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Comment Re:Closed source software and assets are a bitch. (Score 0) 80

I think it's a complaint about how to spell "kerning", but I don't understand the funny moderation.

But kerning is not an issue for most of the Japanese characters. However if you want to get beyond kaisho, then the situation quickly becomes intractable. Gyosho is hard and I don't think I've ever seen a computer version--but sosho is much worse. The flowing script is often much too pretty to read. Even if you have the kaisho side-by-side it is often hard to find matching features.

Comment Re:Ya don't say? (Score 1) 82

Gee thanks CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!
At least in the states, kids under 16 shouldn't be allowed to have anything but a dumb phone that can only call say 911 and, their parents.
We see it all the time, young teenagers all sitting around NOT talking to each other but with their heads down in their phones.

Quoted against the censor trolls.

My take is that young impressionable people are especially good at learning to think like machines. I even think that is not a good thing, no matter what the generative AI tells me.

Comment More stupidity is not the solution to stupidity (Score 1) 109

Why are you propagating the vacuous Subject? Also masks your point, though I can't really figure out what it is.

Did remind me of a twisted joke. The US basically started on a negative foot. The focus was on rejecting the king. It actually took a while to start developing positive philosophies. I think the best effort was Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".

There was a transitional period when it became government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%, but now we are moving to government of a few giant corporate cancers with AIs, by the Donald, for the (mostly shadowy) puppeteers. Or maybe the first and third are reversed? Too soon to figure out what sort of mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Comment The YOB keeps shooting himself in the foot (Score 1) 56

It's like the YOB can't stop shooting himself in the foot. Then he blames the shoe company and takes ownership! Even though he never wore that brand of shoe. "The light was better over here!"

To make it a proper joke for Slashdot I have to note that the YOB shot himself in the foot using his preferred programming language. But then I'm stumped because I cannot imagine the YOB writing a program of any sort. Which language is best for shooting senile self in foot?

(I say YOB because I reject the brand as poison. Like Exxon and Amazon. How many guesses do you need for YUGE Orange Buffoon?)

Comment Re:79% of Adults in South Korea (Score 1) 2

Kind of sad that so little interest was aroused. I'd add a comment related to the local police and their concerns with PI, but the story is at the bottom of the top page now, so effectively about to expire.

NIMBY so no one cares? (I'm in Japan, so I can sort of regard South Korea as close to my back yard? (But this is not the joke I was looking for.))

Comment Re:They are objectively wrong (Score 1) 194

Not a bad FP branch, but no explicit mention of "moral education", which I think is a that crux of it. It's not just that they want them (= the masses?) to obey orders. It's not even that they want them to obey illegal orders. It's more that they want them too naive to know the difference between good and bad.

Poorly trained monkeys with nuclear weapons and rockets. What could possibly go wrong?

Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 3, Insightful) 264

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Comment Re:AI detectors remain garbage. (Score 1) 34

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

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