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Comment Re:Figures (Score 5, Insightful) 149

"There is no safety or cost reason to prefer this over normal analog protein vaccines. Only advantage MRNA has is reduced up front capex."

Nice attempt at shaping the discussion to flow down the limited paths you prefer. In reality world the gigantic advantages of having straightforward yearly influenza vaccines be mRNA-based is that (1) after enough experience it would become possible to reformulate the vaccine midseason if the dominant flu strain changes (2) if a 1918 Kansas Flu boils up out of a giant pig farm somewhere it will be possible to create an mRNA vaccine for it and get it into distribution rapidly.

Comment Multiple rug pulls (Score 5, Informative) 90

The streaming services have already done multiple rug pulls, rights-stripping acquisitions, and bankruptcies to take away "purchased" streaming rights and force people to pay a second time (and a third, and a fourth...). But yeah, the people who have CD players with analog outputs and who buy CDs are the dumb ones.

Comment Wilhoit's Law (Score 5, Informative) 97

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

To conservatism I would add billionaireism.

[note that this is not Wilhoit the academic political philospher, but a different Wilhoit]

Comment 40% growth forever (Score 1) 39

The smartest guys in the room somehow failed to realize that 40% compounded growth forever at 80%-3000% gross margins wasn't possible. It can happen for 5-10 years of an economic turnover (whether driven by new technology, new forms of organization, immigration, or other fundamental changes) but just because it happens to some organizations for 5, 10, even 20 years does not mean it can/will happen to every organization - and trees don't grow to the sky.

Comment Re:Smells fishy to me (Score 2) 146

Before starting a local nuclear power industry Korea did a thorough study of the global industry and decided to basically copy US NRC regulations. They had the option to start from scratch and create a new regulatory framework but they decided to go with one that had experience behind it and known weak spots documented. I don't track that part of the industry closely any more but my understanding is that Korean nuclear operational and safety requirements are now tighter than those of the US.

Comment Re:Simple solution (Score 4, Interesting) 17

It's a "simple solution" because you have missed the point entirely.

The extra cost of ApplePay to banks isn't borne by the individual using ApplePay (almost certainly Apple's rules for issuers using ApplePay will expressly forbid charging customers a fee for using it). Rather the cost of ApplePay to banks must covered by whatever base costs they pass on to all consumers (whether they individually use ApplePay or not). So no, you can't just "Use your bloody physical card" to avoid paying for ApplePay.

I imagine Apple would argue the use of ApplePay brings other cost savings (eg fraud prevention) and even "new business" that more than offset whatever Apple charges so there is in fact no net-cost to issuers that they have to pass on.

That might even be true!

Comment Re:More likely because people guess they are watch (Score 3, Interesting) 63

My guess is it is more likely to be an artefact of increased attention rather than an actual increased tendency to be pro-social.
Ie, people on average are x% likely to give up a seat for a pregnant woman if they are actively aware, but in many cases people on public transport are "zoned out" so the actual rate of people giving up a seat is lower.
The "Batman" may just be something somewhat unusual that increases people's awareness of their immediate surroundings rather than making them more pro-social.
An interesting follow up would be to try things that are "unusual" and attention level raising, but are somehow neutral and free of the sorts of symbolism that are attached to Batman.

Comment Sometimes, Slashdot posters who are under pressure (Score 3, Informative) 63

Sometimes, Slashdot posters who are under pressure to publish, anything, no matter what, to increase their publication count, will make stupid comments, mentioning terms they have vaguely heard about, without any real thought as to whether they apply.

P-hacking involves researcher degrees of freedom and the ability to find some signal for "something" in a bunch of data by varying how the the analysis is performed after the events themselves.

That does not seem a relevant at all in the context of this particular study, which uses a very simple method and measure for what it is testing and whose methodology was pre-registered before it was done.

Comment Re:Nothing but Clippy (Score 1) 211

"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.

Comment Re:Current LLM's (Score 1) 211

That's what the big bosses tell us anyway. In a somewhat obscure corner of the human experience where I sometimes hang out there are ~5 web sites of varying ages that write and publish original and meaningful things. But if you search for that obscurity on Google you will now be directed to 847 "sites", "magazine articles", "experts", etc of which 842 are thinly disguised machine-rewritten versions of the 5 real sites - the kind of rewriting I would have instantly flagged as plagiarism back in my TA days - wrapped up in phony autogenerated web sites, documents, articles, etc.

Comment Massive theft of intellectual property (Score 1) 211

Most people aren't authors or painters who earn a direct living from their creative work (of which there are very few), but most people put some amount of creative effort into their jobs and livelihoods. Whether it is a financial analyst in a cubicle who develops independent analyses of the prospects of an investment target, a graphic artist who creates flyers and web sites for small businesses, or an electrician who figures out a better way to route cabling through a standard spec house during construction they can all recognize that the self-styled "AI" vendors are just stealing their creative labor with zero compensation and feeding it into a spicy chatbot labeled "AI" which is going to be used by their bosses to put them out of work.

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