Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:I laughed (Score 1) 56

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

Comment Re:Does this mean it'll stop sucking? (Score 1) 27

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

Comment Re:The problem with SAS (Score 1) 27

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Comment My takes on this presentation (Score 1) 6

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

---

Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

Comment Re:Complete failure all around (Score 1) 140

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.

Submission + - How the US Military Exposed the Tools That Let Authorities Break Into Phones (reason.com)

SonicSpike writes: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) really doesn't want the public to know what it's doing with Cellebrite devices, a company that helps law enforcement break into a locked phone. When it announced an $11 million contract with Cellebrite last month, ICE completely redacted the justification for the purchase.

The U.S. Marine Corps has now done the opposite. It published a justification to a public contracting platform, apparently by mistake, for a no-bid contract to continue putting Cellebrite's UFED/InsEYEts system in the hands of military police. The document is marked "controlled unclassified information" with clear instructions not to distribute it publicly. UFED/InsEYEts "includes capabilities exclusive to Cellebrite and not available from any other company or vendor," the document claims, before going on to list specific capabilities for breaking into specific devices.

Reason is posting the document below, with phone numbers redacted.

Comment Great; it shouldn't be a thing. (Score 4, Insightful) 45

> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.

Comment Re: Thank You, Fake AI (Score 1) 238

Honestly, it was the tone of the message, which is admittedly difficult to derive from a forum. IMHO, the proper response would have been one that questioned whether the 'upscale grocer' selling spareribs at $6.99/lb vs $1.49/lb were at different ends of the subjective or objective quality spectrum. In my case, they are literally the same brand: Smithfield. The only difference is that Aldi is $5+/lb less expensive.

That said, IMO, unless we're talking about a butcher that sources heritage-breed Berkshire (or the like) pork from a local farmer, I don't really give a flying fuck where the previously cheap cut of meat I'm going to put on my smoker for 6h is sourced from.

Submission + - ICE buying eye-scanning tech to deport and remove people from a foot away (9news.com)

SonicSpike writes: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued a notice to purchase licenses for mobile artificial intelligence-powered iris recognition technology to aid in deportations and removals.

The mobile software from BI2 Technologies can identify individuals from 10 to 15 inches away using a smartphone app, according to the the Massachusetts-based company. It then connects with a second product that includes a database.

ICE posted a Wednesday announcement for a sole source purchase order to BI2 Technologies for licenses to both BI2's Inmate Recognition & Identification System and the Mobile Offender Recognition & Identification System for "enforcement and removal operations."

Steve Beaty, a computer science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, explained iris biometric capabilities.

"In general, it's quite accurate," Beaty said. "The iris is the part of your eye that everybody sees — the color has stripes in it and they are unique to an individual."

Beaty said recent technological advances have made iris scanning more accessible and affordable.

"The innovation is now that it's much less expensive that it can be done on less expensive devices such as phones," Beaty said. "In the past it was kind of a big standalone machine that these sorts of things could be used on."

The system compares iris scans to existing databases of photos. Beaty says that can come from a criminal database or even from photos scraped from social media profiles.

"Facial recognition companies have scraped the internet for photos," Beaty said.

But in Colorado, law enforcement agencies couldn't use the technology the same.

Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Bacon co-sponsored a 2022 Colorado law requiring police agencies to disclose their facial recognition plans and prohibiting its use as the sole basis for arrests or investigations.

"The way that we saw facial recognition working was with one to identify and match, versus profiling," Bacon said. "That's two different things."

She expressed concerns about ICE's intended use.

"The notion that ICE is going to use it to do some of those things actually scares me a little bit because that's what we were, in fact, trying to get ahead of," Bacon said.

Bacon outlined specific worries about potential civil rights violations.

"We had a lot of conversations about how law enforcement cannot use it to profile, how law enforcement cannot use it to circumvent due process, how law enforcement cannot use it to circumvent First Amendment rights," she said.

She emphasized the need for safeguards given the high stakes involved.

"When you get it wrong, people's due process are violated," Bacon said. "We're talking about jail time, we're talking about how much one earns. We're talking about if someone can rent an apartment, and so we want to be sure that we can protect our communities from bad decisions."

She questioned underlying assumptions and bias built into artificial intelligence systems too.

"How does one determine what an illegal immigrant looks like or is?" Bacon said. "In America we believe in innocence before proven guilty and so the tools that we have need to also act upon those values as well," she said.

Federal regulation of facial recognition technology differs significantly from state oversight though.

"That's why the states are worried about it," Beaty said.

Beaty noted that this particular software has been used by sheriff's departments elsewhere in the country, primarily as a way to help run jails.

But he raised questions about data handling and privacy protections.

"Let's say my iris is taken and I haven't committed a felony, which I have not," he said. "Where does the data go?Does it stay on the phone? And how long will it be on the phone?"

He highlighted a key concern with biometric data collection.

"Another concern about all biometrics is it's something we cannot change," Beaty said. "Our fingerprints, our faces in general, certainly irises, retinas, we can't change. If it is misreported, then we have a huge problem," he said.

Slashdot Top Deals

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

Working...