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Comment Re: It does it poorly (Score 1) 86

Rural communities could deal with the problem by selective enforcement - i.e. the local sheriff chooses not to be a dick. But this seems a problem better solved with different license types.

If some states can give a junior license with restrictions on nighttime driving (w/o licensed supervision, etc) they could make it easier to get a basic license w/ road restrictions based on verified id + online test.

Comment Re: I guess they were a total business failure (Score 3, Interesting) 15

No, no, non you don't understand. AlphaFold demonstrated serious artificial intelligence could help solve real, expensive, research problems with provable results and quantifiable value.

That is the worst thing you can do in the current environment; why would you want provable results? The moment you can prove which type of problem you can solve, everybody only asks about the 100 problems that have no line of sight to production and the 1000 problems you can only prove this cannot solve. That's how you get into ROI conversations in the first place and a single millions-lives-saving problem cannot justify trillion dollar valuations

But if you are *pre-solutions* and stick to demos and trustmebro benchmarks - you can say its all about AGI, baby! You're a pure potential play.

Its not what your tech can do, its about making promises large enough the investors can't risk to ignore the opportunity, and get them to invest large enough sums they can't afford to let you fail

Comment Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score 0) 70

The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

Comment Unfortunately (Score 4, Insightful) 183

"If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. "

That was the neighborhood advice going around our area 1-2 years ago. I myself was skeptical that mail theft was going on as I had dealt with the Postal Police when managing an e-commerce site and I knew they are very good at finding things like this. Unfortunately it turned out (1) I was wrong: there was mail theft going on in our neighborhood but (2) everyone else was wrong too: the mail wasn't being stolen from blue boxes; it was being lifted from the bins behind the slot in our postal service center. The perps were eventually caught but it took far longer than I would have thought.

Comment Re: TFA is shit. (Score 3, Interesting) 58

TFA from Techcrunch is basically "creative editorializing" the original reporting of other sources (axios mainly) to justify the clickbait headline. But it you click through to the original sources the story is more nuanced and more interesting.

The surface dynamic is anthropic is in a delicate position and struggling to manage a "temperamental" regulatory power *and* strategic customer shortly before their IPO.

The background dynamic is multiple sources close enough to the matter in the exec branch felt so strongly this was an unnecessary escalation and that anthropic was the party who could and had to fix it, that they're talking to axios reporters the next day.

  In an administration that is proudly punitive of leaks, don't assume multiple people are spilling the tea to reporters this quickly out of civic interest or a strong belief in the role of free press.

Comment Re: All based on fake values (Score 4, Informative) 58

Its not just who remains after the bubble pops - its we dont know yet *which product* will pay the bills, and *then* who remains selling that product.

OpenAI has more users overall, but they have mainly "sold" a free / loss leader product. Anthropic has become more popular on the enterprise "maybe eliza doesnt pay the bills" business model. OpenAI pivots but if this were "search" its too early to figure out if either of these is google or they're yahoo and altavista.

Nvidia seems to be betting this is the PC + MPC redux and all these folks are trying to be IBM selling mainframes; which is less of a "worst timeline" but they're biased since their valuation already priced in the "mainframe" market. Democratizing AI is a larger addressable market for a chips seller whether its a real market or not.

Or the real business model could be elsewhere altogether - I still remember the early aughts when the future of growth for the interwebs was telecoms and iTV and Netflix was shipping CDs and the video streaming business was licensing codecs.

Comment Re:Buy my plastic rice machine (Score 2) 76

I knew several people in ruraltania who bought into the 3rd generation of raising Vietnamese potbellied pigs. First and second generations made a fair amount of money selling into a rising novelty market; the second generation also made money selling to third generation hopefuls. Third generation breeders lost their shirts of course. Before that it was small farmers in central Ontario who discovered that ginseng grows very well in that climate and soil and that was large, nay HUGE, demand for that root in the PRC. This is perhaps even more germane to the tech example because it takes the first crop of ginseng 7 years to mature, so many many Lake Erie-area farmers saw their early-in neighbors harvesting the crop and the cash - only to see the market flooded and prices crash the year before they were due to harvest.

Comment Juxtaposition (Score 1) 48

Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?

Comment Re:Never got the hate (Score 1) 79

"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."

Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.

Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.

Comment Never got the hate (Score 4, Insightful) 79

I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.

Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.

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