Hap said:

THAAD numbers are insanely optimistic.

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Those are the ones that are artisanally handcrafted by a couple of Swiss watchmakers in a little shop next to a bicycle store, right?

I'm getting ready for Linux.

How about, "No" for $500, Alex.

Cranioclast said:

I haven’t been through a manned tollbooth in a decade. They’re all just plate readers now, aren’t they?

I’m trying to think of the last time I opened a car window. I’m sure I’ve done it, but I just can’t recall. It’s certainly not part of my regular driving experience.

I feel like the manual windows were included in the original concept car because it fit the whole retro design philosophy, but then they became such a talked-about feature that they couldn’t drop them. It’s wild to me how much their existence seems to piss people off, though. I’m in favor of them just for that.

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I got corrected, correctly, for making the last thread all about how cynical I think this things is, and I am endeavoring to not be a butthead about it. But yeah, they do piss me off. They're not necessary. They strike me as a pretentious, performative nostalgia dog-whistle with no actual, objective engineering requirement to justify them; their only value is to appeal to the people who embrace the cranky backlash against vehicle electronics.

However, Microsoft is clear that this is still just a concept. None of it works, but the company is committed to spending money on it as part of its massive AI expansion plans.

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This should be in the dictionary as the first definition of generative AI.

lyme said:

Garbage.
Traditional vaccines require creating a non-viable version of the virus, then modifying it such that the bodies immune system can detect it and produce viable blockers.
With mRNA the time is shortened as they can tailor the non-viable RNA chains to look to the immune system like the easiest to defeat parts of ebola, without risking human life.
The amount of time the body needs to create target proteins and an immune response is equal between the two methodologies as the body behaves the same way with each.

If the covid vaccines were making you ill, it simply shows that you have a poor immune system and likely would have been killed by Covid.

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Like to bold this for truth. I have personally seen likely 10,000+ Covid vaccines administered in my pharmacy since they became available and someone mentioning the Covid vaccine making them feel like this is incredibly rare. All the more sign your system is doing what it should. Don't let it be like the people who claim the Flu vaccine makes them get the flu

EnPeaSea said:

Coincidentally. "MAGA" seems to be the opposite of "antifa", too.

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On a meta level as well, since MAGA is actually set up as a hierarchy with Trump in charge, but antifa is a completely leaderless movement with no discernible hierarchy. It's rather hilarious to see the FBI and justice department trying to "dismantle" a movement and find out who's "in charge" of it.

Question is, how much is all those agents going to cost? Seems like "a lot" is the likely answer.

MrTom said:

Luckily we have DMARC and others to combat spoofed emails. If they could just take that theory and implement it world wide to phones, then you could have your phone reject all calls that don't pass "DMARC For Cellular".

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Email is (normally) sent directly from an origin server to a destination server, so you need the detection in the endpoints.

The telephone system is a switched network. There's no need to do the work in the endpoints. You can do the work in-network it in a way such that all the good-faith participants are incentivized to cooperate and the regulatory apparatus only has to go after the bad-faith callers.

1) Mandatory call completion payment to the receiver from the immediate upstream telecom provider, on the order of 10^-3 cents per call rounded down to the nearest dollar per month.
2) A Payee can discharge their call completion payment by passing it to their immediate upstream telecom system.

The benefits are:
A. The low charge and the rounding mean an endpoint will have to have an incoming/outgoing imbalance of 100,000 calls per month before seeing any change on their billing.
B. The upstream discharge means the good-faith telecom participants have an incentive to participate as well as an incentive to manage their ingress points.
C. The losses accumulate to telecom providers with bad know-your-customer policies without requiring government interference in know-your-customer policies.

Iphtashu Fitz said:

From a brief look at the article it appears that this works by your phone asking the device purportedly belonging to the caller if they did in fact make the call. So it's authentication at the device level, not at the network level.

Unfortunately it only works when both the recipient of the call and the purported originator of the call both have properly configured Android phones. It would be nice if Google could have implemented this in such a way that it would work with a combination of both Android and iPhone devices, and didn't rely on a handful of Google-specific apps. If they could have done that it would likely have worked on well over 90% of mobile-to-mobile calls with little to no setup.

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This, and this:

As usual, some of the new features are limited to specific devices, and others require using Google’s apps. But if you don’t mind the latter, you can get automated protection from the growing threat of deepfake phone scams.

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Pretty much tells me that it won't be a thing for me, at least.

I'm a bit flummoxed to figure out who, exactly, it's for, since I doubt it will work with Apple phones (the article doesn't specify, but I doubt Apple will get on board with anything Google).

And since it seems a huge share, if not a majority, of people in the US use Apple phones, it's kind of pointless.

Besides the whole "others require using Google's apps" thing I highlighted screams "NO FUCKING WAY!" to me. I know people routinely run around with wifi or data turned on, but I don't. My phone lasts 18 hours if I have all the devices enabled people seem to have enabled. If I turn off everything, it lasts 4 days and is recharged at 20%.

Since my phone is a communications device, and I'm able to parse my calls by who I hear, rather than what the caller ID says (because I have people I know who share each others phones), and I don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize, my being scammed is going to be a mountain too high for most scammers to climb compared to easier targets.

I get that Google wants to be all things to all people to get all the datas, but I'm not going to climb on that bandwagon.

DarthSlack said:

Maybe, but both the cash and the tax crime immunity are profoundly corrupt acts, yet everyone is just laser focused on the cash.

Has everyone except Trump really forgotten what sent Al Capone to jail?

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Al Capone didn't own the feds.

You're right in that the rest of it seems to be being swept under the rug, but I'm willing to take this small victory for now.

fyo said:

Citation needed.

For actual numbers, industry publications like SemiAnalysis¹ estimate Anthropic's margins at 70% this year, up from about half that last year.

We can debate what's included in these numbers, but these models aren't as massively subsidized as people seem to think. Microsoft had a terrible pricing structure, but that's not anyone else's fault.

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Sure, here they are:

EIA: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/
NVIDIA specs: https://www.nvidia.com/en-sg/data-center/h100/

This is not rocket science, all inputs and outputs are known.

Also, given a rate of 50 tokens/s, this is only 130M tokens/month per single inference point.

cleek said:

yeah, no. i searched and found nothing to support your assertion that general purpose LLMs have reached any kind of "master" level.

if you think that's a "gotcha", that's on you.

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Apparently the term "gotcha moment" has degraded to mean "any time someone's shown to be wrong".

Lt_Storm said:

I'm pretty sure that there's already fairly broad consensus that we live in a new gilded age... Though, admittedly, I haven't seen Pinkertons yet... At least, not in the US. (Glares nervously at Palantir).

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Palantir and their ilk would be the intelligence gatherers and surveillance outfits that would organize and direct security forces—who would be subcontractors. Think of them as the AI precogs, to borrow a Philip K. Dick term, who probably will be given plausible deniability for their AI hallucinations actions.

House of Propane said:

You are getting downvoted but you are right: regulators hate it when OEMs provide workarounds to FMVSS/crash certification by selling it aftermarket.

The DOT isn’t going to say “well technically you helped a customer turn a truck into an SUV after sale, so I can totally ignore the subsequent rollover deaths because your truck as sold isn’t subject to the same rollover standards as SUVs”

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Yeah, we'll see. I am not entirely convinced this is as plug-and-play as Slate says it is. But I am also on record as a hater, so.

dagar9 said:

Day in, day out? It's probably been 6 months or longer since I've gone through a drive-thru, a decade since a tollbooth, I don't think I've ever entered a gate code or needed my vehicle to get the mail (unless it was at the post office, and for the last 40 years I could walk there, it's less than a mile).

I guess life is different if you're stuck in the hinterlands.

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I haven’t been through a manned tollbooth in a decade. They’re all just plate readers now, aren’t they?

I’m trying to think of the last time I opened a car window. I’m sure I’ve done it, but I just can’t recall. It’s certainly not part of my regular driving experience.

I feel like the manual windows were included in the original concept car because it fit the whole retro design philosophy, but then they became such a talked-about feature that they couldn’t drop them. It’s wild to me how much their existence seems to piss people off, though. I’m in favor of them just for that.

And we're started!



Our deadline for this week is 12:01 AM, Monday, June 8. HOWEVER, since we have less than a full week, we'll have an automatic extension to June 15th if needed. Try to get your games done before the end of the weekend.

PlasticExistence said:

I think also that you might be focused on the voting population instead of the population at large though. Our politics don't really reflect the average American's feelings. I have not in my adult life voted for very many politicians who won their election. The ones who did win were generally the ones I had to hold my nose over while I voted against someone else.

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This is why you get involved earlier in the process, especially at the local level. Hopefully you will be able to "grow your own" politicians along the way.

Well, Terence Tao "a professor at UCLA who is widely considered to be the world’s greatest living mathematician" supports the use of AI in mathematics, but "a historian and anthropologist of computing and artificial intelligence at Leiden University" opposes it.

Tough choice...

Deleted… I think I confused some plot points with another post-apocalyptic story.

internetomancer said:

I'm not into having a silly gotcha Internet argument. If you want to talk like normal humans that respect one another I'd be happy to share where I'm coming from.

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yeah, no. i searched and found nothing to support your assertion that general purpose LLMs have reached any kind of "master" level.

if you think that's a "gotcha", that's on you.

pm sent

apoclypse said:

Well that's the way most sprites are handled now on modern hardware so I would say overall it was the right call even if it was by necessity since the PS1 had no 2D specific hardware. It did give them some things by default that were difficult to do with regular 2D operations, like scaling, alpha blending, 2D on 3D etc. The problem was that the PS1 had so little ram and sprites would need a lot texture data to be either in memory or streamed in and out of the disk.

I remember being quite impressed with Guilty Gear when that first came out. They were doing some crazy zooming in on the characters during some moves. Then there was Legend of Mana which looked absolutely gorgeous at the cost of horrendous load times.

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Agreed on all counts! The N64 had a little more RAM, but had a HORRIBLE bottle neck meaning it's effective RAM for textures was quite limited.

chucklepie2 said:

Maybe AI usage should get refunded for failed results....

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That's the thing. When it was all you can eat. If the LLM hosed the last 2 hours of coding you said "Crap", Rolled back or kept the LLM taking stabs at it until it worked.
How do you explain to your boss. CoPilot lost its way for $400.00 and to get everything back on track was $600.00 more. But it's working now!

No Bonus for CoPilot this quarter.