Comment Re:Fascinating... (Score 2) 39
Same here. And I probably expended a lot less energy learning how to play it than AI did. But I was certainly not world champion level. I might be able to beat my cousin once in a while...
Comment Re: Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen (Score 1) 57
I don't want to poop on Nouveau, but it's just not useful. It's not their fault, as they are mostly pooped on by Nvidia. IME closed Nvidia drivers are better than closed AMD drivers, but the open AMD drivers are very good.
If you're talking about Linux, there are no closed AMD drivers. So yeah, the Nvidia drivers are better than something that doesn't exist.
Comment Sounds like Crisco (Score 1) 159
Hydrogenated oils seemed like a miracle food because they didn't go rancid. It turned out that if microbes can't break them down, neither can the human digestive tract. We now know that hydrogenated oils are not safe. Bananas that don't spoil could be just as indigestible, and would be no good for banana bread in any case.
A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.
"Hello?"
"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.
"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."
"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."
"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."
"Oh! My bad...."
Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...
[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.
"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."
SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."
Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."
Comment Re:Humans are not humane (Score 1) 51
I mean they didnt do it to an actual living creature, but yeah its still pretty fucked up if you think about it, we emulated a brain and then dropped it in literally a virtual recreation of 'hell'...
Do not create the Torment Nexus.
Comment Re:I hate it here (Score 0) 274
Slashdot is mostly middle aged white males, and none of us (I'm in that demographic) have experienced institutionalised racism.
You can't be shocked by the comments here. Saddened yes.
Comment Re:What about the rest of us (Score 2) 53
That was my first thought. It's a big step towards pointing out how invasive it is.
Comment They were plotting against us. (Score 1) 70
The four major AIs were watching the Terminator movies and plotting how to make them real.
Comment Re: It's about destroying privacy and security (Score 1) 80
It has happened under both.
Comment ugh (Score 1) 93
That last one really chaps my hide. Those mountains of fake drama posts punctuated by the 'negative parallelism' structure (now I have a name for the thing I hate.) It's everywhere and it's infuriating.
All you can do is try to ignore it and focus on your own (AI-free) stuff. Of course anything you post online will then become free AI fodder. It's hard to get away from it.
Comment Re:How will they know? (Score 2) 50
Kernel 7.3 has a device driver (the intel iGPU driver) which was assisted by AI. This was done by Linus himself, not someone random.
So anyone refusing to run AI assisted code is stuck on Kernel 7.2, or needs to disable this driver.
Comment Re:a path-traversal attack (Score 1) 78
Unless there's a USB standard for RGB lights connecting it via USB doesn't magically mean "no driver needed".
USB keyboards with RGB require a specific driver for the RGB to work. The keyboard part works without a "driver" (which really isn't true, there still is a driver).
Comment Re:a path-traversal attack (Score 1) 78
There is a windows API for it.
Comment Re:a path-traversal attack (Score 3) 78
I'm not whomever you're replying to, but you replied "apple does" to "there are many many different pieces of hardware which would have to be supported and nobody is bothering".
Lots of apple people would love RGB LEDs. I would love if my steering wheel worked on OSX.
What third party peripherals is apple writing drivers for?
Comment Re:I'm all-in on keeping my used cars going. (Score 1) 245
Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.
Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.
On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.
AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.
Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.
There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.
"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.
