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Comment Need state approved toilet paper to wipe your own (Score 1) 123

California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models, quarterly list updates

This is the most California thing I've ever read. Unconstitutional, unenforceable, and a massive increase in costs and bureaucracy; they hit the trifecta! I wonder if printer manufacturers that bake their own bread will be exempt once their checks to the governor's presidential campaign clear.

Incidentally, this is the kind of stupid shit that helps Trump and people like him get elected over and over.

Comment What about heat? (Score 1) 245

Let's say that Elon is right and the economics of space-based solar energy make the expense of launching into orbit worthwhile. Let's also say that we manage to avoid the Kessler Syndrome that Elon's companies have largely helped to make more dire.

Compute generates heat. Lots and lots of heat. And heat is difficult to dump in space. How does he plan to get around that not insignificant engineering problem?

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's not going to happen in three years.

Comment Yep (Score 1) 186

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.

Comment Re:Calling it a lead is very generous (Score 1) 28

I've used Claude at home for ages. Work was wanting to get some AI stuff for us and the only 'blessed' one is CoPilot. Everything else it blocked. All senior management seems to know about AI is "Hurrr... Copilot and ChatGPT."

Out team of ~8 (pentestesting & VA) were unanimous about Copilot being crap and Claude being the top dog. So some higher ups OK'd a Claude Teams package for work. To bypass the CorpSec tards, we use it from our lab environment that has its own unmonitored link and IP range.

Anthropic/Claude is just so far ahead of OpenAI/ChatGPT and MS/Copilot it's not funny.

Comment Re:LLM had a head start (Score 1) 113

Don't ask some LLM's how many "r"s are in strawberry.

That was definitely a problem two years ago. I did just check in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and all reported 3 correctly. The problem with people throwing out these sorts of criticisms isn't that they're all wrong; it's that they're ignorant of the leaps in progress being made. These models are rapidly improving and it's getting harder to find serious gotchas with them. They're still weak in some areas (e.g., spatial reasoning), but for serious power users who know how to prompt them well? They've become insanely powerful tools.

Not gods; tools. But really, really strong tools for huge variety of tasks.

Comment Re:Too late (Score 1) 65

I've used ChatGPT to write code and Gemini to debug it. If you pass the feedback back and forth, it takes a couple iterations but they'll eventually agree that it's all good and I find that's about 90-95% of the way to where I need it to be. Earlier today I took a 6kb script that had been used as something fast and dirty for years - written by someone long gone from the company - and completely revamped it into something much more powerful, robust, and polished in both its code and its output. Script grew to about 20kb, but it's 10x better and I only had to make minor tweaks. Between the two, they found all sorts of hidden bugs and problems with it.

Comment Re:With Science (Score 1) 95

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 92

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record

Comment Re:Wait until (Score 1) 92

Are You Scared Yet?

I would be.

The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!

Christopher Allen Wright (born January 15, 1965) "12) is an American government official, engineer, and businessman serving as the 17th United States secretary of energy since February 2025. Before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America's second largest hydraulic fracturing company, and served on the boards of Oklo, Inc., a nuclear technology company, and EMX Royalty Corp., a Canadian mineral rights and mining rights royalty payment company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright

Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

"If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn't be such a great concern, but it just doesn't seem feasible."

We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.

But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.

Comment Re:Once again (Score 1) 11

Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.

There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.

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