Comment Re:"On the bright side" (Score 0) 48

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @11:22PM (#66292166) Attached to: Anthropic Criticized For Adding Watermarks to Text that Claude Generates - or Processes

You understand
A) no actual rare or precious books have been proved to have been destroyed, right?
B) millions of books are destroyed every single day. Millions. And that processing has nothing to do with ai. It has been true for decades.

Your rage about this is either misinformed, or dishonest.
Either way, maybe think about that.

Comment perhaps we could observe (Score 0) 104

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @11:19PM (#66292160) Attached to: China's Moon-landing Plans And Why the US Is So Worried

Is it irony, complaining about China outstripping US space tech on a US "tech focused site" where the single technically capable company reasonably able to outmatch the Chinese is deeply and routinely despised here because it's founder/owner (now) associates with the "wrong" political side?

I wonder if there's a parable here about priorities?

Comment Re:The next weapon (Score 2) 46

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @07:57AM (#66291180) Attached to: X Open Sources Its Ranking and Filtering Algorithms

I suspect most of the amplification of right wing noise has something to do with the left wingishness of the complainers.

My stance comes from seeing it from the other side. I'm comfortably right of center and my previous experience with Twitter (x is a stupid name) is that it absolutely was a left wing echo chamber. It indeed was rather calmer because of the aggressive pruning of any conservative voices.*

I believe the algo serves you aggressively oppositional views to spur contrary posting and raise engagement. It's a rather simplistic but effective tactic. If you're leftish, you get served the worst of the right, along with a strong current of fringe left views to affirm you are "reasonably left, not like those crazies". If you're conservative you get the worst of the left, and a current of toxic right wing enough to affirm that you're not that far right.

My "for you" feed is exclusively militant socialists, feminists, pro trans activists, leftist local politicians (not hard to find as I'm in MN) all just ceaselessly toxic people.
My "following" is like wise a cess pool of right wing commenters, the worst of the worst shouting all sorts of racist, anti women nonsense, interspersed with occasionally interesting comments about ttrpg games and science subjects that are actually interesting.

I joke that "for you" is comments entirely from people I completely disagree with and despise. "Following" is only *mostly* people I disagree with and despise.

(I actually "follow" only maybe a dozen people in science, tech, ttrpg gaming, and work-related subjects. No politics, no dogmatics of either side. Certainly no politicians.)

As a result, I spend almost no time on Twitter

*(Nota bene to this day I still have a banned account from just before musk's takeover for a post in a David Axelrod thread, observing that transsexual strippers & burlesque dancers seemed to militantly insist on the right to dance in front of children to "express themselves" but I'd failed to see any comparable insistence to dancing in front of the elderly.)

Comment Re:As expected (Score 1) 68

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @07:30AM (#66291168) Attached to: AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies

About the most succinct, blather free summary I've seen.

Unfortunately, and definitely not to credit the legions of ai snake-oil sales going on, Jevons paradox probably means that rather than ai ushering in some sort of low-work utopia, we'll more likely indeed just figure out how to use it properly and end up back at 40 hour work weeks with (likely) an explosion of increased productivity.
I don't know how we get there personally but that's the sort of blindness we have before paradigms genuinely change, like the coming of the Internet.

Comment Re:shameful clickbait (Score 1) 132

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @07:21AM (#66291164) Attached to: Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead

New here? Slashdot has been suffused with politics for two decades, as tech stories are largely replaced with a feed that's more and more like the usual social media cesspool of left and right wing dogmatics shutting at each other.

Comment Re:What The Absolute Fuck Is With These Comments? (Score 1) 132

by argStyopa on Sunday August 16, 2026 @07:18AM (#66291158) Attached to: Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead

When a candidate is granted a professorship based on race, and then militantly (irrationally) defended again largely based on race, how is nobody supposed to bring that up?

Comment the solution to "the mental health crisis" (Score 4, Insightful) 255

by argStyopa on Thursday August 13, 2026 @11:05AM (#66287207) Attached to: University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to 'Curb Mental Health Crisis'

...is not found in avoiding the problem.

You are here to educate these kids. This is your role.
Granted, these issues should have been addressed long before COLLEGE but the idea of entering supposed 'adulthood' without the mental armor to deal with things like "being rated for your performance" is...asinine.

STOP WRAPPING PEOPLE IN BUBBLE WRAP. You are not doing them favors, you are just kicking their mental health issues down the road (while exacerbating them, most likely) for someone else to deal with.

Comment Re:Just... wow (Score 1) 120

by argStyopa on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:19PM (#66285604) Attached to: US Hires Over 2,000 Video Gamers As Air Traffic Controllers

Interesting take.

If I understand your core point is that this group of (largely young men) is worthless, and suitable in your view for what, street sweeping? Picking cotton? What employment would you deem low enough for people who (shudder!) enjoy computer games?

I'm genuinely curious why you despise them so. Would it be better that these jobs remain unfilled by anyone? I expect that would lead to more deaths, is it worth that so these human dregs can be adequately punished for living at home or working low-wage jobs if that's all that was available?

Video game players would seem at least superficially to be a great alignment for the long hours, ocd-like-focus on a video monitor, attention to detail, and ability to evaluate/react to complex situations skills needed.

Comment Nano banana (Score 3, Interesting) 77

by argStyopa on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:21PM (#66284492) Attached to: Google Gemini Hits 1 Billion Users In Record Time

...is by far the best engine I've found for generating images, editing images, etc for use as informative or scene-setting images during GM'ing ttrpg sessions. So much better than any other free options. Better at understanding my descriptions anyway, and better at amendments "ok move that person to the left edge of the screen but have them facing the camera, but wearing the same uniform as the other character in the scene" sort of direction.

I understand Grok's image 2.0 is available free for a bit, so I guess we'll see. But 'available for free' means 'will be for pay eventually' so I'll probably keep using banana.

Comment Re:this is bad but what's the alternative (Score 1) 90

by argStyopa on Sunday August 09, 2026 @11:03PM (#66281244) Attached to: New Orleans Will Use AI To Answer 911 Calls Instead of a Human

So we should tax YOU more, then? You know that you can voluntarily pay more in taxes, right?

Comment this is bad but what's the alternative (Score 1) 90

by argStyopa on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:27AM (#66280172) Attached to: New Orleans Will Use AI To Answer 911 Calls Instead of a Human

Ok the comments are full of all the predictable responses: this will kill people, this will only be used on answering calls from poor districts, rich people get good stuff, etc.

Great, now that you've gotten your political wiggles out WHAT'S YOUR SOLUTION?
Is it actually better that someone waits on HOLD with a 911 call so they can speak exclusively with a human?

Because "just hire more people" doesn't work.
Setting aside the cost, there's a 20-50% vacancy rate in 911 dispatch positions nationwide, 30% first year turnover due to burnout, with a laborious onhire process with extensive background checks and reviews for every staff member.

"Just pay more and more people will apply" answer doesn't scale infinitely. Cities don't have infinite money and one you've paid teachers more and garbage men more and and health care workers more and janitors more ...eventually you run out of money.

So no, I don't disagree that an ai front end isn't ideal but when less than half (some data shows 25%) the calls are true, time sensitive emergencies maybe this will help the real calls get a real human more promptly.

Comment dear editors (Score 1) 33

by argStyopa on Sunday August 09, 2026 @08:10AM (#66280148) Attached to: America's First Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Battery Plant Gets Its First Big Test

Interesting, but perhaps 900+ word story could better be served behind the link, instead of being copied word for word as the "summary"?

Comment Re:(shrug) (Score 1) 55

by argStyopa on Friday August 07, 2026 @10:20AM (#66277438) Attached to: Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

I've dug into the story, and I don't see any substantive claim that RARE books are in fact being destroyed, other than "someone said this was happening"? Do you know of any?
My questions would be:
1) first, the oldest volumes are going to complicate reading the text by several orders of magnitude; from the shit-quality of the printing to the actually-different use of & inconsistent characters, as well as 'creative' spelling all needlessly increase the challenge for AI to get anything useful from it. How does it help if Claude's AI sees that there are (in the old works) 14 different spellings of "plow"?
2) why are LLMs eating books in the first place? My understanding is that it's mainly about learning broader human concepts, logic, and syntax than they can mine from 140 character posts or reddit. Do we think they're ACTUALLY going to be getting that from Pepys diary from 1660? It certainly won't have historical knowledge that can't be more easily retrieved from elsewhere and the syntax is borderline useless.
2) moreover, what could the "age" and "rarity" have to do with anything besides raising the costs? I have a 1st edition of Thoresby's Letters. It is ideally worth nearly $200. (Mine's nearly falling apart, so it isn't.) Or, Anthropic's AI can suck up the free online text of it in 0.001 sec clearly, cleanly, and for free.

So no, to me this sounds like someone floating a trial balloon of "what's another reason we can get people to hate AI and Datacenters"*, which then leads me to wonder why the effort?

*I think there are plenty of tangible, obvious, and simple reasons to be upset about the current surge of AI and datacenters, without inventing rather-obvious bullshit complaints from thin air.

My $0.02.

Comment Re:I'd be surprised if its only 2 (Score 1) 104

by argStyopa on Friday August 07, 2026 @10:07AM (#66277426) Attached to: Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

Agreed; the spans of time are so vast as to be incomprehensible. Looked at it that way, it would be hard to believe that if there ARE other pathways to "life", that pretty nearly all of them hadn't been explored, and even if failed, explored repeatedly later.

4.6 Billion Years Ago: Earth forms from cosmic dust and rock.
3.8 to 3.7 Billion Years Ago: First single-celled organisms (prokaryotes) and microbial life appear in the oceans.
2.4 Billion Years Ago: Cyanobacteria develop photosynthesis, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere (Great Oxygenation Event).
2.1 Billion Years Ago: Complex cells with nuclei (eukaryotes) evolve.
1 Billion Years Ago: Multicellular life begins to form in the seas.
540 Million Years Ago: The Cambrian explosion brings a massive surge of diverse marine animals.

So (as far as we understand) it was 1bn years to go from *a ball of magma floating in a vacuum* to a primitive but active ecosystem of organisms self-selecting to opportunistically gather whatever they needed (energy, really) from the existing environment.

And we've been here for FIVE of those spans.

Comment Re:(shrug) (Score 1) 55

by argStyopa on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @12:23PM (#66272320) Attached to: Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

But insofar as I can tell, that original 404 Media story largely amounts to "my friend heard from another friend that they're doing it with RARE books". Â\_(ãf)_/Â

Why would LLMs benefit from scouring RARE old books? What benefit would the rarity serve, when likely the texts are reprinted in umpteen subsequent editions that - to put it bluntly - nobody wants?
Are they buying an original copy of Samuel Pepys diary (first printings $4000) when they can get the umpteenth reprint for 17 cents? So yes, they're "destroying an old book" but rare? Why would they pay for rare?

You know how I know? Because I've been trying to unload a cache of 'rare old books' for a decade and nobody wants them.

1935 Platt & Munk Indian Series 3 pics â" Iâ(TM)ve only ever seen sets of 8, this is 16
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Maximilian I., der Grosse (2 pics) 1876
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Massive Norwegian Bible 1891?, rough shape, 7 pics gorgeous rebinding candidate, probably 14â x 10â x 4â?
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Worldâ(TM)s Great Classics, The Federalist Papers 3 pics, 1901
https://photos.google.com/shar...

Roman London â" 1926? 1 pic (contents on web at https://archive.org/details/in... )

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