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Comment Re: Unencrypted? (Score 1) 117

I have a solution for this.

And by that I mean an idea that these idiots could use to protect media like that, and still be capable of using it themselves.

Or use streaming. One-to-one from the studio to Netflix. The studio gives Netflix the app with trivial authentication. Cheaper and easier than sending drives through the mail.

Comment Re:Are they using the same call center (Score 1) 26

Just because Google is cheating doesn't mean it's an insurmountable task to make an autonomous vehicle that drives slightly better than humans do.

What does "drive better than humans" mean? Drive better in all possible scenarios? That's likely impossible now and probably forever. Maybe driver better in a majority of scenarios weighted by occurrence probability? Maybe, but we don't currently have the technology to validate this requirement.

Currently, we can cherry pick scenarios where some autonomous vehicles perform better or worse than the best drivers. What does that mean? Well, not much as a generalization for all AVs in all scenarios. Certainly any comparison to the worst drivers is useless. Comparisons to the "average" driver are also useless because the most average driver profiles are heavily skewed by the worst drivers. Can any AV currently perform better than the best human drivers? I would be shocked if that were the case.

Comment Awesome! (Score 2) 52

Swaps are defined broadly in US law to include contracts in which payment "is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence."

So, casinos just need to define card table game moves as swaps, and all pesky state laws regarding these games can easily be struck down and moved to the more friendly confines of the CFTC. If there is a pesky requirement that swaps be technically tradeable , I'm sure there's an in-house technology workaround for that. If the pesky requirement requires actually trading, that also would be easy to surmount with an in-house technology workaround.

Comment Re:"proud maga" (Score 1) 226

The very (false, but that's besides the point) narrative that "you can shit on christians all day long", "but not some other religions" is literal and fundamental example of identity politics.

There are a lot of specific nuances here about religious criticism, aspersions, parody, etc. Jews - not tolerated in the US, not just conversationally but with legal and other consequences. Muslims - selectively tolerated or not, depending on the audience, generally with little or no legal consequences. Mormons - tolerated all day long and sometimes rewarded, such as on Broadway.

Comment Re:AI break down (Score 1) 128

AI is better and faster than humans: in the areas where it is better and fast.
Also: it opens paths, we yet right now can not do without AI.

AI is not a single entity. It will not completely work or not work. Some things will work and others not. Some things will make money and others not.

The biggest takeaway from the original comment about Apple watching AI burn is that Apple has not stepped firmly into AI. So, it will not suffer for those AI things that don't work, and it won't profit from those AI things that do work.

We often use AI LLM chatbots as the face of AI. However, that's a misleading broad generalization. As one example of AI that currently works (but may not necessarily be profitable on a standalone basis), imagine if Apple cancels AI photo imaging while Android phones continue support.

Comment Re:Your heart surgeon in 19 years (Score 1) 132

What if your heart surgeon AI slopped their way through lots of medical school classes, write ups during residency and required medical papework for 15 years before she is to operate on you?

What if that heart surgeon had cheated without using AI? Would you feel better? The problem isn't AI. The same people who cheated with AI would have found alternate ways to cheat if AI hadn't been available, as has been the case for a very long time.

Yes, AI makes cheating easier in some respects. But there are other ways to test that are less amenable to AI cheating.

Comment Re:Plausible deniability is better (Score 1) 218

His lawyer should have an easy time getting any charges dropped, *especially* with how incompetent the current US DoJ is these days.
=Smidge=

The big catch is that the government gets to window shop to get the judge they want. Judges are not required to be impartial; effectively, they have no motivation to be impartial and face no punishment for being biased or arbitrarily applying/inventing the law. The only theoretical punishment is impeachment, but that is only a theoretical/fanciful punishment.

It's an indictment of our current political environment that whenever I read about a court case, the first thing I search for is who appointed that judge. That political background is far and away the most important aspect of any case, usually more important than the facts and merits.

Comment Re:Correlation does not equal causation... (Score 1) 63

Well, maybe. At any rate, near me, there is an interesting study being carried out. Quite by accident.

Many years ago, there was a guy with a small, hobby farm. And then the state decided to build not one, but two freeways right next to his property. The animals did not like it, so he retired and gifted his farm to the city. With a covenant attached to the deed: The property was to be used for public benefit. Such as educational facilities. It is now a preschool. Strangely enough, due to the undesirability of the location, it is now the preferred site of a bunch of light industrial facilities. And due to low rents, also about half a dozen more preschools and daycare facilities. At least one or two generations have grown up attending these. So I hope someone is tracking the long term health of their alumni.

The obvious question to ask is the extent to which road noise correlates with and is associated with other characteristics such as poverty and poverty-associated health effects. Roads, railroads, and airports tend to be built near poor people. I imagine the statistical correlation between road noise and wealth is moderate to strong. I know that as I aged and accumulated wealth, I was able to restrict my home search to quieter locations, often quieter spots in the same neighborhood.

Then again, even though this study was a large cohort study, the results are "squint-class." A 3%-increase is greater than zero, but it's not clearly actionable and likely not significant in the life of an individual. The large study population shrinks the confidence intervals technically, but slight cracks in experimental design would easily overwhelm a 3% change in risk.

Comment Re: Of COURSE you can't use sweetener or cream... (Score 2) 189

You should buy nicer coffee beans - if your coffee tastes bad without milk or sugar and tastes terrible when cold, that is a sign you are buying trash coffee beans.

This seems like a pretty weak observational study. This is "maybe" a link. The huge elephant in the room is the same one that finally debunked the daily glass of wine is good for the heart myth. People who drink 3-5 cups or more or less are heavily influenced by other life factors that could be the causation for the "maybe link." Initial health, income, work/physical activity, stress, ethnicity, diet besides coffee, sleep, etc.

If coffee really has a significant benefit for heart health, you'd think there would be a scientific experiment created to test this theory. It wouldn't be blind, but it wouldn't have to be for an initial experiment. It should be super easy to find experiment participants, and I'm sure the coffee industry would be super happy to fund all experiment costs.

Comment Re:Open weight models FTW (Score 1) 108

Why would anyone waste their time and money when you can use uncensored open weight models for free?

Open weights can be useful for copying a model or building on previous work. However, weights are largely opaque. In contrast to open source code, open weights are not auditable. Open weights are just a bunch of numbers that are completely non-intuitive for humans; they are less auditable than even open machine code.

The only way to evaluate and validate large models is to test them as much as possible. The way to evaluate free speech concerns or any other bias is to create strong benchmarks. Of course, comprehensive validation of large, complex software systems remains an unsolved problem and likely will be for ... ever. So, those benchmarks will necessarily need to evolve.

Comment Re:Oh goody (Score 1) 118

The difference is really simple. You cannot lie for money. False advertising is not free speech. Or didn't used to be. Since we've become a kleptocracy and kekistocracy all bets are off.

The fight against false or misleading advertising is often a challenging and losing battle, partly due to First Amendment ambiguity. Perhaps an alternative is to highlight the practical level of recycling success. Have the government post conspicuous numbers about the percentage of each recycling group that actually gets recycled. That way, the companies can use whatever recycling symbols they want, and consumers can match those symbols up with the actual rate of recycling.

Comment Re: Capitalism or Dictatorship? (Score 1) 45

They don't even make chips in Arizona actually.

Arizona only performs middle-of-line wafer processing. It's a tiny slice of the value chain. Almost the entire semiconductor production chain is in Asia still, which is why the TSMC Arizona fabs have no technological or economic point to exist. Their only possible point is geopolitical or strategic.

Much of the value chain is in Asia, particularly Taiwan. However, the Arizona fabs will do EUV photolithography and wafer production and testing. That's not a "tiny slice" of the value chain. Characterizing it as middle-of-the-line processing is a gross understatement. It's a huge deal. It's the part that the US is trying furiously to prevent the Chinese from doing. Furthermore, CoWoS/etc. packaging is planned to be online in Arizona by 2028/2029 by both TSMC and Amkor.

Comment Re: Capitalism or Dictatorship? (Score 2) 45

Many of their customers are in the US anyway. It makes sense to build there if that's what your customers want. Of course politics plays a role too!

It's not just the chips but also the packaging and supply chain. Making chips in Arizona that have to be sent back to Taiwan for packaging is costly. What the customers want is a reliably, steady supply at a reasonable cost. Whether that comes from Taiwan or Arizona doesn't really matter.

Trump is pushing for the US fabs, but TSMC might also be mitigating future risk in case of the theoretical Chinese invasion. There's another angle that Trump likely would hate. The Arizona plants allow TSMC to legitimately send a bunch of Taiwanese to the US on L visas.

Comment Re: No this is not possible (Score 1) 50

You didn't have a nondisclosure agreement or anything?

Non-disclosure agreements are only as potent as the lawyers behind them, which in this case means that Apple's lawyers would completely overwhelm whatever piddly lawyers a bunch of poor startup founders could afford. That NDA wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on or the flash it's stored in.

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