Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:What is American Airlines really thinking (Score 1) 20

I hope that happens too, otherwise I'm going to need an AI agent to screw with their AI agent until it gets me the best prices.

Per Delta, the AI pricing isn't individualized, meaning all customers buying the same class of service at a given time will see the same price, so I don't think that would get you anything, unless maybe your AI agent gets good at predicting when exactly you should buy your ticket, but that seems unlikely because your agent will always be operating with less information than theirs (e.g., yours doesn't know exactly how many seats are already sold).

Comment Re:Agents are dangerous in general (Score 1) 148

I find that it works well to treat current-generation AI agents like bright, incredibly fast but overenthusiastic and incautious junior engineers who do not learn from their mistakes. They can be extremely useful, but you have to be careful to limit the damage they can do if they happen to screw up.

Comment Re:This is why we need public health insurance (Score 1) 107

This is just yet another example of why we (USA) really do need a public, non-profit, health insurance system. Too many people cannot access proper medical treatment for life-threatening conditions, and in their desperation fall victim to quacks and other grifters and con-artists.

I don't think anyone struggling to afford health insurance -- especially now that insurance can't deny pre-existing conditions -- is shelling out $20k for bleach injections. It would be much cheaper to get an individual healthcare policy and get it to pay for proper chemo.

Comment Re: This is why we need public health insurance (Score 4, Informative) 107

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

Comment Re:The climate changes have been obvious (Score 1) 181

When I was a kid in the 80s, our halloween costumes were sized to fit snow suits under them.

A few decades later, we had a green Christmas, and it was so odd that we made a Caribbean theme to go with it.

Nowadays, it's even money if we'll have snow on the ground at Christmas any given year, and it was 30c on Halloween.

Comment Re:Google (Score 2) 7

So do it yourself. Honestly, this kind of kneejerk response is stupid.

Moreover, Chris Mattern's implication is that he thinks Google might somehow backdoor their reproducibly-rebuilt packages. Even if he thinks Google engineers are evil, does he really believe they're stupid? It would be impossible without someone noticing and crying foul.

Google's security efforts provide a lot of value to the world, for no direct financial gain to Google. Things like Project Zero, Certificate Transparency and OSS Rebuild make the computing world better and safer. In this case, I suspect that it's something that Google wanted to do for its own purposes, to make its own systems more secure, and someone pointed out that for negligible additional cost they could make the tools and data public. You may dislike Google's business model (though the people who complain about it never seem to be able to propose any alternative for funding the web), but the fact is that Google is really good at security, and does a lot for the security of global computing.

Comment Re:I never knew the actual number (Score 1) 150

I don't think a crime can be established from the simple fact that they spread fake news... but the consequences from those fake news can be used as "deliberate attempt to cause indirect damage."

I'm not sure you could identify specific, actionable damage even if it were intentional, and I doubt you could prove it's intentional. Odds are that if you dug into it you'd find that they're true believers in the crap they're spouting, and you definitely can't prosecute them for wrongthink.

Comment Re:The devil is in the details (Score 1) 212

pollyanna

It's how basically everything else works. Provide the product desired and you make money -- and people get what they want to buy. The core point, though, is that it's silly to worry about who is going to get rich. Just make sure the market is competitive, then see who can compete the best. This particular market is a bit hamstrung by regulations, but diversifying the supplier sources should actually help to ease the effect of that a bit.

Comment Re:Enron 2.0? No thanks (Score 1) 212

I live in California and used to work in the Texas electricity market (ERCOT). I don't want a bunch of out of state pirates manipulating our market again. Our homegrown pirates are bad enough.

How would out of state "pirates" manipulate the CA market? If the pirates want to charge more for electricity than it costs locally, use the local power. If they're offering it for less (which is likely the case, since everywhere around CA has cheaper power than CA does), then buy it.

This seems like nothing but a win for CA residents. The residents of other states in the area might not fare so well, since their own generation companies will prefer to sell to CA for the higher prices available there.

Slashdot Top Deals

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken

Working...