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Comment With what economy? (Score 1) 140

This is just more bluster from russia; simply another desperate attempt to get the rest of the world to pretend russia is a power to be reckoned with. Their economy is collapsing due to their war against Ukraine. Their only spaceport is damaged and unusable. They're selling themselves off to China and becoming a resource colony. They're selling their oil at a loss. russia has become a joke under Putin's rule.

Comment $100 more for a TV if you're in the parking lot... (Score 4, Informative) 56

For example, the Target app charged people $100 more for a t.v. when a person was in a Target parking lot versus when in another location because it appeared to determine people would pay higher prices the closer they were to the store.

https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy/new-report-details-how-companies-use-surveillance-to-charge-different-prices-for-the-same-item/

Comment Kinda pointless due to cell damage (Score 2) 87

What's the point of freezing a body? The water in the cells freezes, expands, and ruptures the cell membrane. The body is effectively mush at that point. Does anyone really expect medical tech to get to the point that it can repair that kind of cell damage in every cell in the body?

Comment LLMs return random results by design (Score 1) 74

LLMs are randomized algorithms. They return a random value from its weighted set of dialogue options. As such, I'm not sure I would put LLMs in the same category as AGIs.The article below is interesting about how non-determinism works in such algorithms and why such randomness is actually useful.
https://towardsdatascience.com/llms-are-randomized-algorithms/

Of course this means, at best, I will never trust LLMs to be anything more than a convenient but lazy data miner, never mind that I'll still need to double check its answers/sources.

Comment That's the rule for today. Tomorrow, however... (Score 1) 82

This is the problem with a single idiot making up the rules on the fly. You can't trust the rules won't change based on the last person he talked to, the last bribe he received, the latest opinion polls, or whether his drug regime was changed.

Another reason for having actual laws passed by Congress* is that Congress is slow to change them and doesn't like to do so willy-nilly.

* Not to imply that the GOP Congress is actually capable of passing laws or pushing back on the Executive or standing up for America in general.

Comment So the entirety of human knowledge wasn't enough? (Score 3, Interesting) 81

So, training LLMs on the sum of human knowledge wasn't enough to make a human equivalent AI? The human brain runs on ~20 watts of power; OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank are building five data centers that will use ~10-gigawatts of power, which is ~500 million of those 20 watt human brains. Guess it's back to the drawing board on how to create a human level AI?

Comment What about vibe testing...? (Score 1) 36

The "common people" are going to learn about the importance of testing the hard way...

Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with .xlsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It’s still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.

Comment High School Kids bypass Yondr with ease (Score 5, Interesting) 148

My kid's high school just implemented Yondr (after successful trials at other local schools.) It's a joke; collecting phones at the beginning of class in a cardbox box is more effective.

Kids have bought the unlocker online. Kids have figured out how to "close" the bag without it actually locking. Initially the bags were unassigned (you just picked up one at the entrance to the school) but kids would cut open the bags and/or never return them. So the school had to assign everyone a bag in order to charge for damage or loss. Even then kids cut the stitches and use tape to make the bag appear sealed. Burner/decoy phones are common. And so on.

Not having phones between classes means kids cannot coordinate clubs, e.g. notify of time updates, if someone can't make it, communicate issues, can only communicate after school gets out, etc.

Another fun problem is that a lot of kids use their phones to pay for things at the school's cafe. Because the phones are locked up when they enter school, the cafe has seen a drop off in morning customers.

Overall my high schooler says the "collect phones in a box at the start of class" is far cheaper, more convenient, faster, and more effective than Yondr.

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