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Comment "Planned to" seems dubious (Score 1) 14

Given the level of commitment it implies; basically the most lightweight of expendable pilot programs even if you are saying that you 'plan to' in a legally binding context; is seems at best exceptionally dubious to treat the answers to "do you plan to adopt generative AI?" as straightforwardly meaningful.

The differences mean something; it's just not obvious to what degree they reflect actual company strategy, vs. personal fascination with the new shiny thing, vs. people saying what they think the audience wishes to hear.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 1) 25

It's sort of an interesting mix of goofy hype and actual(but relatively boring) worth-looking-into.

Not so much because of 'quantum' necessarily; it's entirely possible that someone will get an at least somewhat worrisome classical efficiency improvement worked out before the quantum computing types reach anything of useful size; and it's probably worth betting money that particular cryptographic implementations will turn out to be flawed; but because it takes a fair amount of awareness to even have a complete idea of what you are running; and more than that to know the implications of needing to swap it out in some or all locations.

The people selling 'quantum' and 'post-quantum security' are mostly in the business of "forget your boring arduous problems by focusing on our exciting ones!"(good business; bad way to do security); but it's a pretty solid idea to be aware of the boring arduous problem of exactly what ciphers you use, and what implementations, and whether there are any places where you've inadvertently left a compatibility toggle that allows something to be downgraded to some 90s 'export grade' cipher; and have an idea of how hard it would be to change ciphers or update implementations if you needed to for one reason or another.

Shockingly enough, the people with the biggest marketing blitzes and best 'executive whitepapers' with stock photos of shadowed hoodie hackers and chinese quantum AI owning your cyber are not the ones mostly advising that you should do some really boring systems administration and SBoM stuff while waiting for mature industry-standard implementations to become available; so the people selling immature proprietary implementations and dubious silver bullets tend to out-shout the more sensible ones.

Comment Re:It's DeFi! (Score 2) 94

Sorry I guess I'm going to have to ask a more specific question. Do you have an example of anybody owning a few million $ in bitcoin *exchanging ALL of it* for something that is not Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency or crypto asset. The fact that you can exchange a small amount of bitcoin for the equivalent amount of dollars does not prove anything.

There are examples of people exchanging their entire hold of hundreds of millions in gold or stocks, without the value of those commodities crashing. Would like proof this is the same for bitcoin.

Comment They replay the manufacturing emissions in months (Score 1) 156

With a wild twisting of words this author added "meaning the emissions were dumped up-front in China's coal plants" to try to make this sound bad.

ALL "manufacturing emissions" are "dumped up-front". There is not something special about China or using coal. And even with the 2x or more CO2 emissions of coal, a solar power panel replaces all that CO2 emission in just a few months, which is an awful lot better than a lot of other things that people claim are green.

Comment No problem. (Score 4, Insightful) 57

So all we have to do to vindicate our investment in glorious AI is keeping firing the expensive labor until we get the team down to people so ignorant of the code that their guess is worse than the bot's guess; and they'll have no reason to doubt the bot's output?

Sounds like a win-win to me!

Comment Re:That is rather limited point of view (Score 1) 287

It would be amusing if it weren't so annoying; but you often see people who embrace both positions without a hint of awareness of the contradiction: when condemning the non-breeders they are 'selfish' and 'hedonistic' and so on; but, in the same breath, children are their greatest pleasure and most fulfilling experience and so on and so forth. What's it going to be? Are children the cutting edge of indulgence and everyone who is missing out will die bitter and miserable; or are the people failing to pay the flesh tithe to our civilization repulsively self-centered for avoiding a massive hassle that one undertakes only as a grim duty?

Comment It would be interesting to know... (Score 2) 287

I'd be curious what, if any, role the increasingly obviously hollow promise of progress may have.

In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.

Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.

Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.

My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.

Comment I'm puzzled by their puzzlement. (Score 5, Insightful) 287

Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...

Comment Re: Go away from slashdot ur too dum. (Score 1) 115

Even that source seems weird though, it has Kansas having more than Washington.

You must mean Kansas City, it's a big destination for conventions because it's in the middle of the country.

I'm sure it makes sense to count that in some ways because it feeds the hospitality industry just the same, but it's not the same as normal tourist traffic that might spend each day in a different place. Like you go to KC for a week and you might have one free day to see a Royals game, go to Virginia and you can hit the Mall, Smithsonian, Busch Gardens, Monuments, landmarks, historic towns in one trip.

Comment The line between citation and advertisement (Score 1) 33

I happened to be aware of the existence of a extension made by someone else that offers domain-level opt-in consent to run script in a particular web browser. I cited the extension's title and author and deliberately left out any URL. I thought that would have been adequate to imply lack of conflict of interest. A user has implied to me that it is not. What means of citing a source would have been adequate?

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