Given how much of modern manufacturing is fully automated, why couldn't US companies compete on a level playing field with Chinese ones?

Tariffs simply allow domestic manufacturers to reap higher profits and/or continue to use inefficient processes to create an equivalent product.

Perhaps the motto of the USA will eventually become: "Tariffed into mediocrity"

It seems like the fight goes back and forth about "just cameras" vs "cameras + sensors", when all I can make of it is that the REAL answer lies in how good the hardware and software is processing the incoming data?

Tesla, for example, scrapped the cameras + lidar idea, largely out of frustration that both inputs often led to the computer interpreting the scene in conflicting ways. "Camera visual seems to indicate that's just a light pole on the side of the road but lidar image shows it may be a person starting to walk into the road." (Maybe that's a poor specific example, but I heard talks about it saying things along these lines were the struggle.)

If Waymo is arguing humans can only do so much with our eyes, so "superhuman levels of driving" require more? Again, it seems to me like more CPU power and better software is that "more"? Computers can do math FAR quicker than my brain can... and that's been true for decades. Superhuman levels of driving safely seem like they could happen with systems just using cameras OR systems collecting data from multiple sources?

You're right, but the problem is going to be location in many cases. Would a former data center make a great public library? Technically, it might. But when it was built out in the middle of some farm land, where they originally got a good deal on the land by buying some farmers out who were willing to sell? Now, it might not make so much sense.

Or as an example closer to home for me? Our own city is fielding requests to construct data centers right now. There are rumors about our now closed-down steel plant being a potential site. Great for the guy who owns the property and wants to unload it. But a data center there would mean tearing out and removing an existing environment that was good for manufacturing. If you said ok -- no more steel made here but we could do cement, or process glass? That would be an equivalent replacement that would bring back the lost jobs. A data center really won't ... and if it closes? I'm not sure people would want it as office space in that part of town.

Reality is? The places that allow new data centers where they interfere with the existing population are just going to wind up with regrets.

They remind me a bit of the battles over putting in new landfills/dumps. Everyone knows we need them, but it's always "not in my back yard"!

The thing is? The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.

Even in "best case" scenarios, they don't employ many people once they're constructed, and they use large amounts of resources -- which tend to be sold at discounted rates as part of the deals struck when they move into an area. Everyone else gets stuck covering any losses by way of rate increases.

A landfill may smell bad, but it's not using up the lion's share of available electric power in my town or using a big portion of available clean water.

I don't understand how the entire concept isn't just outlawed and thrown out? The core reason we have a stock market is to allow business growth/prosperity. Company owners trade off their original ownership of a successful business for a chance to get investor income flowing in to make the business more successful than they could make it on their own.

Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. There's no "investing" in a business happening at all with this.

To be fair, cellular data is really poor in quite a few places in America, when using ANY of the "second tier" reseller carriers. (Won't speak for other countries.)

EG. We have Spectrum Mobile right now (mostly due to a bundle deal with our broadband at home), and while voice calls work pretty much as expected, anywhere I go? The data is terrible! They say they're using Verizon's towers but it's obvious Verizon is throttling the heck out of them and/or only allowing them on SOME of the towers in a given area.

When I had T-Mobile for a few years previously? It had bad holes in coverage areas, but it worked quite well where it was built out (usually your bigger cities).

I don't care how much "cost savings" they claim it brings to eliminate retail stores. As one of only a few "major carriers", it's pathetic to offer only online interaction with customers. And honestly? I'm not even sure I would have a big issue with the FCC pulling some of the dedicated frequency spectrum they were allowed to purchase. I'm pretty sure there was an assumption made that as one of the "big 3" cellular providers in the USA, T-Mobile would ensure any potential customer had the ability to buy a phone with them and get the help needed to use it. I imagine there are quite a few elderly or handicapped people around who don't find it very functional to do all of that via an app.

I don't do a lot of traveling, but I remember when I last worked at a job that involved some travel? The ongoing "wisdom" was a realization that the cheaper hotels had the most usable/reliable wifi. The expensive ones tended to use Internet as a service to upsell, with annoying portals trying to bill you a daily rate and generally interfering with your applications. (They might, for example, lock down just about all ports except 80 and 443, meaning you couldn't get software updates to complete or connect a VPN, or ....)

The basic chains, by contrast, all seemed to used "canned" wifi setups sold to them by third party vendors, and as long as you got a decent signal in your room, you were good.

In any case, I never trusted a hotel wifi to be super-secure. Heck, I remember on a Vegas trip one time, they had it set up so wifi was capped at a slow rate unless you paid a premium. I was curious about a wired jack I found behind the bed and plugged into it. Turns out, it gave me a full gigabit network connection and bypassed their sign-in portal and everything. They seemed to just not realize or expect guests would still carry ethernet cables with them and try to use a wired connection.

But the first thing I thought of when reading this is how "sales" seems to constantly involve managers over teams who think all their employees have to be treated like kids, or at least assume simple-minded "motivators" actually work.

Have any real studies been done on ANY of this? Because whether it's negative reinforcement like this public shaming/pie assault, or it's insanity like ringing bells each time a sale is made and some bozo interrupting the whole place with loud announcements? It all feels primitive and pointless to me.

These drone delivery services that have to operate in line-of sight and comply with a gazillion FAA regulations are doomed to failure. You could deliver the order faster using a trebuchet over such distances and with fewer liabilities or costs.

Manna Aero has moved to the USA for its trials because it effectively had so many problems in it's home of Ireland and Just the other day another 85lb Amazon drone crashed and burned.

Given the costs, both from a hardware, labor and systems perspective, they'll never compete with a gig-worker on an ebike.

The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.

I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.

> "mnemonic"

Johny who?

I wrote a lot of assembly (back in the day) for both the Z80 and the 6502. The Z80 was like a Mac truck. It had some really powerful instructions (LDIR etc) and a great register-set but the 6502 could be a lot faster on one condition -- that you had space available in page zero to exploit the indirect addressing mode that relied heavily on the first 256 bytes of RAM. The Z80 had the advantage that it had on-chip support for refreshing dynamic RAM so systems with more than 4K or so of memory were much easier and cheaper to build using a Z80 than a 6502.

If you were building and programming a system from scratch then the 6502 was the obvious choice but if you were programming a "store bought" 6502 system such as the Apple, Atari or Commodore, many of those valuable first 256bytes (page zero) were already in use by the ROM-based system software so things became a bit trickier.

Ah... happy days.

I paid for a year of access to their service last year (recently let it expire/lapse) ... and I agree with another Slashdot poster who called it "impressive".

I guess you can fight legal battles endlessly over what you're allowed to do with content that was made freely available for you to access over the Internet.... But those "vast music libraries" they "stole" were the same ones the average user of services like YouTube are welcome to pull up and listen to any time they like.

We're really just arguing about if it's ok to write code so a computer can analyze the music and use it to create new music based on ideas it "learned" from the content ... vs human musicians doing the same thing.

To me, the impressive part of SUNO was the way I could supply my own original lyrics as text, complete with instructions on how I'd like to hear the words sung, and have it churn out a realistic-sounding result with a backing track fully assembled to go with it. If you listen to enough SUNO content, you start to get a sense that specific music genres it uses result in only a certain resulting sound/feel/vibe. I could tell it to regenerate something I told it to create in the style of an "Irish jig", for example -- and over dozens of attempts? I'd wind up with maybe 4 or 5 really different ways it constructed it, and the rest feeling like small changes to those basic constructs. But to me, that's ok. You shouldn't try to use an AI music creation tool to crank out complete, "ready to play/perform" pieces of music that got rid of human musicians. A SUNO creation should be identifiable as a SUNO creation when a discerning listener hears it.

I see SUNO handling relatively "low effort" music creation needs like advertising jingles or as a tool to inspire a musician to build from what it gave them as a staring point. For a lot of background music, such as what's needed in a video game? It makes sense too.

I feel like it's not only possible, but likely America saw relatively major power outages at close to the same "one per month" rate in the past too? The electrical grid is basically designed with an assumption it only stays up with the help of a crew of linemen who get tasked with locating points of failure and fixing them ASAP.

I remember some years back, I lived in a small city right on the edge of the Potomac River in western Maryland. They were originally set up with "feeder" power lines coming from two directions in to town. At some point, Potomac Edison power company decided to just discontinue one of those feeder lines and let the city get by from the other one. Every time a car hit the right power pole coming in to town, after that? Power was out for the whole community.

Seemed insane to me that they'd purposely remove redundancy they already had in place? But I'm sure it was all about the economics -- with bean-counters realizing the lower grid reliability was still "adequate" per the total population there, and they'd save all the money maintaining the additional lines and poles.

I also remember living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri where they had a power outage lasting over 2 weeks. A storm came through and knocked down a lot of trees. (The community took pride in having all the trees growing there, but I guess didn't consider how bad that was for above-ground power lines running right past all of them.) They had to get crews from other states out to replace blown transformers on poles and the whole bit, to get it back up and running.

If better uptime was a major issue, you'd think they'd bury those power lines. But again, it's about cost-savings instead.