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Comment Re:This will not end well (Score 1) 52

A 27 year old college dropout who decided that crypto was too boring so he started a gambling website and became a billionaire? .

Gambling has been lucrative since a bunch of cavemen got together and started rolling rocks in the back of the cave for the best cut of Wooly Mammoth. That's never going to change. The dropout will more than likely die a rich man.

Comment Re:Never been a better time to run linux (Score 1) 99

I was preferred to sacrifice PC gaming alltogether in the process. Turns out Steam runs Windows games in my library using Proton quite nicely

I've been skeptical about the "Windows games on Linux" thing, but I'm hearing nothing but good things about Proton. If it is indeed as good as advertised, it could truly a way for young men to finally get out of the Windows world.

I would have moved my parents to Google's Chrome OS Flex, but while it's super fast and does a few things extremely well, its lack of support for things like DVD playback is a killer in the "Upgrade for Grandma" department.

Comment Re:Never been a better time to run linux (Score 1) 99

It may never be a better time, but this is a huge reason why there will never be a "year of the Linux desktop". When Microsoft cuts support, most people will just knuckle under and buy new machines, even if they're happy with what they've been using. They bitch. They threaten. They shake their fist and tell Microsoft they'll go to something else. But most just give in and write the check.

Comment Re:just like PCs did? (Score 4, Insightful) 75

Indeed. Most readers won't be ancient enough to remember stenographer pools, mechanical typewriters, and telegrams. They'll have seen video but that cannot convey lived experience. They won't have experienced the transition between manual machine tools and vastly mor capable CNC machining, but we all live in the outcomes.

The critical difference was that those old machines, and the software that replaced them, were created to make human workers more productive. To grow company profits through increased worker output. AI is designed to increase profits by flat out replacing those workers, not making them more productive. AI is intended to kill two birds with one algorithm: create software that does human work better and faster than any human could, and then eliminate the costs of human employment.... salaries, insurance and other benefits, training, et al. That's the crucial difference, the intent to replace people, period.

Comment Re:As a European I am quite surprised ... (Score 1, Offtopic) 86

"As a European"...

You have zero room to talk. France has just collapsed. Again. France, Spain, Italy, and Greece all have debt exceeding 100% of their GDP. And you can't even defend your own shores from an army of military age North African men that are coming in waves specifically to sponge off of your welfare systems. Europe is a pressure cooker right now, and you're doing nothing to free any pressure.

Comment Re:Engineering departments (Score 3, Interesting) 86

The Physics departments have been made obsolete by the Engineering departments. I already noticed the trend in the 1980s.

Engineers have always made more money than the pure-science grads, and this accelerated in the 60's. Even the mathematicians jumped over, largely because if you have a talent for math, its fairly easy for you to slide into engineering, with is mostly math anyway. Just math with a real-world purpose. It's funny because, at the end of WWII, there was a big debate about where US science research funding should go. One camp wanted practical research focus with real-world goals... "Build me a generator with twice the output", etc. Lyndon Johnson famously summed up this approach with the question "What will it do for Grandma?". The other side argued for instead funding pure science research based on curiosity, and argued that practical advances would trickle down from those results. The pure science camp won for a short while, but what killed it was the Space Race. The US needed specific machines with specific capabilities on a specific deadline. "Pure Science for the principal of it" fell by the wayside to "We need that rocket to have a 60% thrust efficiency increase, next year". And it's been that way ever since. In the marketplace, and especially in the marketplace of ideas, practical engineering won. And what research we still did tended to be dominated by hyper-expensive physics projects that had practically no commercial applications at all. I think the death of the Super-Conducting Supercollider in Texas was the death knell of big pure science projects in the US. As a result, engineers are actually doing a good bit of our basic research now. It's just folded into their commercial projects.

Engineering spacecraft modules will get you a high income with steady, reliable pay. Choosing to look for particles that may never be found will not.

Comment Re:Hype? (Score 4, Insightful) 75

I do believe that AI will lead to significant dislocation of workers.

But the committee's asking AI to assess AI is GIGO. AI is trained to foster AI, generate additional interaction, etc. Not exactly a dispassionate assessment.

I believe AI is in the overhype part of the tech cycle, and we will see some moderating of expectations as many of these AI companies are shattered by not being able to deliver on their over-promises

"AI" (which isn't really AI, but)... is indeed being overhyped. But it's also still going to kill millions of jobs that won't be replaced by new jobs. Both things can be true at the same time. And while AI will indeed create some new jobs "caring and feeding" for AI, it'll kill off far more in other fields that will never be made up, unlike, say, when the Model T largely replaced the horse and buggy. A major reason for what we're calling AI is to replace human jobs in order for companies to save money on human expenses. It's why these companies backed AI in the first place. Shareholder Value Uber Alles.

Comment Re:Actors and Hollywood are dead men walking (Score 1) 99

Not to mention the porn industry.

It's not just the actors, it's the whole entertainment industry that's doomed.

I've seen AI generated shorts on YouTube with Marvel and DC characters that are far more visually appealing than anything I've seen in a Marvel or DC movie. This is going to be a losing effort by Hollywood in the long run.

Comment Re:Did they remember what a cunt he was? (Score 1) 103

Deadbeat dad, horrible boss, ripped off his "friends", and then in a final act of bastardry, bought a house in a state with a shorter waiting list for transplants after basically guaranteeing he was going to die soon by delaying treating his cancer. Someone else would've got a lot more out of that transplanted organ. Rot in hell, Steve.

You forgot his fondness for handicapped spaces. In the early 80's, an anonymous employee left a note on his windshield in an attempt to shame him for the practice. He responded with a Captain Queeg-like obsessive search for the employee. Thankfully, he never found the writer.

Comment Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score 1) 47

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Comment Re:Err, NYT is right. (Score 1) 71

There's *plenty* of remote work out there.

If you live in Northern California, perhaps. But pretty much everywhere else, people are being told to get back to the office of find another job. In my area, the job notices are explicit about remote work not being available, and mandating an office presence.

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