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Comment Re:The same people ... (Score 4, Insightful) 130

... who wanted to let freakin' Iran keep their actual weapons program, will claim to be worried about this.

That's because we "same people" have zero trust in Agent Orange as he threatens his country's own allies and invades other countries just for fun, while he simultaneously shits the bed over and over and over and over again.

We do, however, have at least some trust in the inspectors who, until the Great Trumpster Fire came along, were ensuring that Iran wasn't building nukes.

Comment Re:Cowardly fucking shits (Score 1) 38

If Microsoft did this to an US agency, their management would be in court for treason.

That would depend on which agency you're talking about, and how well Microsoft managed to curry favour with Trump.

I hear that money, flattery, and spurious ersatz medals can go a long way toward making der Trumpenfuhrer look the other way. And if the agency in question was NOAA or CDC, Trump might actually hand out a medal.

Comment Re:No Choice (Score 1) 38

What's extraordinary is that the U.S. House of Representatives engaged in spying on a regulatory agency of a fellow NATO member. But then again, the current Washington Administration does seem to be about burning all bridges.

Here in Canada - at least among us average citizens - NATO is a very iffy thing just now. NATO's supposed leader has threatened the sovereignty of other NATO members, and launched trade wars with some of them. Ambassador to Canada Pete Huckster is an insulting arrogant bully, and he and American politicians are supporting Alberta separatists in a not-so-clandestine fifth column operation aimed at breaking my country apart.

So while the US spying on other NATO members is reprehensible, it's not really extraordinary. Throughout NATO, dealing with that kind of shit from America is just business as usual now.

Comment Re:No Choice (Score 1) 38

Personally I don't think the government should be using 3rd party clouds for anything remotely critical. They have the scale to make running their own infrastructure worthwhile financially, and the know-how to run it effectively.

And if they don't have the scale on their own, they can combine forces with other like-minded countries.

That's probably not ideal, but it would be WAY better than trusting ANY private-sector cloud services provider - never mind an American one - with all that sensitive data.

Comment Here's hoping... (Score 1) 50

The Illinois legislation targets the LLMs themselves. I would like to see companion legislation targeting the server farm goldrush as well, since rapid growth in that sector seems to be driven - or at least excused - largely by AI demand.

By far the most prominent news stories deal with the psycho-social and job-market damages caused by LLM use. Equally important are the serious environmental and physical health consequences resulting from the server farms whose growth has exploded since the tech bros started pushing AI as though it's ShamWow.

Comment Re:Tech industry is right wing? (Score 1) 68

You are clearly not very aware of reality.

There are liberal Jews, and there are conservative Jews.

And then there are Fascist Jews such as Netanyahu, almost everyone in his government and - so it would seem - a very large portion of Israelis. They are the ones who either support or actively participate in genocide, the killing of journalists, and the beating and imprisonment of people who try to give humanitarian aid to starving, dying Palestinians.

As far as I can tell, there are both liberal and conservative Jews among the Fascists. Thankfully, there are also both liberal and conservative Jews among those who denounce the genocide.

The Venn diagram of liberal Jews, conservative Jews, Israelis, Zionists, genocide supporters / deniers, and genocide opponents is one which I would not even attempt to draw. The thought of that makes my head hurt - never mind my heart.

Comment Re:Tech industry is right wing? (Score 1) 68

That's a very distorted perception of reality.

That depends on your definition of "right wing".

I suspect that for most people at your end of the political spectrum the phrase means "conservative, traditional, and with a social, moral, and financial hierarchy that I'm bloody well going to climb as far as I can". I think folks at my end of the spectrum extend that definition to include extremely rich assholes who have invented and fought to legalize accounting dodges which allow them to pay ridiculously low taxes. (Oh, I almost forgot - add in the entirety of the fast-growing military-industrial complex).

Did you know that one of those tricks that the uber-rich use to owe sweet-fuck-all in taxes is to take smaller salaries than some of the people they employ? They pay income tax on those earnings, but they don't pay tax on the large loans-with-extremely-favourable-terms which underwrite their lavish lifestyles.

They themselves - along with, say, shares in their companies - are the collateral for loans which allow them to pay income tax on only a VERY small portion of the money which is really "income" by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, tax laws aren't a reasonable standard.

Any guesses as to who pushed for, and had their hands and noses in, crafting the tax laws? You see, THOSE people are the ones by which we lefties largely identify the "right wing". The identity politics, social conservatism, "pull your own weight" rhetoric and the like are just sleight-of-hand distractions.

Comment I don't think that will work (Score 1) 76

Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."

That suggestion assumes that CEOs have sufficient imagination, familiarity with workflows, analytical ability, open-mindedness, and patience to do the required work.

In the days when CEOs rose through the ranks and actually knew shit, it might be feasible. But I suspect the average C-level these days is a placeholder who probably costs their company - and society - more than a dozen or more of them are actually worth in real-world terms.

Comment This doesn't surprise me at all (Score 1) 112

Before I got to the end of the first paragraph I thought of how a bit of surface roughness can reduce drag between two solids in contact with each other. The best example I can come up with involves applying pressure while dragging your finger across a glass surface. If the glass is smooth and shiny your skin tends to stick and sort of 'ratchets', while on a finely etched surface this doesn't happen.

I don't have the math or science chops to know if there's any theoretical connection between what I just described and what TFA is talking about. Does anybody here know if I'm on the right track?

Comment There are no words (Score 4, Insightful) 95

The phrase "dystopian hellscape" comes immediately to mind. This is just so fundamentally fucked up that it's hard to say much beyond that.

Can off-the-rack clothing which contains cameras and cell modems be far behind? Sure, that sounds like an impossible stretch, at least practically and technologically speaking. But wouldn't many of the dystopian developments we live with now be seen as unthinkable or outright impossible a decade or two ago?

On the bright side, at least we'll have sufficient data centres on line to process all that footage from all those cameras, along with AI to parse the images so humans will be spared the effort. /sarc

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