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Comment Good! (Score 2) 32

This is the future of film making. No more $250 million budgets to hire 20 FX houses in 12 countries to make a movie based on tired IP. AI is going to let small budget movies made all over the world compete with the biggest movies from Disney and Warner. This is going to be great in the long run. You know all those sci-fi and fantasy novels that you wished would be a movie but they just never made it past the Hollywood gatekeepers? AI is how those movies will be made.

Comment Good work! (Score 4, Insightful) 45

Congratulations to the DOJ for doing serious damage to one of the most vile criminal enterprises of our time. They hit slavery, fraud, and graft in one fell swoop. At a time when the DOJ is being abused for shameless political vendettas it’s nice to see real good work being done.

Comment Keep in mind... (Score 1) 77

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

Comment It's not just foreign languages (Score 2) 42

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Comment Well, that's one example. (Score 1) 167

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

Comment Re:And TP-Link is being investigated for a ban.... (Score 1, Interesting) 34

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

Comment Remember marchFIRST? (Score 4, Interesting) 46

Those of us who were around for the web 1.0 boom should remember marchFIRST. It was the dotcom enabler with its own VC arm. marchFIRST would get investors to give it money that it invested in startups. Then the startups would use the money to pay marchFIRST for branding services. And web design services. Then backend development. Followed by hosting. Then marchFIRST started over with another bullshit startup. And everybody at marchFIRST was getting bonkers salaries, free lunches, and playing pool at the office with the money skimmed off at each step of the chain. AI companies are doing an even more obvious scam with much more money. The American AI companies, hardware providers, data center companies, etc. are all just bouncing money and phony spending commitments around so they can keep getting paid until the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

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