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Comment Simple - they'd rather read (Score 2) 54

The reason is simple. They are used to consuming much more of their information in text form, particularly when communicating. You can read much faster than normal speech rate. So listening to someone actually speak the words is like slow motion. Those of us that grew up having to use the telephone (as in, you know, to talk to someone on the phone), or carrying on conversations in person, were conditioned to that speed, so we don't perceive it as slow compared to reading - they are just two different things.

Now... the younger generations can't hardly carry on actual conversations with people because they are so out of practice and barely learned the skill (I'm talking on average - not all are like that). Have you ever had a voice-only phone conversation with someone under 20? It's weird and awkward, because they don't know the subtle communication cues and timings that make that work when you can't see the other person. The rare times our kids call us voice-only they are saying "Hello?" before we can even answer the phone.

I have a similar issue but somewhat backwards from that. I'm a fast typist, and still use an actual keyboard for most of my messaging and text entry (like this comment on Slashdot). So my handwriting absolutely sucks because I want to try to write information as fast as I can type it.

Comment Clickbait headline (Score 5, Informative) 56

What a clickbait headline. First of all it's not the skin of the pig that turns blue, it's muscle and fat you can only see after it has been butchered. And they know exactly what caused it - it's because the rodenticide is covered in a powdered blue dye specifically for this purpose.

Pigs have been eating it, and it seems they are actually attracted to the rodenticide in this better article. Hunters have seen them eating it, and have also seen the blue dye in muscle and fat.

Finally, agricultural producers ARE allowed to use the poison in CA, hence why it's being used. It sounds like a simple solution is putting the poison in containers only the rodents can fit inside of to eat it, keeping the wild pigs from ingesting it.

Comment Slightly faster, in some specific cases (Score 2) 51

It's not clear from the article because it doesn't have hard data, but it does say this:

And if you chop up the graph in the right way, it runs slightly faster than the best version of Dijkstra’s algorithm. It’s considerably more intricate, relying on many pieces that need to fit together just right. But curiously, none of the pieces use fancy mathematics.

So it is "slightly faster" than the well-known algorithm, and only in specific conditions when "you chop up the graph in the right way". The real question... is it SLOWER than Dijkstra’s in more cases to the point that on average it is actually slower?

The news here is this isn't necessarily better (the portion about the implementation being "considerably more intricate" doesn't sound great) or faster, but it is a new method to find routes.

Comment Re:Differences (Score 1) 96

This is starting to split hairs. There are lots of legitimate reasons for pages to be fetched by a "bot". If you post a link to a social media platform, that system will fetch the page to access the HTML meta tags to find things like the page title, an image to represent the page, a description, etc, and that is what is displayed in the post instead of just a plain URL. That request also doesn't result in "eyeballs" and ads are not served. Browsers can pre-fetch URLs on a page, again, not resulting in the page actually being viewed by a person.

I'm not seeing a huge issue with AI fetching something on-demand to generate content, which is totally different than scraping data to train a model. This is really more in the realm of a traditional search engine in this regard.

If Cloudflare is misrepresenting the data to make it appear as if data is being scraped for training purposes when it is not then that is indeed something different.

Comment That explains The Mandalorian (Score 3, Interesting) 29

In the first season of The Mandalorian, when a de-aged Luke appears, I remember the complaints that the CGI wasn't great, and within days there were alternate versions using AI that actually produced much better results than what Disney spent a fortune doing. A lot of people were wondering why Disney didn't use these tools if they were available to the general public, and now it makes sense. It was the legal side of things and Disney not being sure they fully owned the result if it wasn't created by a work-for-hire human being.

Comment Re:Australia creating a lot of IT knowledge (Score 1) 125

Future Australians will be well-versed in nuances of networking, online tracking, VPNs and TOR

It's nice to think that, but as a parent of a 16 and 19 year old, I can tell you right now that generation is so used to everything being rolled out in shrink-wrapped, shiny, ready to use packages, that they will gain no deep understanding of networking from this. They will install an app, like TOR, on their phone / iPad if they hear it will let them access something that was blocked from them, with no understanding of the underpinnings or what is going on at all.

Comment Re:Espionage (Score 1) 29

the Chinese will eventually solve their launcher issue

It's been 15 years since the first Falcon 9 launch, and 10 years since the first Falcon 9 came back to earth and landed. When you say "eventually" just how long are we talking about here? As another commenter said, just wait until Starship is launching stuff into orbit. That will be even more disruptive than Falcon 9.

Comment Espionage (Score 3, Interesting) 29

Six years after [SpaceX's] Falcon 9 began launching Starlink satellites, Chinese firms still have no answer to it... The government has tested nearly 20 rocket launchers in the "Long March" series

Props to keeping the underpinning technologies secret for this long. That's almost as big of a feat as the engineering itself.

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