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Comment Re:Studios demanding happy endings (Score 1) 16

The question is if the studios demand it or if the test audiences demanded it.

Movies have test screenings all the time, and the original director's vision and script might get completely tossed because the test audiences hated it, requiring a last minute rewrite and re-shoot that changes the ending.

Studios demanding happy endings means studios have a chance to fix it at the writing stage before the movie is shot (this is MUCH cheaper). Test audiences only see the mostly-finished movie, so if it movie test screens bad, then you have to do a last minute change. Usually directors get a chance to fix the movie but sometimes they also have a right to refuse to do so. Of course, if a movie does bad because the director refused to make changes after a test screening, that director's chances of another movie go down significantly.

Comment Re:EV (Score 1) 135

Not to mention the focus on fast chargers.

Level 1 chargers can work for a lot of people - most EVs will do 3-5 miles per hour on level 1. At home overnight while you sleep, that's 30-50 miles. At work, 8 hours is 24-40 miles. The average commute is around 20. Even if you do a lot of errands and stretch it to 40 miles, you'll be topped up at work the next day.

Let's have more chargers so people can park all day, not have faster chargers that require you move your car after a couple of hours. (Do you want 1 Level 2 50A charger, or 6 Level 1 parking spaces? Which is more convenient for an office?)

Comment Re:This is not an AI failure (Score 1) 136

AI is a tool and tools require trained operators.

A Product manager experimenting with a trenching tool and cutting an underground power or gas lines would be a failure of the trenching tool.

No, it would be a failure of the operator to be sufficiently trained as well. Because basically everywhere now you have to call before you dig so you don't cut power, gas, sewer or other lines.

And if you do that before calling, you get 100% of the blame and the 100% of the costs to resolve the issue. No one's blaming the tool. (On the flip side, if you dig up something that wasn't marked out, you're off the hook, thus it's all upside to calling)

Tool failure would be things like your fileserver dies because the power supply fails, and when you try to fix it, enough drives fried that you lose the entire array. That's a tool failure (which you hopefully mitigated with a backup).

I do however like how vibe coding has suddenly turned into a game of chicken where maybe it will delete everything or not. Kind of like having AI give you commands to do something when it really means it'll format your hard drive.

Comment Re:The missing detail is the split percentage (Score 2) 40

Yes, at the same time, they will also jack the price of their CPUs up 30%. Maybe 5% is due to having to run another fab, but the real reason is prices are going up, so jack up the price anyways because why the hell not. You're going to blame tariffs for prices increasing, so what's the harm in a little more margin?

Plus, AMD is in a really good spot right now, so they can justify a price premium over Chipzilla.

Comment Re:The thing "progressives" always miss... (Score 1) 153

I'm sure you can find some idiot, probably a false flag, saying that. Or twist something someone said to imply it, the classic one being that beyond 1.5C is pretty bad and we had about 20 years to prevent it. But that's all it was, fringe stuff and lies.

There were plenty of credible sources, plenty of people on the political left accurately relaying the scientific consensus.

What does it matter though? Even if what you claim was true, that's no excuse for you to continue to ignore the science.

Comment Re:Shades of Toyota FUD (Score 1) 135

Even if there were a viable, production ready, solid state battery announced today it would take years for that to translate into actual production because an entire supply line, infrastructure and factory would have to be built to manufacture the thing.

That's what Mercedes is saying. Solid state batteries are now available as small-scale production samples, not as simulators and not as one-off lab toys. They are still too expensive for truly mass production, but they can be used to actually start designing real products. Engineers can start testing the batteries for real-life performance, mechanical durability, thermal envelope, etc.

Production ramp-up is happening now, but it'll take years to scale up. It turned out that solid state batteries are complicated. Who knew?

Comment Re:What is American Airlines really thinking (Score 1) 20

I hope that happens too, otherwise I'm going to need an AI agent to screw with their AI agent until it gets me the best prices.

Per Delta, the AI pricing isn't individualized, meaning all customers buying the same class of service at a given time will see the same price, so I don't think that would get you anything, unless maybe your AI agent gets good at predicting when exactly you should buy your ticket, but that seems unlikely because your agent will always be operating with less information than theirs (e.g., yours doesn't know exactly how many seats are already sold).

Comment Re:Agents are dangerous in general (Score 1) 136

I find that it works well to treat current-generation AI agents like bright, incredibly fast but overenthusiastic and incautious junior engineers who do not learn from their mistakes. They can be extremely useful, but you have to be careful to limit the damage they can do if they happen to screw up.

Comment Re:This is why we need public health insurance (Score 1) 104

This is just yet another example of why we (USA) really do need a public, non-profit, health insurance system. Too many people cannot access proper medical treatment for life-threatening conditions, and in their desperation fall victim to quacks and other grifters and con-artists.

I don't think anyone struggling to afford health insurance -- especially now that insurance can't deny pre-existing conditions -- is shelling out $20k for bleach injections. It would be much cheaper to get an individual healthcare policy and get it to pay for proper chemo.

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