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Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 133

You're entirely right, but Fixed vs Variable costs are a well understood distinction that OpenAI's bean counters aren't merely glossing over here.

If your up-front investment is $1M, each unit of output sells for $2000, and costs $1900 in operational expenses - Your profit is $100 per unit. Once you sell 10000 units, you've broken even and every additional sale is $100 in pure profit. Presuming you expect to sell significantly more than 10000 units, the initial cost is literally irrelevant over the long term.

For a more physical-manufacturing analogy, consider a modern chip fab costing double-digit billions of dollars to build, just to sell fancy chunks of melted sand for a few hundred bucks each. Yet TSMC is one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with net margins slightly over 50%.

Comment Re:Make a silent drone I'll be more impressed (Score 1) 54

Not sure what you think is or isn't subject to being disproven here. "Security" isn't some monolithic "do X and call it a day", it's 100% situationally dependent.

If the situation requires radar, we use radar. If the situation requires strong passwords and MFA, we use strong passwords and MFA. And if the situation calls for giant concrete acoustic mirrors - Yes Virginia, that's why the UK coast is dotted with exactly those.

Comment Re: Let them choose (Score 2) 96

For the same reason you can't just drop in at your former childhood home to dig up Sparky's corpse: Not yours anymore. It sucks what happened to Hawaii, but the opportunity for the people to say "yeah, not happening" and send a handful of American stuffed shirts on a long trip in a short canoe expired 130 years ago.

The idea that we're sacrificing basic science in the interest of not offending ghosts is utterly insane. Mauna Kea is uniquely suited to ground-based observatories; if we were talking about any other group, that land would simply be taken by eminent domain and there'd be nothing to discuss. Case in point, did you all know there's an eminent domain case going on right now in North Dakota where ranchers are fighting a pipeline going through their own land... Which in turn was seized from the Sioux? Guess which group isn't even at the table.

Comment Reddit as we knew it died the weekend of July 4th (Score 4, Interesting) 78

Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

Comment Re:Relax and then read them again, completely. (Score 1) 119

You appear to be violently agreeing with me.

Yes, those articles all say we need better managers. Why? Because the current crop largely suck at the actual task of managing, conflating oversight with line-of-sight. And some aren't even interested in managing in the first place, only in maintaining their micro-fiefdom to stroke their egos. What part of that disagrees with my stance?

If you're taking issue with my choice of quantifiers, yes, I'll readily admit good managers can absolutely make most jobs easier. Good managers are rare, and Covid gave us the receipts. None of that has anything to do with whether or not the work itself can be done remotely - If a car's steering wheel is broken, do we punish the tires?

Comment Re:Pretty simple (Score 1) 119

Observing that some people aren't responsible enough to work without someone breathing down their neck is a wildly different claim than saying the work itself couldn't be done remotely.

Any task that doesn't require physically interaction with product or customer can be done from anywhere on the planet with internet access.

OB car analogy: Some people really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a steering wheel but the rest of us drive 10-20k miles per year just fine.

Comment Re:Make a silent drone I'll be more impressed (Score 1) 54

The UK was using "listening ears" to detect incoming attacks before radar existed.

I don't think that's really needed in this case, however, because:
1) We do have radar now and human visual tricks don't really matter to it, and
2) Purely optical detection is still trivial for non-humans, this hits exactly one intended blind-spot tuned just for us.

This is a one-trick pony, albeit that trick is very cool if you happen to be a deaf human without access to a variable frame rate camera (e.g. any cheap modern phone), and the payload isn't subject to being centrifuged into oblivion. Most small mammals will still see it just fine; cameras running at a multiple of its rotation rate will see it as a stable if somewhat blurry image. And a high enough shutter speed (given enough light) would just plain show it as it is.

For spying on protestors in a noisy urban environment - This is perfect. Against any military targets with better tech than longbows and armored cavalry, not so much.

Comment not really (Score 1) 81

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Comment Re:The high cost of training police (Score 1) 99

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

Comment No ??!? (Score 1) 99

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

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