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Comment Re:I love it! (Score 1) 159

I love this idea because I know the second a company using this crap gets bitten it's going to be an extremely expensive problem the fix

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

Comment Venture Scam (Score 1) 147

Why do people keep talking about putting something HOT in space. Outer space is NOT COLD. The main requirement for computing (after power) is cooling. Infrared radiation is the usual form of cooling, and that ain't fast. They have to know this. So either someone is Dunning Krugering all over the place, or it's another scam to get money from people who are ignorant of the reality.

Comment Pedantry Alert (Score 2) 92

How can the poster make such a ridiculous OBVIOUS mistake? Makes the pedantic 90% of my brain seethe. "the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface" The lunar soil is NOT "powdery." It sharp and pointy like crystals or shards of glass. To be "powdery" would require some way to grind it (eg water), which the moon has never had. Now it is quite possible, and would be required, to grind the soil before using it to grow plants, but damn it, who with any scientific knowledge does not know this?

Recommended moon setting book (nothing to do with grinding lunar soil): "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". And of course "The Menace from Earth."

Comment Re:Dandy (Score 1) 74

Mullahs with nuclear fusion. What could go wrong?

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.

Comment Re: Not for long. (Score 1) 144

When the bombs start dropping near your back yard, are you going to be thinking of âoecostsâ at that very moment, or are you going to realize with the threat of death nearby that fighting over cobalt and lithium might just actually force you to realize the EV mineral wars, will NOT be any less deadly?

One nice thing about cobalt and lithium is that they don't get consumed when you use them. When you drive your gas-powered car, the gas you put into it goes away forever, and you have to buy another tank next week, every week, for the life of the car. The rare earths in your EV's motors and batteries, OTOH, remain present and usable for the lifetime of the car, and can and will be reclaimed for other purposes after their service life ends.

So sure, there might potentially be wars fought over those elements; but it's much less likely to come to that, partially because manufacturers are learning to get by with less or none of those elements, but mainly because every nation-state that depends on them already has a de-facto internal stockpile that it can rely on instead of having to go to war for more.

Comment Re:Missing the mark (Score 2) 144

An EV I would purchase: $20K-$30K, no expensive sensors embedded every where around the car, knobs and dials on the dashboard please, no connection to the mother ship unless I explicitly authorize it for a software recall upgrade/update. You know, a nice Toyota Matrix (Pontiac Vibe) style car for the average American. 0 to 60 in 6 to 8 seconds is fine, 150HP is more than enough, around 200 miles on a charge is fine. A perfect around town and to work and back car. I'll use my ICE to go on longer trips if needed. When will car manufacturers figure this out?

Dunno when American automakers will figure it out; I suspect Chinese manufacturers already have, but we're unlikely to see any of those here. In the meantime, the Slate might be something like what you're looking for.

Comment Re: Not for long. (Score 4, Interesting) 144

You just don't see it, so you don't think it counts.

That's true -- people tend not to properly consider the costs of problems that they can't directly see. Such as the housing/infrastructure costs incurred by having too much CO2 in the atmosphere, or the security/stability costs incurred by having to fight wars in the Middle East every 15 years.

At least the environmental messes in China remain China's problem; one that they will likely sort out on their own, because unlike some superpowers I could name, China is very much into solving technical problems. The global-scale environmental messes, OTOH, are everyone's problem, and only get worse the longer we ignore them.

Comment Re:Glyphs are for low cost (Score 1) 76

It's a $600 product, those keys are one less thing to localize. Simplifies manufacturing and lowers costs.

That would only reduce costs if it allowed them to ship a single standardized keyboard silkscreen worldwide. As soon as they need to support both QWERTY and AZERTY designs, for example, they're back to having to create separate variants again and any potential cost savings are lost.

I think this more just Apple being Apple -- too many graphic designers chasing not enough remaining graphic design problems, to the point where they start "solving" things that didn't actually need to be solved. Now every new buyer has to learn what the new glyphs are supposed to represent, or guess what they mean based on their location on the keyboard.

Comment Re: Glyphs are for kids. (Score 1) 76

It's in ipad where the entire screen is a key

I've never seen a keyboard where you could drag across the surface of a key, or press on different parts of the key to invoke different actions at different times. If such a thing existed, I think it would be very expensive and also not very useful. So, a touchscreen is not a key.

Comment Re: You know what? (Score 1) 71

But... the power they use isn't Green (like all your EVs, because they're Green... what's the point of a Green vehicle if what it gets it's power from isn't Green) or renewable

Yes, you make an excellent argument for constructing more renewable energy generation facilities. I'll even include nuclear in that, if you can get the price down to where it's competitive, without compromising on safety.

Comment Re:it's a tool (Score 1) 150

Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself. I barely trust my own code, much less code that an opaque AI generated that I consequently only half-understand.

With code I wrote myself, the way it works is a direct reflection of my own thought process, and by the time it's done, I've spent enough time writing and refining it that I'm intimately familiar with it and can tell you exactly what every line does, why it's there, and why I wrote it that way and not some other way.

Which isn't to say I don't use AI, but I'm using it either to review the code I wrote ("check this for any potential bugs") or to provide me with examples of some common technique, which I can then study and rewrite to my personal taste before adding it to my codebase.

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