Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

...and I know from years of experience in I.T. that any time you give people the ability to do a database search, you'll get people putting nonsense in fields for testing purposes. So at least SOME of the "button mashing" and entries like "dickhead" sound to me like officers trying out the system for the first time, or experimenting because they weren't trying to conduct a REAL license plate search.

That doesn't disturb me as much as the overall problem of allowing these searches without a warrant or at least a judicial review. Even if it's decided that a license plate search doesn't rise to the level of requiring a warrant to conduct it? There should absolutely be someone reviewing the searches being done. (EG. The officer who is too lazy to properly document why he/she is doing them and consistently leaving fields empty needs to be punished.)

I don't think training a model with copyrighted data is any kind of gray zone at all.

Running inference against such a model _might_ be infringing.

But I don't see the legal argument that model training would be.

Think of model training as lossy data compression. You provide an input, it produces a compressed artifact, and it can no longer reproduce the original when you uncompress it. It can produce _something_. It cannot reproduce the original.

On slashdot, we all agree that format shifting copyrighted works should be allowed and unrestricted, right?

If there is applicable case law here about how lossy a "reproduction" can be before copyright has something to say about it, that would be relevant. Do you know of any?

I think you're repeating something that feels emotionally valid but in my experience, isn't factually (or legally) accurate.

I have found AI models to be frustratingly _obedient_ of copyright.

I'll be in a situation where I ask a specific question about what a document says, and the AI repeatedly says the work is copyrighted and it can't just tell me what it says _verbatim_, but it can answer specific questions for me in its own words (while telling me to check the original).

Two examples from my life are procedural questions about what Roberts Rules of Order would require in a given situation, and, what ASD STE-100 says about how to name/word things.

The applicable US law would appear to be USC 17 Sec 106 and 107, which on one hand limits derivative works, but on the other, allows fair use for purposes of teaching, scholarship, or research.

(USC references provided by AI, btw. Which I haven't read)

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

(AI tells me the attribution is "The Red Lily", Anatole France, 1894)

Around 2029 we'll see that a ride is available for $16 or $31 with a driver.

Rider's choice. I'll guess it goes about 80/20.

He seems like a real scumbag but it's worth keeping in mind that the people who told us that have a massive incentive to pin their crimes on a scapegoat.

Since we pretty much know that FTX was the #1 donor to a party's political action committee with money laundered through Ukraine, he would have been smarter to wait for that conflict to conclude.

The people who benefited from the crime also prosecuted him which is never reliable.

It might not be FedSlop but unless it is proven that both parties didn't benefit we shouldn't trust this government either.

We do know that Ladybug Graham got $18M straight into his bank account from Ukraine so there is certainly smoke.

It's only since a dead man can't sue for libel that people are willing to print that nugget now.

Not in a Corporate Democracy.

The people who would prosecute OpenAI want to use OpenAI to maximize their power and wealth at your financial and legal expense.

Remember when they tried to extradite Gary McKinnon for twenty years for looking at a spreadsheet when he accidentally got RDP access to an unsecured NASA desktop with a simple Perl script? Intent is not relevant for prosecutors (mens rea should be an element in a Constitutional case).

The legal basis is there but the will to power is not.

Two systems of courts for different classes of people (yet again). It would be an error to call that a Justice System.

n.b. the Culture War psyop is there to try to convince you that the classes are something else.

There are corrections to gravity that include the current size of the Universe as s term that gives extremely small differences in calculations but explains most observations.

It has a certain allure from an Information Theory perspective and is extremely parsimonious in ask.

But funding is for finding wimps and axons and evidence of mysteries that use the old equations so you are called crazy if your simple theory threatens that gravy train.

Some people say useful physics is too dangerous to fund and we're better off wasting time and money.

Twenty years ago Dark Energy seemed like a good idea to me. So did Supersymmetry. Most new ideas that can be tested and used or disproved probably should be. That LHC found no Supersymmetric pairs is a good thing.

Apologies to the original.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09...

According to a report I heard yesterday Talarico has 50x the cash of Paxton and it's the Bush politicial machine that is funding him.

The situation was similar in the primary but the base favored Paxton over Cornin by such a huge margin that the spend didn't matter.

The dual state people hate Paxton so much they have been after him for years.

It's populists vs. oligarchs in most races where party affiliation is a distant second to the money machine.

Since Trump ran on populism but then did a 180 with Judas knives out for his "former supporters" the odds of any Republican getting elected anywhere but an R+20 are extremely thin regardless of warchest.

DC's interference in free elections is gross but it probably won't matter on Election Day.

Impeachments of officials over FCC actions are quite likely at this point.

"You're folding it wrong," obviously.

Perhaps Tim Apple had the sense to get out ahead of this.

Happy to be proven wrong! That would be amazing engineering and might actually allow the rollable Global to come to fruition.

But since everybody who has claimed to have perfected the engineering hasn't actually done so one should be cautious on such investments.

It's possible this might change some minds about government data collection of financial activity.

It would be great if we all someday learned that PITT data analysis was actually based on de-anonymized CFPB data, which constitutes the singular largest and most granular financial surveillance program the US government operates, and perhaps put a large moral panic sized dent in the "consumer protection" narrative.

Consent is the difference between it and lovemaking.

A legitimate government listens to 90% of its citizens when they agree on an issue. Delegated powers and such.