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Comment Re:King Arthur had a shield? (Score 1) 56

It doesn't feature in the John Boorman film, but it's certainly a feature of one strand of the King Arthur myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

(I would assume it's merely a detail in the original stories, as it's rather obvious Arthur *would* have a shield, but all focus would be on Excalibur because of its origins and its link to Arthur himself and his powers.)

Comment Re:It's not like it's super-hot... (Score 1) 56

> I think this is actually why giants like google have been enshitifying search engines, to promote the use of AI which provides better results.

I think you misread what you quoted. They didn't say (paraphrased) "AI was better than search engines", they said (paraphrased) "A rival to Gemini is better than Gemini".

I have no idea, to be honest, they're both fucking awful.

Google search was enshittified much earlier than Gemini, it was already falling apart in the 2010s, it's largely remained popular because the rivals insist on copying it, rather than trying to build something likely to give you relevant results on the first try. Why enshittify it? Because if it can give you hundreds of thousands of irrelevant results on your first try... you'll sit there for 5 minutes trying other searches. Engagement, baby. That's where it's at. Make you sit on a site for longer, and you'll see more ads.

AI had nothing to do with it, it's just adding a new layer of shit to the pile.

Comment Re:Cutting edge only (Score 1) 56

For the umpteenth fucking time the "Mainstream Media" is not a loony-right-wing-conspiracy debunking organization. It's a group of outlets owned by billionaires and, less frequently than in the past, giant corporations, who have no interest in truth, just serving a demographic, and most of them repeat the same shit Fox News does, and if they don't they usually are talking about other topics.

You don't know this, because you don't actually follow the MSM, you just assume what's said on various right wing sites or even Fox is true.

At best, the "liberals" have MS Now. That's not because MS Now is a liberal organization - its morning show is literally headed by a man who was considered a far right Republican in the 2000s. It's just that MS Now is pandering to "liberals". Curiously, it's also slightly more honest than the other outlets, largely because most liberals - gweihir being an example of an exception, prefer to know that what they're repeating is true and get embarrassed when called out on it if it isn't.

But no, the MSM isn't sitting watching Fox News saying "Gosh, another lie, we should debunk that". If that were the case, obvious lies, like "gender reassignment is being done on kids!" would be debunked every few days when Republicans make that lie, rather than quoted without pushback.

Comment Re:Garbage in garbage out (Score 5, Insightful) 67

That's giving them far too much credit. Even if everything on the Internet was accurate, you'd expect generative AI summaries to mess up regularly because the algorithms are based upon statistics, not reasoning and logic.

If it were merely the Internet that was wrong, you'd expect a much higher proportion of AI summaries to be accurate: after all, just as Google's PageRank system made its search engine revolutionary, you'd expect similar algorithms could be used to filter out sites and pages less likely to be factual, and you'd have expected Google to implement that by now. But right now? One third irrelevant, one third inaccurate, and one third... might be accurate, but how do you tell? That's a symptom of a much bigger problem than someone on the Internet being wrong.

Comment Re:Screw AI (Score 2) 37

I am patting myself on the back for making a rare call that everything tech was going to rise in price, albeit largely based upon Trump's rhetoric about tariffs, which turned out to be even more complicated than I thought. So late 2024 I built and finished the network servers I wanted, and early last year got my main PC as much memory as the mobo will take.

This one we all have to ride out. What's infuriating is the helplessness I feel as every other article on Slashdot is about someone adopting generative AI for something it's not really capable of doing sanely, knowing it's pushing along this trend, causing people to lose their jobs - often permanently, not because their job was ever obsolete, but because the businesses that switched to AI will never recover - and seeing the entire thing crash.

Between the rise of fascism, the enshittification of businesses in general, and the damaging fads from crypto to LLMs, it's hard to figure out whether there's an end to this nightmare that doesn't ultimately end in the collapse of everything. Who knew the post-apocalyptic fiction we read as kids would end up being so wrong about the cause of the apocalypse: in the 1980s, I'd have said Nukes, not mass stupidity and con-men who are good at marketing.

Comment Re:Oh good (Score 1) 37

ASUS has pretty good products, their mobos are great. I can't comment on the support because I've never needed it.

Regardless, it wouldn't be another reason to avoid them even if it was a legitimate complaint because everyone else is doing the same thing. You think ASUS is the only company affected by the world wide shortage of memory and other storage chips, thanks to AI and crypto and other techbro frauds?

Comment Re:Crypo is terrible as an investment (Score 1) 55

Fiat currencies don't claim to have assets, instead they have the backing of a government and a mandate to use them.

Bitcoin basically destroys assets and then pretends they're backing it (spoiler: no, because they've been destroyed!), and other cryptocurrencies are usually worse. Indeed, only the stablecoins come close, and usually they're fraudulent. But in all these cases, the crypto-boosters pretend the unique advantage to their fake currency is that it's "backed" by something, when it clearly isn't.

Comment Re: AI summary? (Score 2) 35

Bingo, that's what it is.

If you go to the source, the words "described the consortium" (rather than just "described") are the link. The link then ends with a symbol that has an alt text of ", opens new tab" on it, which means if you cut and paste and don't look at what you're doing, you get this:

described the consortium, opens new tab,

So someone cut and paste this, noticed the link was missing, but somehow didn't notice the new clause added to the sentence!

Comment Re:That is ... really bad? (Score 5, Insightful) 78

I'm fairly convinced that despite the "Coffee is good for you!" reports on Slashdot on a regular basis, caffeine is probably a bad thing - I mean, it's the drug equivalent of overclocking your heart, how can that end well.

That said, there's a massive difference between nicotine, which creates anxiety shortly after it's been taken and then "solves" its own anxiety next time you take it, giving the victim the false believe that nicotine somehow calms their nerves, and caffeine which just stimulates the central nervous system. One is a fake, and is bad for you (nicotine lowers your defenses against cancer, which is even more awful considering the primary delivery method for the last 100 years has been carcinogenic) the other is real but may ultimately be bad for you in ways that haven't yet been proven.

I'm all for discouraging nicotine intake by all means possible. It's been proven to be a problem and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Caffeine... until it's proven that it's a problem, it should be left alone.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 271

> This is still true. Note that Rust doesn't have exceptions. At all. And this is exactly why. Errors are expressed using Rust's enums. And Rust enums can be either numeric values, tagged unions, or both. This is the basis for Result where T is the Ok variant, and E is the Error variant.

Yeah, Rust uses some syntactic garbage to hide its exceptions as something amazing and new, but it's actually more of a PITA. Having to write a long chain of unwraps to catch exceptions - sorry - "unwrap enums" one by one for objects that would otherwise be throwaway is not better.

The best that can be said for Rust's Enums-based variant is that it's so awful it actively discourages you from using it and ending up with Java where everything throws one.

Rust is, over all, a decent language, but it's not perfect and some of the decisions they made ended up being pretty bad. And that'd be fine except Rust programmers continue to act as if these decisions were masterstrokes of genius, from not discouraging 'unsafe' nor mitigating its problems by curating crates.io, or its poor Unicode support, to its absurdly lighweight library requiring you rely on untrusted third parties or write your own code for encryption and hashing.

And yes, it managed to come up with a worse alternative to Exceptions.

Comment Re:wayland only != good/better/best (Score 3, Interesting) 36

What pisses me off is that the entire justification for wasting 15 years to develop a "replacement" for X11 ended up being obsoleted by technologies that could easily have been foreseen in 2010. cgroups in Linux means every application can be given its own authentication token for the X server, allowing X clients to be given application-by-application security. No need to send everything to everything any more. And full backward compatibility is possible. All that's needed is for the Xorg team to implement the protocol. ...which they won't do because it'd be admitting that the entire last 15 years producing a slower, less efficient, display system with fewer features and some really boneheaded limitations, and making the rest of the community write awkward kludge-ridden desktops around it was a complete waste of time and money that could have been spent on (1) the three months needed to implement security and (2) fixing bugs and bringing other improvements to Xorg.

What an utter shit show.

Comment This has to be a joke (Score 1) 47

The reason memory is expensive is because there's only a certain amount of manufacturing capacity for the chips, not the fucking circuit boards. If it were the circuit boards, we could spin up factories in days to make new DIMMs.

Come on editors, do better. This article is either by a troll or by complete morons. Either way it doesn't deserve a place here.

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