Comment Re:Why does anyone take this seriously? (Score 4, Insightful) 76
Does it matter of it's true or not? Other countries will take it as licence to deploy their own weapons, or to paint the US as the bad guy.
Comment I sure hope they got my data! (Score 1) 160
No such luck, however
Comment Re:How effective is IR floodlighting? (Score 2) 171
It's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Flickering might work just as well, or better. Less energy and heat needed, and might screw up exposure or auto levelling. I have not tried it.
The problem is that if you walk around in public with a high brightness IR LED on your head, sooner or later some minimum wage security goon is going to notice their camera is blinded and get upset.
Comment Re:The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry (Score 1) 138
And besides we already solved the baseline problem. A bit of demand shaping, some short term storage, some interconnects.
The old model of the grid is going away rapidly.
Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 40
I've seen plenty of Python used in production... My question though is that I've found Python can be quite heavy on memory bandwidth, doing a lot of copying and transforming data so it can be processed. I guess that is less of an issue with embedded, but is it still an issue?
Comment Re:Feature Request (Score 1) 110
Good opening joke.
As usual I went down the list of features to see if there was one I would donate money to pay for. Usual string of nopes. (Not to be confused with the strange drink "Nope", which actually tastes much better than you'd think from the marketing.) But I suppose there are new bugs in there... Definitely wouldn't pay for those if such choices were offered. (Reminds me of Microsoft's emergency patch this month. Nothing to see here. Just some failures in the regression testing. Why do I want a remote desktop in my Windows machine again? (And why is my Chromebook still trying to reset its password after that Wi-Fi fiasco last week?))
More meta: Slashdot is running much slower for new stories these days. Good change, editorial shortage, or a sign of fading out?
Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 110
20%, but it's only when loading very large images that are scaled down for display. And when you zoom in on them, it has to decode them again.
The PDF viewer isn't really a gain, it just pre-loads it like the bad old days of Internet Explore pre-loading itself on every boot.
Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 1) 123
Punches very obviously not connecting suggests it's been trained on Hollywood fight scenes. The other giveaway is rapid hard cuts and shaky camera so you can't see how badly the punches are not connecting. Everything feels weightless and fake.
There is a lot of AI slop, but I wouldn't discount it being able to do something decent with the right person at the helm.
Comment Re:The effort is the point... (Score 5, Interesting) 123
Most entertainment has always been slop, this is nothing new at all. A decade ago it was reality TV, before that it was gameshows and daytime soap operas.
The interesting story here is how this demonstrates the basic different in attitude between the US and China when it comes to new technology. In the US the established players are very concerned that new tech will affect their business model, so they try to hold it back as much as possible. In China it gets embraced and there is a rush to adopt it.
Comment Re:Summer vs Winter (Score 1) 200
Seeing some very negative prices in the mid west (I think that's the right term) states too. Not even free electricity, people are being paid to use it.
Can you get a tariff that pays you to use energy in the US? Here in Europe we have some, and if you play the game right with a home battery your energy can be pretty much free.
Comment Re:Summer vs Winter (Score 3, Insightful) 200
Solar panels are actually very good for the environment. They can help over-farmed land recover by providing shade. Livestock and some crops can live under them very happily.
They are good for your house too, they reflect some of the heat away in the summer.
Comment Re:eh (Score 1) 62
I'm glad that they made the pre-orders fair. I'm not after one, but too often they open in the middle of the night (for Europeans) and by the time we are awake are sold out or all the "early bird" deals are gone. I hate that, I'm not paying more that someone else just because they found out about it first, or I had to be asleep so I could work the next day.
This way where there is a large window and then the queue order is random is much better.
A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
Comment Re:I had similar. (Score 1) 4
I feel like I should ask for insider details about what is going over there, but I'm going to focus on the bugs around the Submit button. Most of those links seem to work badly or not at all. However in this particular case I also got a notification that the topic had been front-paged when there was nothing on the front page. On one hand, I figured it must have been a slow news day in the first place to consider the story, but on the other hand, WTF?
Pretty sure it isn't funny, but here's a bit from another website. These days I write less and less in the Slashdot direction...
I voted for funny, but for "Very sad" values of funny. Just had another discussion about AI with an actual human. In that part of the discussion I predicted that most people are going to be stupefied by the AIs, but a few people will seize the opportunity by "winning" the battle to understand and control the biggest and strongest AI. You know, like Dr Faust.
Comment No they aren't (Score 1) 3
This is just a camera that makes sure the driver is looking forwards out the windscreen, and doesn't have their eyes closed or looking down at their phone for extended periods. The data isn't sent anywhere or recorded, there is no spying.
There is plenty of shit to be angry about, without making up more.
