license. Be sure to tell the pseudonymous contributors what their share of that is while you're at it, assuming you allow contributions at all.

Comment Re:Source term for Einstein's field equation (Score 1) 47

There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor

There most certainly is. Density-- mass per unit volume-- is the (0,0) term of the stress-energy tensor.

Energy density, yes.

Which is also mass density. Multiply by c to keep the units straight. (If you're a physicist, you just set c=1, and the units don't matter.)

I guarantee, if you have a mass density of M kg/m3 and you put it in Einstein's field equations, you get gravitation.

Comment Re:Protect the children form stupid laws! (Score 1) 107

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Comment Re:Of course Apple knows the real email ... (Score 1) 90

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Comment Non-commercial use only (Score 3, Interesting) 88

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

Comment Not actually hard science fiction (Score 2) 65

A fun movie, but the movie wasn't in any way hard science fiction. I don't think there was any real science in it, other than the distances to various stars. It was hand-wavium from beginning to end.

But, heck, that's par for the course for film science fiction. If you try to find the science in "Dune" or "The Last Jedi", good luck.

Comment Re:Use an Age-verified flag (Score 1) 192

Because laws have been passed that require it. The problem isn't the OS vendor, it's the law. Any commercial backer of a distro that doesn't comply is, in one way or another, complicit in breaking those laws. Many backers will withdraw support in that scenario. So basically it will come down to community forks and patches that the official distros avoid condoning. Probably it won't simply be a case of 'store date of birth in user database' in future, rather they'll have a government ordained supplier of age verification and you have to store some kind of cryptographic token that ties a user account to their official proof of age. Then browsers will be required to present something based on this token to websites. It's gonna get more 1984 as things go on. But Linux distros aren't in a position to oppose this.

Comment Source term for Einstein's field equation (Score 2) 47

in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor

There most certainly is. Density-- mass per unit volume-- is the (0,0) term of the stress-energy tensor.

Comment Re:All for it, but would like to know the launch r (Score 2) 22

If the launch fails at a point where it is say 50 miles up, and the reactor has been turned on prior to launch.

The conops says that the reactor doesn't get turned on until after it's successfully placed in a high orbit.

A good feature of nuclear reactors is that they aren't dangerously radioactive until after you turn them on.

Comment Re:Bye bye Wikipedia (Score 2) 32

Here's a case of a very experienced journalist getting caught by including made-up quotes that had been hallucinated by the AI he'd used to summarize research information: https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Vandermeersch added: “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.”

When even experienced journalists fail to find AI hallucinations, you really can't expect unpaid volunteers to do better.

Comment Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score 2) 91

And of course that Mac Pro idea was killed by the cosmic trashcan thing. In a sense what one wants is a kind of 'docking tower' into which a Mac Studio fits, giving a lot of expansion. If you want a machine with 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs, you have to put up with crazy sprawl with modern macs. With an old school tower with it all contained inside, you had a single box you could pick up, carry around, and just plug in.

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