Comment hmm (Score 1) 48
I'm a busy man. I'm also a lazy man. Could someone tell me if this is cheaper or more expensive than a desktop gaming PC with the same stats?
Comment Re:Betteidge's law (Score 1) 131
Additionally, the way it's phrased, as a "bet," is implicitly skeptical.
Comment Re:Betteidge's law (Score 1) 131
There is no question that states are betting on AI.
Comment Re:Sojust like every other tech growth story (Score 1) 220
FDNY life is rough but it is still vastly better than Chinese factor worker life. That 18-hour shift is not constant answering calls, a lot of it is downtime. Also, they get a lot of time off in between. And retire with good benefits years and years before the Chinese worker.
Comment Re:Sojust like every other tech growth story (Score 1) 220
"and where blue collar workers get to retire on a full pension before white collar workers."
Yes, if only I could enjoy the life of a blue collar factor worker in China. Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?!
Comment Re:And it gets worse! (Score 2) 220
Government intervention in international currency markets is "capitalism"? Since when, and by what definition? Wikipedia says "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit", which on the surface neither implies nor aligns with the Chinese government controlling the CNY-USD exchange rate.
Comment Re:Correction (Score 4, Interesting) 93
The elites hate labor shortages. They love labor surpluses.
Comment Re:make it open-source instead? (Score 1) 104
and quite another to spend more money on it.
And that's the core of the issue.
If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.
If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.
As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.
A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.
I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.
Submission + - Here's Where to Track (and Predict!) Your Congresscritter's Insider Trades (pjmedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Want to find out how much money your congresscritter makes from insider trading? Ever been curious to see the correlation between bills, votes, big-money donations, and shockingly handsome investment returns? Would you be interested in an A.I. geared to predict lucrative congressional trades before they happen?
There's a website for that.
It's called GovGreed, and it's an AI-powered search engine that "fuses [machine learning], deep learning, and 7 intelligence layers to predict which politicians will trade — and in which sectors — before the 45-day disclosure window even opens."
Over on X, Ricardo dug into the "crazy" numbers and found that "56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on."
Worse — or better, if you're a member of America's insider-trading nomenklatura — Ricardo also revealed that "343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information."
But wait, there's more.
GovGreed's AI identified 752 "triple signals" in the sitting Congress. A triple signal is when a congresscritter sits on the committee writing a bill, "they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry."
Triple signals trade at 5.4 times the normal rate of congressional trades, he found.
In other words, Congress isn't just trading on insider information. Congress generates the information, influenced by donations from the very companies whose futures are written by Congress. The result? While the S&P 500 so far is on track to generate a 10.8% return in 2026, Congressional traders earned 10.2% in the last 30 days, according to the site.
There's a website for that.
It's called GovGreed, and it's an AI-powered search engine that "fuses [machine learning], deep learning, and 7 intelligence layers to predict which politicians will trade — and in which sectors — before the 45-day disclosure window even opens."
Over on X, Ricardo dug into the "crazy" numbers and found that "56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on."
Worse — or better, if you're a member of America's insider-trading nomenklatura — Ricardo also revealed that "343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information."
But wait, there's more.
GovGreed's AI identified 752 "triple signals" in the sitting Congress. A triple signal is when a congresscritter sits on the committee writing a bill, "they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry."
Triple signals trade at 5.4 times the normal rate of congressional trades, he found.
In other words, Congress isn't just trading on insider information. Congress generates the information, influenced by donations from the very companies whose futures are written by Congress. The result? While the S&P 500 so far is on track to generate a 10.8% return in 2026, Congressional traders earned 10.2% in the last 30 days, according to the site.
Comment Re:Everyone knows Meta = Facebook (Score 1) 65
> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.
They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.
Comment Betteridge's law of headlines (Score 1) 65
Comment Oh yeah, Shutterstock... (Score 1) 19
one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.
I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.
Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.
Comment Re:How about at least... (Score 1) 99
You said "Open Source development." Which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small.
Comment Re:Destroy Them (Score 1) 67
No, it's not. Read better.
I bet that the system showed police the timestamp of the image and they ignored it. This is the same dysfunctional state where police can't identify a burglar who used a Waymo robotaxi as a getaway car.
Comment Re:Destroy Them (Score 1) 67
Don't be a dick. You claimed something that wasn't in TDS or TFA. It's not my burden to disprove your hallucination.
