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Comment What are the limits? (Score 1) 390

I wonder, in a counterfactual universe, how far the American public and political system would tolerate Trump's genuflections before Putin. If he lie down on television and let Putin walk across his body, would Lindsay Graham soon be telling us that this was appropriate behavior, while Tucker Carlson nods on approvingly? Or would they not? What if Putin spit on his face while he had to keep smiling? Smacked down to the ground after which he has to crawl to Putin's shoes? At what point would the population cross some kind of threshold by which everyone agrees Trump's behavior is unacceptable? I hope this remains a theoretical question, but it seems like we are headed toward a breaking point about as fast as we can go.

Comment Die cheating facilitator (Score 5, Informative) 31

Students using Chegg used to be the bane of my life as a CS prof circa 2018-2021. My assignments were immediately posted there and "solved" often with kooky solutions that many students would hand in as if they were the first people to discover the cheating site. It galls me to see Chegg described as a site that "helps with homework." The way forward in CS education is very unclear to me, but Chegg is not something that should be mourned in any way.

Comment EV FUD (Score 3, Interesting) 176

This has the ring of EV FUD. The reasoning is that heavier EVs will make more brake dust and thus be environmentally less sound than fossil fuel cars. Libtards: owned.

But I have an EV and use one pedal driving. The car is slowed when your foot moves away from the accelerator by electromagnetic resistance that recharges the battery. This will bring the car to a complete stop. I literally never touch the brake.

So therefore shouldn't the headline be: EVs Doublegood, stop CO2 and brake dust?

Comment Oh Hawley (Score 1) 226

He does realize that downloading the model means that China gets no visibility into its use, right?

Furthermore exploiting something they are giving away for free does not put a single dollar into the hands of the CCP.

This seems like a very confused idea.

Prohibiting the API and the web app makes total sense though.

Comment Not unlikely (Score 1) 166

We need to differentiate between what is likely to happen and what we want to happen here.

Establishing a US bitcoin reserve is crazy, dumb, irresponsible and corrupt. But it is not unlikely. It is more probable than not. The president elect has already said that he is going to do it. Bitcoin is a plank of the Republican party and they control all branches of government. Key members of the administration and congress will buy bitcoin (many or most already have) and then use their authority to create the reserve. Then they will make multiples of their investment. See the logic? You might find that disgusting and rightly so, but don't call it improbable.

Comment Hard to spot (Score 1) 118

As a CS prof I have graded quite a few essays in the last year, many of them AI influenced. It's true that generic ChatGPT has a recognizable writing style, but judging human from machine can be quite hard. This is because of two reasons.

1) Sophisticated prompts on the part of cheaters
2) Off-brand AI

Just as you can recognize generic ChatGPT verbiage, smart students can as well. They tell the machine to remove the adverbs, bullet points, ornamental language, and to put things more plainly, etc. But I think I've actually had more trouble with issue (2). There was one student in particular who set off my alarms only on his 3rd exam. When I looked at his 1st and 2nd it was obvious that he had cheated on those as well. But the problem was that his AI was an idiot, and so what it said sounded very plausibly student-ish. There were awkward unworkable metaphors and circumlocutions of just the sort that bullsh*tting students use when they don't know an answer, but it was still allowing him a definite edge. Anecdotally I've heard that this might have been the Snapchat AI, but I'll never know for sure.

Incidentally one side effect of AI cheating is that when you have 30 students and you've busted 10 of them for cheating, morale declines and the social atmosphere becomes toxic. I do let students use AI quite a bit, just not on everything. About 1/3 of people try to find a way to use it anyway.

Comment Nothing to see here (Score 1) 213

Presumably the buyer would get the code to the app.

There are probably so many surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation features embedded in the source that it can never be exposed to outsiders.
There would be no way to safely modify the code in the time allowed to remove the unseemly functionality.

This is more likely than the alternative, namely that ByteDance just doesn't care about the $6 Billion that the app would probably sell for.

Comment virtuous circle (Score 2) 86

Hmm let me see.

Google gets exclusive content to reddit data for 60 million per year.
Google directs huge amounts of internet traffic to reddit.
Then... Google gets huge amounts of data in its exclusive data stream.
Meanwhile it impoverishes its competitors by denying them said data.

Funny that Google searches are now directing users to Google.

Comment BV Ohare (Score 3, Interesting) 69

I wonder what exactly "dog fight" means. From what I understand modern fighters fire from beyond visual range. This article seems to suggest that some kind of tooth and nail machine gun battle is taking place. My expertise on modern military aircraft is fairly nil, but I imagine that a real modern "dog fight" is just pushing a button indicating which entity within range you want to destroy.

Comment Read Between the Lines (Score 4, Informative) 67

It is not about data harvesting. It is about control of the information diet of 60% of Americans under 30. The completely opaque algorithm TikTok uses could clearly be exploited to do many things including:

* Sowing distrust of US institutions
* Bending US opinion toward geopolitical outcomes that benefit the interest of China
* Fomenting belief that US elections are rigged

In fact the timing of the US elections in November are almost certainly a factor in the September deadline given in the bill.
Does the EFF really not see this?
For whatever reason the bill does not explicitly say that China is controlling the weltanschauung of US youth. But come on, read between the lines. The government obviously has no issue with the leak of private info on citizens. Or at least is too incompetent to worry about that, as evidenced by many articles here on Slashdot. The crucial issue is control of media messaging.

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