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Comment Re:How can it happen? (Score 1) 27

The Earth's magnetic field is weakening which is measurable by the accelerating traversal of the magnetic poles. That's why a relatively small CME last year caused the same Northern Lights all the way down to Hawaii as the Carrington Event which was 10x stronger. The beauty is unquestionable but the impacts will cause us difficulty.

There was a recent solar storm which ionized the atmosphere more than we are used to as "normal" in our recent history, which sets up the conditions for lightning to travel further. The physics on it are pretty simple with all variables considered.

We're going to see more of these than we're used to as the pole shift continues to accelerate.

This happens every 6000 years or so and we're right on schedule but we're really unprepared to handle it. Preparing for this ought to be a planet-wide project for our species, and to help out the other species that rely on geomagnetic migration for their reproductive success.

As a kid in the 80's we only needed to update our compass calculations for variance to True North every 20 years or so; now it's yearly.

I wish Humanity could not plant their heads in the sand on this one but I'm planning like we will.

Comment Re:the lesser of two evils (Score 1) 41

Detractors claim Epic just wanted Google to run the Play Store infrastructure at a loss to increase Epic's profits.

Nobody numerate believes that but they claim Epic did it for that reason which would be shitty except they didn't.

Somebody could probably make a good business out of running a store at 5% markup.

Comment It's about killing small R&D (Score 5, Insightful) 181

They yammer on about Temu but the hardest hit sector will be small R&D shops that get parts and components as the need comes up and now they'll have 2-3 week delays on every order at Customs.

I've seen stuff disappear into the Customs black hole for six weeks and there's nothing you can do but reship and home the Chinese Roulette favors you.

It would be great if Adafruit and Sparkfun were 50x their size but that's not reality and manufacturing was driven out on purpose. It can't return for a decade even if a project were started today.

Watch: the media will say small businesses are complaining about the 15% to try to fool everybody. In prototyping almost nobody cares if an SoC is $10 or $11.50.

Trump's Corporate donors will be just fine and face fewer upstart competitors so it is working as intended.

Comment voice acting (Score 4, Interesting) 136

I'm an indie game developer. My games have budgets of a few hundred bucks at best. Before AI, voice acting was simply impossible. There was no way I could pay a voice actor for even one language.

Now, with AI, I can have voice-overs in half a dozen languages easily. It has opened up something for me that was never possible before.

Yes, the AI voices are mediocre. Yes, I would prefer having an actual voice actor whom I can tell that I want THAT word stressed, or what emotion to convey. I'm sure in a few more years, the text-to-speech AI generators will allow for that as well.

But I'm not lost business. I'm still hiring the exact same number of voice actors that I did before AI. Zero, in my case. But if I had a budget, I'd still hire voice actors instead of AI because a good voice actor still beats the best AI.

There's still time enough to learn something new and get a different job, guys.

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