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Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 72

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Comment Re:Carmack makes a good point (Score 1) 23

There's also the issue of cost/scope. I'm not sure that Id is atypical for a studio of its age and size in terms of how its games have gotten more costly over time; but it's still very much the case that Quake was about a dozen guys crunching and Trent Reznor making creepy industrial noises; while Doom: The Dark Ages was closer to feature film level budget.

More potential players now than there were in 1996; but the production cost increase has still, on the balance, likely done bad things to your ability to turn a profit on the basis of a relatively small slice of the market thinking that your game fucking rules; rather than making a major seller more or less mandatory.

In Id's case specifically I'd also be curious if they are somewhat victims of their own legend. Basically every "boomer shooter" going is absolutely mainlining some combination of doom and quake nostalgia(often doom aesthetics but with quake's actually-3d to better render how you remember them rather than how the weird 2.5d stuff actually behaved); and a lot of those actually have dev teams closer in size to Quake; presumably with the expected effect on how many units they have to sell to remain viable.

Comment Re:Picking on Cuba (Score 1) 45

"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

Comment Re:Picking on Cuba (Score 1) 45

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

Comment Re:More people should probably feel worse... (Score 1) 36

It's not really a catch-22, since there's no need for it to be the same people regulating how much lying you can do about prices and producing goods and services.

It's also not really a catch-22 since, if it weren't for the tolerance of grotesque levels of regulatory capture, any 'capitalist' regulator would take ensuring high quality price signals really seriously.

The part that should upset people is that the 'capitalists' are so far into bed with actively anti-market rent seekers that you can't rely on them to stand up for honest price signals, contract law that isn't so lopsided as to be basically a joke, and so on.

Comment The challenge (Score 1) 102

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

Comment And the obvious difference... (Score 0) 107

If you are going to anthropomorphize a tool enough to call it "AI" I suppose that it isn't entirely unreasonable to suspect that it might "reflect CCP ideology and values"; but fretting along that line seems to either be ignoring or deliberately obfuscating the difference between running a model and suckling on someone's black-box API.

A local bot can hurt you to the degree that you trust it to actually work; but a remote vendor can(and, given the competitive scramble for training data, almost certainly wants to and will try to to the degree they can get away with it) hurt you both to the degree that you trust it to actually work and to the degree that it can exploit the data and process information you are exfiltrating to them. This aspect is outright advertised as a virtue to some extent(when facebook is going on about how the 'AI' that 'knows you better' will be more useful; or one of the 'foundation model' vendors is promising your boss that, for real this time, improvements will allow next year's digital transformation to still work after it gets rid of you); but there's no reason to believe that it stops there: if the potential of 'AI' is half as interesting as they claim it is why would you expect that your vendor will just sit there obligingly renting you synthetic programmers or virtual back-office functions forever when they could just eat you whole?

For about 2 American money pits racing toward IPOs the chinese models are the scary pirate version that makes their value proposition look even worse than it does by itself; but for literally everyone else it's using the fancy, respectable, foundation model guys that is the glorious future of short-sighted outsourcing; and there's not much reason to expect any of them to like it for reasons beyond stupidity or desperation.

Comment Bleagh, (Score 1) 67

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

Comment How curious. (Score 2) 122

I realize that it's all about keeping the corporate sponsors happy; but I'm perpetually a bit puzzled by how the 'culture war' stuff never seems to result in any related action on things like food contamination (outside of a few 'crunchy'/'natural' influencers who make some social media noise but are essentially irrelevant from a regulatory perspective).

If one were looking for something remotely resembling intellectual coherence wouldn't the legality of persistent compounds that sure do seem to make endocrinologists nervous in food really get the people who are loudly concerned about biological gender or white birth rates motivated? However much you overestimate the ability of liberal propagandists surely you would take good, old-fashioned, chemical effects on the endocrine system even more seriously?

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