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Comment Re:High Regulations Favor Large Companies (Score 1) 69

That would depend on the regulation. Some are specifically designed only to apply to large or established companies. (Although you're not likely to find this type of regulation in the US, or anywhere else subject to regulatory capture.)

Rather than the typical industry regulations, what OpenAI is advocating for sounds more like a total rewrite of the social contract. They need to have something to point at and say "We're a responsible company." It's also more aggrandizement: "Our tech will single-handedly save society"

We know that behind closed doors - though they increasingly don't even bother to close them - the bros are materially supporting politicians they know will give us the exact opposite of short workweeks and an overhauled tax system.

The calls for regulation are not serious. (Like most of what else comes from over there.)

Comment Re:Why all at once? (Score 1) 48

Lol. There are some pretty good zingers buried in the literature.

I'd add a footnote to my post observing that although mainstream medicine no longer gives patients leaves to munch on, an important "medical" industry called alternative medicine, nutraceuticals, or just "supplements" frequently does. Several studies suggest these are usually shredded mixtures of generic houseplants of questionable origin.

Comment Re:Samsung apps are all like this (Score 1) 40

I had, I believe it was a Galaxy A01 for a brief period, due to a job that required mobile Microsoft Teams. Their crapware was the only thing I didn't like about it. On their low-end phones it seems to serve the purpose of sequestering disk space, to make you think you need to upgrade to a higher-end model. They had it engineered so that you can install two or three apps you actually want on it, then you start getting disk space warnings from the OS.

The strangest thing was that, for all the crapware apps loaded, two basic applications (calculator and FM radio) were nowhere to be found, neither the vanilla Android version, nor a Samsungized version.

Comment Information lacking from summary/article (Score 5, Informative) 54

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Comment Re:Get a Border Collie (Score 3, Interesting) 78

The border collie helps round up the cattle but it would be easier if the rancher knows where the cattle are located to send out the collie. Some ranches can be hundreds of thousands of acres. And that is the main herd. If there are stragglers, they have to be located too.

Border collies generally work with sheep, cows not as much simply because cows don't really give a damn.

But sheep you have to be careful with - an entire flock in the UK had to be euthanized because they figured how to escape their fencing, and if that knowledge spread, it would basically render all farms using that fencing to keep sheep worthless. They apparently are very good at teaching fellow sheep things like that, and it was only a matter of time before the one or two that figured out how to escape taught the rest of the flock, and that flock would then teach neighboring flocks on neighboring farms and so on. It was cheaper to euthanize the flock than to have the entire country's farms re-fenced.

Comment Re:Did they find.. (Score 2) 75

The entire mission is obviously an AI fake. As acclaimed physicist Joe Rogan explained, they crew would be dead once they'd hit the Van Allen Radiation Belt (tm)

That should've been obvious by the fake globe Earth image they reportedly sent back after launching.

The earth is flat. Not a globe. The fact they had to publish this image shows the whole thing is fake.

Comment Re:This idea seems solid (Score 5, Interesting) 77

But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech.

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Comment Re:This isn't about the i486 (Score 1) 116

Yeah, Via made a clone that was similar not-quite-i586 fairly recently too.

I have an old embedded box with one that has SATA 6Gbps ports on it that I thought I would use zeroing out old hard drives.

I tried Puppy, DSL, SystemRescueCD, and a bunch of others and none would finish boot. FreeDOS is fine.

It's either eWaste or I need to dig out an Infomagic CD from the attic to get Redhat 9 pr whatever. Probably need to look up when the jump from 3 to 6 happened in SATA land.

But Linus is correct that actual distros don't supoort it. There's one project for composing embedded images that I might try before it hits a shredder. Or NetBSD maybe.

Comment Re:Not a 486 thing, but... (Score 1) 116

Actually, many consumer gigabit Ethernet switches lack 10Mbps support these days. They are 100/1000baseT only.

Business and enterprise switches though I've found (including Cisco ones, which you can find dirt cheap used) still are 10/100/1000Mbps. Even newer business and enterprise class switches retain support.

Of course, once you step into 10Gbps Ethernet, you have to be careful because many only are 10Gbps only, while some do support 1/10Gbps. 2.5Gbps support is iffy unless it's specified which is annoying since many things have 2.5Gbps ports.

As for 486, there are still new CPUs using it. The Vortex86 has a CPU that executes 486 instructions though newer ones do support Pentium minus the FPU. These are modern chips, with IDE emulation of SD cards, Ethernet and USB support, as well as running at speeds of 800-1GHz.

And you've seen them used - any fast food restaurant with the ticket screens is powered by a mini PC using these SoCs. They do run Windows and MS-DOS, and early restaurant e-ticket systems used MS-DOS. But later ones nowadays use some form of Linux.

Comment Re:Java hasn't been in the browser for 10+ years (Score 1) 42

Loading a webpage shouldn't bog down a $4000 MacBook Pro...but the shitty front-end dev community said "M4 should easily be able to load my stupid and simple website?"...."Challenge accepted!"

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

Comment Re:Needs to be optional (Score 2) 42

As long as I can turn it off, I don't give a rat's ass what stupid, annoying, and bandwidth-eating "features" they put into Chrome.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

Comment Re:4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 3, Interesting) 108

Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.

That's because in say, the 60s and 70s, computer time was expensive. It behooved you to make your code as efficient as possible - like today's cloud services, they often billed by the CPU cycle. And the run-debug cycle was on the order of a day, so you didn't want to make a stupid error because it meant your job got delayed a day at the least.

Sometime around the 80s and 90s, this flipped - human time was expensive. Computers were cheap and getting cheaper, RAM was plummeting as was hard drive space. The math started to work the other way - you don't want developers wasting time debugging code so libraries were popular - because it was more efficient (cheaper) to utilize the fact one person presents a well-debugged library that other developers could use and that means developers don't have to write that code, and they don't have to debug that code either.

That's why we have bloat - because it's cheaper that way. You could have a developer write nice and tight code, but how much are you willing to pay for it? If it takes them an extra week to make their library run 10% faster, was it work say, the $5-10,000 it cost? ($5000 a week is around $250K/year including benefits, or around $150K take home pay plus benefits, while $10,000 is $500,000K/year including benefits, or around $250,000-300,000 without benefits). Will that improvement let the company make back that investment?

You have to realize that if you want to charge $150K/year salary, spending a week optimizing costs the company $5000, so unless they can save that $5000 elsewhere (e.g., in reduced cloud compute fees, or customers will pay extra), there is no incentive to do it.

And that's really a valuable consideration. Also, compilers are really good these days. Like, really good. They will often so very strange things to save a few cycles. Some, like Clang, can be "too smart" and apply closed-form mathematical transforms to your computation (E.g., if you attempt to sum integers from 1 to n, and you do the "stupid way" with a loop, Clang will recognize it and actually generate the code to calculate n(n+1)/2 and eliminate the loop).

So it's a mix between the cost of a developer to optimize their code, the increasing intelligence of compilers to optimize code, and other things.

If you want to learn more about how compilers generate code, including being able to add in 0 cycles (hint: it uses the CPU's address calculation unit instead of the ALU to do simple addition and subtraction and even multiplication when it can, so the actual execution time is zero since the computation was done as part of operand calculation), Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer fame runs through a whole series in his Advant of Compiler Optimization series. (Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ). Trust me, it doesn't pay to outsmart the compiler.

Comment Re:Why all at once? (Score 4, Insightful) 48

We don't make drugs by giving patients some leaves to munch on. The point of the research was to develop a platform for producing any of a wide variety of common psychoactive drugs in a crop plant. They demonstrated its flexibility by producing compounds from three different kingdoms of life. If you were going to do it for real production you could engineer exactly what you wanted into their system. You might well go for more than one compound because you've got to purify them anyway so separating two or more is no big deal, and you get multiple pharmaceuticals with each harvest.

AI

Claude Code Leak Reveals a 'Stealth' Mode for GenAI Code Contributions - and a 'Frustration Words' Regex (pcworld.com) 38

That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World.

The more than 500,000 lines of code included:

- An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases
- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code
- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude

"But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases — including f-bombs and other curses — that serve as signs of user frustration." Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of — -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f — you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.

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