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Comment Re:WTF did they DO all that time? (Score 2) 16

Well, that's one hypothesis. However since they saw a significant difference in the population where the social media apps were removed, then if your hypothesis is true, the data would suggest that delivering the service as a native app rather than a web app must have some harmful effect in itself. An alternative hypothesis is that their application usage patterns changed when the apps were removed.

It's not altogether far fetched that web-delivered apps have a different psychological effect than native smartphone apps, because native smartphone apps have greater access to the system for tracking and notifications. Native apps also offer different features than their web versions. This is why I use Facebook via a browser, because the Facebook native app is insufferably intrusive, constantly trying to get your attention. It means, however, I can't use Facebook's chat function.

Comment Re:They're right (Score 3, Interesting) 28

> "Good enough" is exactly the reason that AI is upending the world of white collar work. It might not replace a skilled and experienced employee, but it's good enough.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that. The problem is, skilled workers only become skilled after being inexperienced for a while and gaining experience. If you cut junior, unskilled workers from the job market, you won't have skilled workers in a few years.

In other words, company that adopt AI to avoid paying unskilled labor are shooting themselves in the foot.

Comment They're right (Score 2) 28

professors have repeatedly told students that AI is bad.

Whether you like AI or not, if your profession is about to be obsoleted by AI, AI Is factually bad for you.

Beyond that, it's up to you to decide if it's worth paying a talented human writer to report on local events in a local rag. Most of those newspapers are strictly utilitarian and simply inform the locals of what's happening in their communities. I've never seen any of them dabble in gonzo.

And well, journalism is like football: most professional footballers play in minor leagues and don't earn much, and only a vanishingly small minority earns top dollar playing incredible matches watched by millions.

High-flying journalists writing for classy newspapers will most certainly keep writing their own stuff. But the mundane will probably be taken over by AI because mediocre is good enough for the money.

Comment USA was terrible in the 60/70's too (Score 0) 56

But we cleaned it up. Japan had a similar problem in the 60's & 70's too, but cleaned it up. China had a smog problem in the 2000's, but are cleaning it up. India will have a smog problem too. It's industrialization. Once they get better, it will clean up as well. Most industrialized societies go through this.

Comment Re:Paywall free link (Score 1) 151

The military is right.

The military is right. As in, the military is saying Anthropic's tools are the best there are, and they don't want to change. Pete Hegseth is wrong, and he's throwing a hissy fit that, as usual, goes against what the people who now have to follow his orders, but are way more qualified than he is, actually want to do.

The entire value of AI for them is decision speed.

Incorrect. It's important that the decision be the *best decision*. Speed is a factor, but it's not the most important one. I can give you a system that gives you decisions faster than any AI, just have it choose randomly instead of actually analyzing any data, and it will be very fast!

What Anthropic is concerned about is that they are not confident their AI system can make decisions like what to shoot at with a low enough error rate to justify doing so. Anthropic is understandably concerned about the blowback to *them* when they become the scapegoat for all our drones engaging in friendly fire and killing a bunch of Americans, because Hegseth decided to trust a system that if you ask it, "the carwash is only 100m from my house, should I drive or walk there to wash my car" will say that you should walk there, because it's so close. You really want *that* system making the decision on who to kill?

I'm a pragmatist. I *know* eventually humans will be out of the loop in such decisions. We're very, very, VERY far from that. We know it, the military knows it, ALL the AI vendors, out of which Anthropic currently has the best product, know this. Pete Hegseth is apparently too incompetent to know this.

The second part of the equation, AI is actually pretty good at. It's a great tool for sifting through massive data, so it's great in helping to spy against Americans. No patriot should want that, however. Anthropic is ok with it being used to spy on other countries, but understandably does not want that use to spy on our own citizens. If you're against that, fuck you, you have no right to call yourself an American, you don't have the very basic values that this country stands for.

Comment Sheer, unadulderated bollocks (Score 5, Informative) 157

The difficulties described are consequences of Apple’s proprietary platform design, not evidence that Linux or ARM are immature ecosystems. Conflating ISA compatibility with platform openness is a fundamental misunderstanding of how hardware enablement works.

“Linux doesn’t feel ready for ARM yet. Many apps aren’t compiled for ARM.”

This is the weakest argument in the article.

ARM Linux is widely deployed on:

Billions of Android devices (Linux kernel)
Most cloud hyperscalers (Graviton, Ampere)
Raspberry Pi ecosystem
Embedded and industrial systems
Major distros eg:
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian have mature AArch64 support.

And today most open-source software compiles cleanly for ARM64.
Browsers, compilers, containers, dev tools are fully native.
Even Steam supports ARM via translation layers.

The real issue is x86-only proprietary binaries.

That’s not Linux-on-ARM immaturity.
That’s legacy x86 ecosystem inertia.

Even Apple solves this via Rosetta — a translation layer.
Linux uses FEX or box64 for similar purposes.

Translation instability platform immaturity.

I guess the source is MSN though ...

Comment I'm all for that but not for the reason you think (Score 4, Interesting) 37

Infinite scrolling == infinite memory usage.

Whenever I go to some forum that's heavy on pictures and videos that has infinite scrolling, and I'm looking far down the page for something or other, eventually my browser slows to a crawl, or the browser's resource-hungry JS engine crashes, and that's the end of the scrolling.

Certain sites I patronize that have the stupid infinite scrolling also have the classic &page= HTTP GET mechanism. On those sites, every once in a while, I reload the entire page with a &page= corresponding to roughly where I am in the infinite scrolling, just to reset it and free up some memory.

It's not the UI paradigm that bothers me, it's the resource usage insanity.

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