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Comment Re:Mythbusters (Score 1) 74

It's more nuanced than that. There may be some particular characteristic of infrasound that cause the issue.You would need to look at the infrasound in places that have reports of the phenomenon and try to replicate that first, then try to find commonalities in the sound characteristics and come up with a wholly artificial sound that replicates the phenomenon.

The Mythbusters showed that whatever particular Infrasound they used in the test did nothing statistically significant is their small sample.

Consider, I propose that sound can make people afraid. So I get a group of 10 people and one at a time I put them in a room for 5 minutes. 2.5 minutes in, I play the sound of a kitten mewing at normal volume. Nobody shows signs of fear or panic. Myth busted? Might the results have been different with a bicycle horn? Bear growling? Gunshot?

Comment Re:Sort of (Score 1) 26

The crazy thing about that exemption is that critical infrastructure has the highest need to be independantly repairable. You need it back up and running yesterday, there's no time to play salesman games where they try to get you to buy a forklift upgrade instead of repair.

The lobbying is IBM and Cisco declaring openly that they intend to profit from holding critical infrastructure hostage.

Comment Re:Kills start ups and adds to waste (Score 1) 26

Only badly written right to repair. A good right to repair law should block you from contracting a special variant only sold to you, or require you to stockpile spares, but shouldn't require you to stockpile a commodity part. Of course, small businesses are unlikely to be ordering custom chips with pins swapped around compared to the commodity part like Apple does. More likely a small business' design will not feature anything not available from DigiKey or Mouser.

If you decide you no longer wish to support a device at all, publish schematics, gerbers, and CAD and you've discharged your obligation.

Comment Re:Chatbot Lies (Score 1) 103

The Engineer had agency. The AI (or google search, or a stack of text books) does not.

Of course, if the mad bomber instead posed as a student and found some non-evil reason for wanting the exits to collapse first (even a thin one like directing the dust upwards), the engineer is less culpable or not culpable at all.

But we need to be very careful about imagining an AI has agency. There are many legal and philosophical implications behind that.

Comment Re:He's Not Wrong. (Score 1) 240

Sounds like it's time for U.S. auto makers to figure out how Chines manufacturers are making their cars so inexpensive.

And no, it's NOT all from cheap labor. It's also from efficiency, making a fair profit rather than hand over fist, less marble and mahogany in the executive suite, and paying a reasonable amount to upper management. Also less jet setting for execs.

Do we REALLY have to repeat the '70s and '80s when the Japanese manufacturers spanked the big three?

What happened to "free trade" and "deregulate all the things!"

Comment Inevitable (Score 1) 46

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

Comment Wow, old memory (Score 1) 137

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

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