Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:So they don't need revenue (Score 1) 43

Even if AI saves a lot of labor the people developing the AI have to find a way to monetize it.

For example a mechanical engineer making $150 K / year it's not uncommon to pay maybe $7500 for CATIA.

For a stock trader it's about $30K / year for a Bloomberg terminal.

Or maybe it will be like operating an MRI scanner which is $5 million to buy, and the MRI technologist who operates it makes $88K / year.

Or a mining dumptruck that costs $7M and the driver is paid $80K.

Nobody knows where this ratio will end up for any number of jobs to be impacted by AI.

Comment Re:Can the F-35 do anything on time and budget? (Score 2, Informative) 56

I don't know it's anything with the plane, the F35-C first launched from the land-based testing version of the electric catapult back in 2011:

http://defensetech.org/2011/11...

and has been taking off from carriers with steam catapults for over a decade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Hematite vs Rust (Score 4, Informative) 19

Hematite is one specific type of iron oxide. Rust is a non-technical umbrella term for all iron oxides, and the typical red ones we see in daily life are formed by contact with water and are not hematite. Hematite is a dark charcoal gray and is sometimes formed as a byproduct of iron ore processing or other heat and pressure processes in the ground, where oxygen may be present but not water.

Comment Competition? (Score 1) 45

We have W+ and Prime and these are probably the main 2 sites I cross-shop these days. They don't overlap entirely; Amazon sells a lot more variety under its own return policies etc, while Walmart is better for things like motor oil that they have locally (if you wanted to go into a Superstore). But there's enough overlap that it's worth cross-shopping, for now.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 4, Interesting) 45

I'm not sure online sales were ever part of Walmart's core competencies; I suspect they contracted all that stuff out to third parties.

The reason I suspect that is that one of my relatives bought a product from Walmart.com and needed to return it, so she called the number listed on the front page of the Walmart.com web site (and dialled it correctly; I later double-checked the call record on her phone against the walmart.com web page), and the representative who answered put her on hold, then forwarded her to a scammer who tried to trick her into allowing him to TeamViewer in to her computer remotely. When she refused, he got increasingly abusive and eventually hung up on her.

So whomever Walmart was contracting for online support, they were at least bribable, and arguably criminal.

Comment Re:Make it free (Score 2) 257

One does wonder what they are thinking - why would anybody want or tolerate this?

Most ads we are stuck with because we want the media or service that the ads support. Oh, you want to watch two teams of 53 millionaires play football? OK, but 30% of your time will be watching ads.

On a fridge what is the payoff?

Comment Re:We are so screwed (Score 5, Insightful) 207

Everybody in society must [...]

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.

Comment Re:Every few years, a new canard (Score 3, Insightful) 207

Yeah, growing up in the cold war it was a foregone conclusion the commies would always lose because central planning doesn't work. You'd hear the story about a factory overflowing with left shoes and no matching right shoes were being made. I still think there is some truth to it, but China has been on a run for quite a while now. I am skeptical of any narrative in which a key element is them being very stupid.

Comment Re:Not going to work (Score 1) 137

Something that seems to constantly get lost in this discussion is that violent crime in the US is not particularly high right now by historical standards - e.g. murder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you were to ask the average "person on the street" to guess the murder rate, it would probably depend hugely on whether a school shooting or racially- or politically-motivated murder was currently a big media story. But that hardly corresponds to your risk as an individual.

Comment Re:So then how long... (Score 2) 50

So how long before the jokes all comedians tell all sound the same (same theme, same setup, same punchline)?

Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Slashdot Top Deals

My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells down by the seashore.

Working...