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Comment Re:Why the need? (Score 1) 20

Why, what's the hurry?

Probably worried about competition from Tesla's Robotaxis.

The quote was from the Bavarian government guy, so it seems unlikely that he's concerned about Waymo's competitive worries.

Also, German regulators are very cautious, so I expect Tesla's camera-only and less-mature robotaxi service will have a harder time getting approved.

Comment Re:Why the need? (Score 1) 20

Now we need to move quickly from testing to real-world deployment.

Really? That is a need? Why, what's the hurry?

You know another company that moved really quickly from testing to real-world deployment? OceanGate.

Well, given that Waymo has been testing for nearly 20 years and been operating commercially for six years, currently operating nearly 4000 vehicles in 11 cities doing 500k rides per week... there's not a lot of risk.

Roads in Munich aren't terribly different from roads in US cities. Stoplights work a little differently. Munich does get a little snow, but rarely very much and it almost never lasts long. If Waymo's vehicles can't deal with it they may just suspend service... though I expect they'll probably handle it fine. They're supposed to go live in Detroit and Minneapolis this year, and if they can handle the weather there (where just shutting down for snow is not an option), Munich will be no problem at all.

So, not much like OceanGate.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 120

That execution is the recording engineer's job. Dre is mostly a producer now, and that does require considerable talent and creativity. Depending on the situation, they may do everything except write and sing the lyrics.

The recording engineer only records (and maybe mixes) the audio that is generated, which is part of what I meant by "mechanical process", along with generating the audio. Dre could use AI to transform his ideas into digital audio tracks, obviating the recording engineer and the performers, and to then select and mold the results. This would still require talent and creativity, which was my point.

Comment Re:TSG (The SCO Group), not SCO (Score 1) 92

They were not in any way the same company

This is, of course, capitalism-worshiping nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions. Having bought one, you have become the owner of the entire fiction, including the name. They are SCO now in every sense that matters, and I say that as someone who used to run SCO software and who knows several former SCO employees. That SCO is dead, hopefully this SCO can also die soon, but they are legally the same SCO.

Caldera didn't buy SCO.

Comment Re:Something is missing (Score 5, Insightful) 127

> The measures taken did - nothing.

"The doctor said I needed surgery to treat this cancer. I took some aspirin instead. The measures I took did nothing, so clearly the doctor lied to me."

> Perhaps it is time to exercise our collective masses of grey matter (and our AIs) to figure out some feasible coping measures and implement them.

We know what to do. We've known what to do for decades. He simply have not done them, mostly because there's too much money and power to be had in maintaining the status quot. We don't need "AI" to solve this already solved problem and, in fact, "AI" is sucking up the resources we need to solve it while also making the problem worse, faster.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 3, Insightful) 126

On top of that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to take fees paid to the government as tax-writeoffs. Sufficiently large firms might well simply write off the money spent this way directly against their taxes.

It's almost certainly all operational expense, same as the salary paid, which means it's "written off". But "write off" doesn't mean "it's like you didn't have to pay it", it just means that it's subtracted from revenues when calculating profits. Net is that writing something off saves about 21% (the corporate tax rate) of the amount written off.

It's the same as your personal taxes, more or less. When you donate to charity, you get to subtract the donation from your adjusted gross income. If you make $100k and donate $10k, then it's as if you made $90k. Supposing (for simplicity) you pay a flat 20% tax rate, and you didn't make the donation, you'd pay $100k * 0.2 = $20k in taxes. Having made the donation, though, you only pay $90k * 0.2 = $18k in taxes. You donated $10k and basically got $2k of it back from Uncle Sam so the donation only cost you $8k out of pocket. But you still ended up $8k poorer (but the charity is $10k richer!).

The principle is the same with corporate "write-offs", though the mechanics are different.

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 2) 126

will you pay 100k or just hire a local. i think they wont pay the 100k.

Silicon Valley companies will pay the $100k. The positions typically pay $500k+ (base + bonus + equity + benefits) and companies are accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars in addition to deal with the H1B filings, and for other immigration services, including fees for green card filings, etc. An additional $100k is painful, but since it's good for 6 years, they're already paying around $3M, so it's only a ~3.5% increase.

Comment Re:TSG (The SCO Group), not SCO (Score 1) 92

They sold a pretty decent x86 Unix throughout the 80s and early 90s.

They did no such thing. SCO Unix was, by far, the worst one. Nearly as unreliable as Windows. Just as an example, their serial port driver was so bad, you had to download an open source driver (Final Asynchronous Solution, anyone?) to get serial ports to work properly, especially if you were using a modem. And Deity help you if you accidentally started getty on a port with modem control enabled, and no modem...

I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.

Comment Re: Super neat, alas not a solution to the issue (Score 1) 36

What bank (or credit union) doesn't have web-based online baking?

Many require you to use the phone app for MFA, even if you're using a web browser.

I guess there's the option of just doing all your banking in person, at a physical branch location... or at least an ATM.

Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 120

More like he’s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time

Assuming for the sake of argument that what Dre does is creative and that he is talented, very little of making great music is about the mechanical process of executing on the generation and recording of sound. That's important, but there are a lot more people who can do that than create something that is new, and good.

Creation (in any medium) is about the ideas, and about the ability to recognize what works well and what doesn't. Given that, I could completely see AI being a useful tool for a creative, talented artist. They have to supply the ideas, in the form of prompts, and they have to recognize whether the results are good. The AI is just a time-saving device for the middle step of generating representations of the ideas.

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