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Comment "Smaller than a hair" - no (Score 1) 15

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Comment It's been obvious for years. (Score 1) 70

I can't believe this is even a serious discussion.

Everyone who matters *knows* who the successor is already. Greg KH. He's already done the Linus job in his absence. No one who matters will challenge this.

There will be no "fight"; all the major subsystem developers know and respect him as Linus's "shadow".

The real, more interesting question is who is the natural successor to Greg KH?

One of the top developers obviously, but which? Andrew Morton? Ingo Molnár? Theodore Ts'o? There are quite a few possible candidates.

Comment Re:It really depends (Score 1) 224

Are you okay with your phone being less water resistant then?

Yes, I don't bathe with it.

How about less battery as the phone must now be designed to be opened and internal volume sacrificed?

You didn't even read what you're replying to, moron. They. Don't. Care. If. It. Is. Thicker.

So you have the *same* battery in a slightly *bigger*, openable case.

Fuck's sake, you're a thicko.

Comment Re:"Stranglehold" ? (Score 1) 361

This outcome from China was inevitable and has been their plan all along. Did Trump's tactics speed up the outcome? Maybe. But to blame him for what was China's obvious strategy all along seems a bit disingenuous.

That's your opinion. An alternative view would be that China knows that cutting off the supply totally and precipitately (even if just temporarily) is somewhat of a nuclear option which they would have been reluctant use if not for Trump's "tactics", since it may not work out to their advantage in the medium term. Using alternative sources and building refineries in different countries now becomes more attractive and may be state subsidised and facilitated as a national security matter, which will potentially undermine China's position in future.

Comment Discourse (Score 2) 187

Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

Comment Re:I see ... (Score 1) 166

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

Comment Well, almost (Score 1) 392

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.

Comment Come on, cheapskate (Score 1) 235

Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

Comment It's not the right call (Score 5, Insightful) 388

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

Comment Then there's the commercial OS vendors... (Score 1) 132

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

Comment Tables (Score 1) 115

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.

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