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Comment Re:This didn't have to happen twice (Score 2) 158

It only applies to black men.

Per the statistics, police shoot and kill quite a few white men as well. Nobody gets worked up about those dudes.

OTOH, when you dig into the individual incidents, pretty much all of those dead white men were actively attacking the police, usually with a weapon (), so it's difficult to get to worked up about those deaths.

Comment It's really about the software and CPU, right? (Score 1) 215

It seems like the fight goes back and forth about "just cameras" vs "cameras + sensors", when all I can make of it is that the REAL answer lies in how good the hardware and software is processing the incoming data?

Tesla, for example, scrapped the cameras + lidar idea, largely out of frustration that both inputs often led to the computer interpreting the scene in conflicting ways. "Camera visual seems to indicate that's just a light pole on the side of the road but lidar image shows it may be a person starting to walk into the road." (Maybe that's a poor specific example, but I heard talks about it saying things along these lines were the struggle.)

If Waymo is arguing humans can only do so much with our eyes, so "superhuman levels of driving" require more? Again, it seems to me like more CPU power and better software is that "more"? Computers can do math FAR quicker than my brain can... and that's been true for decades. Superhuman levels of driving safely seem like they could happen with systems just using cameras OR systems collecting data from multiple sources?

Comment re: re-using a former data center (Score 1) 53

You're right, but the problem is going to be location in many cases. Would a former data center make a great public library? Technically, it might. But when it was built out in the middle of some farm land, where they originally got a good deal on the land by buying some farmers out who were willing to sell? Now, it might not make so much sense.

Or as an example closer to home for me? Our own city is fielding requests to construct data centers right now. There are rumors about our now closed-down steel plant being a potential site. Great for the guy who owns the property and wants to unload it. But a data center there would mean tearing out and removing an existing environment that was good for manufacturing. If you said ok -- no more steel made here but we could do cement, or process glass? That would be an equivalent replacement that would bring back the lost jobs. A data center really won't ... and if it closes? I'm not sure people would want it as office space in that part of town.

Comment There Is No Larger Can (Score 4, Interesting) 48

Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics:
Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can.

So. Who wants to bet that no one will point out what abysmal sysadmins they are, letting internal servers run amok all over the open Internet, only finding out days afterward after someone had to tell them.

And who wants to further bet that the AI grifters will respond that the only way to prevent this from happening again is to give them trillions more dollars so they can build bigger, "hardened" datacenters?

Is there no level of rank incompetence they won't excuse?

Comment The "data center" hot topic... (Score 5, Informative) 53

Reality is? The places that allow new data centers where they interfere with the existing population are just going to wind up with regrets.

They remind me a bit of the battles over putting in new landfills/dumps. Everyone knows we need them, but it's always "not in my back yard"!

The thing is? The need for more data centers is questionable. If all this AI growth turns the corner and companies decide much of it was just overblown hype? Then those data centers will quickly wind back down again.

Even in "best case" scenarios, they don't employ many people once they're constructed, and they use large amounts of resources -- which tend to be sold at discounted rates as part of the deals struck when they move into an area. Everyone else gets stuck covering any losses by way of rate increases.

A landfill may smell bad, but it's not using up the lion's share of available electric power in my town or using a big portion of available clean water.

Comment Prediction markets add no value.... (Score 2) 81

I don't understand how the entire concept isn't just outlawed and thrown out? The core reason we have a stock market is to allow business growth/prosperity. Company owners trade off their original ownership of a successful business for a chance to get investor income flowing in to make the business more successful than they could make it on their own.

Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. There's no "investing" in a business happening at all with this.

Comment Re:Why would you? (Score 1) 93

To be fair, cellular data is really poor in quite a few places in America, when using ANY of the "second tier" reseller carriers. (Won't speak for other countries.)

EG. We have Spectrum Mobile right now (mostly due to a bundle deal with our broadband at home), and while voice calls work pretty much as expected, anywhere I go? The data is terrible! They say they're using Verizon's towers but it's obvious Verizon is throttling the heck out of them and/or only allowing them on SOME of the towers in a given area.

When I had T-Mobile for a few years previously? It had bad holes in coverage areas, but it worked quite well where it was built out (usually your bigger cities).

Comment To discount status they march... hurrah ... (Score 1) 93

I don't care how much "cost savings" they claim it brings to eliminate retail stores. As one of only a few "major carriers", it's pathetic to offer only online interaction with customers. And honestly? I'm not even sure I would have a big issue with the FCC pulling some of the dedicated frequency spectrum they were allowed to purchase. I'm pretty sure there was an assumption made that as one of the "big 3" cellular providers in the USA, T-Mobile would ensure any potential customer had the ability to buy a phone with them and get the help needed to use it. I imagine there are quite a few elderly or handicapped people around who don't find it very functional to do all of that via an app.

Comment Don't most hotels outsource their wifi? (Score 2) 31

I don't do a lot of traveling, but I remember when I last worked at a job that involved some travel? The ongoing "wisdom" was a realization that the cheaper hotels had the most usable/reliable wifi. The expensive ones tended to use Internet as a service to upsell, with annoying portals trying to bill you a daily rate and generally interfering with your applications. (They might, for example, lock down just about all ports except 80 and 443, meaning you couldn't get software updates to complete or connect a VPN, or ....)

The basic chains, by contrast, all seemed to used "canned" wifi setups sold to them by third party vendors, and as long as you got a decent signal in your room, you were good.

In any case, I never trusted a hotel wifi to be super-secure. Heck, I remember on a Vegas trip one time, they had it set up so wifi was capped at a slow rate unless you paid a premium. I was curious about a wired jack I found behind the bed and plugged into it. Turns out, it gave me a full gigabit network connection and bypassed their sign-in portal and everything. They seemed to just not realize or expect guests would still carry ethernet cables with them and try to use a wired connection.

Comment Clearly a winnable lawsuit... (Score 2) 180

But the first thing I thought of when reading this is how "sales" seems to constantly involve managers over teams who think all their employees have to be treated like kids, or at least assume simple-minded "motivators" actually work.

Have any real studies been done on ANY of this? Because whether it's negative reinforcement like this public shaming/pie assault, or it's insanity like ringing bells each time a sale is made and some bozo interrupting the whole place with loud announcements? It all feels primitive and pointless to me.

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