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Comment Re:Meaningless statements? (Score 1) 215

He's not lying, he's simply stating that you can give automation super human senses, and it would just be a complete idiot that would be so against those senses even in principle that hehwould remove common radar sensors from his car, just to prove a point.

He's not talking about worst human case or maybe even typical human. He's saying that confining the solution to cameras makes it only as safe as the safest human, which is fair.

Radar is pretty cheap for cars. LIDAR has similarly gotten pretty cheap. Being anti-LIDAR had at least some justification when LIDAR could only be had for thousands of dollars and saying we can't afford it. Being anti-RADAR was stupid from the moment that sentiment was expressed.

Comment Car companies are run by morons... (Score 1) 248

This is a stupid waste of time that could not have *possibly* earned them that much, a single ad in a very narrow context to a fairly small demographic. They risk their reputation on what has to be a relative pittance. Same on when they toyed with 'heated seats as a service'. A demographic that was probably happy to pay, but the annoyance was enough..

Similarly, GM has decided to move toward no support for phone interoperability. They are de-featuring cars that might be over $90,000 in the hopes that *maybe* people will accede to $10/month for the features their phone gives them already. Risking over $10k profit on a unit to have a somewhat higher chance at an additional $10/month.

Comment Re:Optane (Score 1) 19

Even if open, it just wasn't going to happen.

Problem was that it was awkwardly slower than DRAM and more expensive than NAND. Was it cheaper per GB than DRAM? Sure. Was it faster than NAND? Sure. Problem is there wasn't really space in the market for a tier between NAND and DRAM. Embarrassingly obvious as Intel ran around doing things like trying to force a whole different paradigm for application developers to do things awkwardly special to try to take advantage of this tier.

Now we have a scenario where one would think Optane could shine, an industry obsessed with feeding AI models as fast as possible. Except the answer is simply "more NAND in parallel" rather than fundamentally distinct technology.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 148

People didn't like phone trees, and phone trees have endured. AI might finally kill the phone tree.

The decrease in Indian call centers were mostly due to broadening offshoring destinations and increased emphasis on skill at sounding American. Some places did proudly declare their domestic call center status, but lots more anonymous but credible sounding call centers exist.

Here, the accent is whatever they want, the cost is closer to an automated phone tree than a human.... I think this one is persistent, though I will penalize companies that fob me off to LLM even if I have to pay a little more for the ones with actual human assistance. Of course, I almost never contact a company so I may be none the wiser. The only times I contact a company are almost always because I need their authority to make something happens rather than 'help', and the companies are not having the LLMs do anything but try to spew crap out of the knowledge base, and when nothing is there make up something instead, like the ability in the online self-help to do things that aren't allowed to the client.

Comment Re:Now you'll never get a straight answer (Score 4, Interesting) 148

To an extent, but recently had an exchange with one of these AI chatbots, and the difference is that the chatbot will confidently declare things that are actively incorrect. They will tell you to do things that simply don't exist. E.g. to transfer the case, go online and perform a very verbose set up steps starting with a button that doesn't exist). Note that we had asked to transfer because it misrouted us, and a human would have done it, but the chatbot had some weird imagined procedure for this.

But yes, human support has been pretty bad too, often deliberately prevented from being able to correct an issue. But at least they don't go off on weird tangents made up entirely from nothing.

Comment not really (Score 1) 84

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Comment Re:The high cost of training police (Score 1) 100

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

Comment No ??!? (Score 1) 100

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

Comment Re:WTF did they do? (Score 3) 44

No one can hear the failure of their consumer platform business over the massive flow of money for their cloud and office businesses.

If they shrugged and canned the entire Xbox and Windows things entirely, that's less than 9% of their revenue, and likely an even tinier portion of their profit. They would probably also lose all their consumer Microsoft 365 except people who never check and cancel subscription services, but that's probably similarly tiny in the scheme of the business.

You basically have a story of robust cloud revenue and also as I understand some 'rotation' in the market as investors decide that the AI darlings are probably going to be already as high as they can get for a while, and it's time to cash in and switch to other companies that either seem plausible for share price growth or at *least* actually profitable today with dividends and/or stock buybacks. So the viable quarter came at just the right time to catch investors looking to cash out of their big AI investments for the short term.

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