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Comment Wow, socking! (Score 1) 59

I can't believe it took this long for them to realize people didn't want a camera that they could not fully control within their own private homes possibly recording and displaying everything to random people at the company that built and maintains the device and potentially for anyone who found a security flaw in it.... I mean, really, what a smart item to stick into a TV that might go in say a bedroom, because nothing happens in there that shouldn't be broadcast across the world and saved forever....

Comment This lays bare one of the problems with LLMs.... (Score 4, Informative) 70

What too many people do not seem to understand with LLMs is that everything it spits out is simply a probability matrix based on the input you gave it. It will first attempt to deconstruct the input you provided and use statistical analysis against it's trained knowledge base to then spit out letters, words, phrases and punctuation that statistically resembles the outputs it was trained to produce in it's training materials.

Until this version, ChatGPT obviously suffered from a lack of training materials within it's trained neural network to have it overcome the English language's typed grammar rules for it to be able to discern that em dashes are not typically used in everyday conversations and/or that the input to not use them needed to change it's underlying probability network to be able to ignore the English language's grammar rules and adopt it's output without the use of the em dash. This is a very difficult concept to train into a neural network as it needs to have been training on specifically this input/output case long enough to have that training override the base English grammar language model, which is a fundamental piece of knowledge a LLM requires to function and one of the very first things it is trained to handle.

It also exposes a flaw in how neural networks are typically working. There is a training/learning mode and then there is the functional mode of just using the trained network. In the functional mode, the neural network links, nodes, and function are effectively static. Without having built in-puts to the network so that it can flag certain functionality, it can not change it's underlying probability matrix to effectively forget something it was trained to do. Once that training has changed any of the underlying neural network, you can not effectively untrain it (without simply reverting to a previous backup copy of the network before it was trained). This is why it is so important to scrutinize every piece of data that is used to train the network. One you have added some piece of garbage input training, you are stuck with the changes it made to the probabilities of the output. Any model that is effectively training against the content of the internet itself is so full of bad information that the results can never really be trusted for anything other than probability of asking a random person for the answer because it will have trained on and included phases like "The earth is flat", "birds are not real", and "the moon landing was a hoax". It will have seen those things enough times that it will include them as higher and higher percentages of the proper response to questions about them....

Comment Re:How convenient for the UC system... (Score 1) 161

Also, it is bringing to the forefront a long running battle that is waging in academia. Students have all been taught from a very young age that if they work hard, get themselves prepared, strive for and achieve excellent grades that they will get into the best colleges (i.e. the concept of meritocracy, where those that put in all the work and have the gifts for excelling in academic study and life would be rewarded for their efforts by being able to get into the highest rated colleges).

Yes, a lot of the students who are able to achieve and excel academically may also be from a more "privileged" background once you start mixing in things like social-economic backgrounds, family backgrounds, and even location. These are things that are hard to dismiss, especially in a public education system which has guidelines and mandates to educate the whole population, not just those who have excelled. This is the biggest clash that then occurs because you have a limited resource (i.e. the number of spots for students), which must somehow be divided out in some reasonable way. Things like standardized tests tended to do a good job at predicting who was academically prepared, and was one of the reasons those tests were created. Comparing the grading curves of different schools, teachers, and even students against one another is almost impossible without lots of additional information that the college selection committees simply do not have and don't have the time to research. The standardized tests provided some of that information.

Comment Re:How convenient for the UC system... (Score 1) 161

So let me get this straight. We have a large amount of students coming in that both can't do math and need remedial writing courses. The school has no problem letting ANYONE in, as they will just get a government backed loan. The UC wins regardless if the student ever finishes or not.

Seems to me, they are just insuring their income stream stays nice and healthy.

Not really. The UC system has way more applicants than it can accept, and it has been that way for decades. As such, they already know they have the "income stream" that is "nice and healthy".

What this really means is that the UC system is doing a much worse job then they previously did in "selecting" the students into their system that are ready to meet the requirements without needing remedial math and writing.

In other words, the UC system changed how they were selecting people for acceptance, and the metrics of tracking the need for these remedial courses by a much larger percentage of the incoming students are showing that their current selection criteria is doing a worse job of picking out students who are academically ready for the standards of the UC system at the time of their selection/acceptance.

Comment Companies finally get it... (Score 2) 82

Cloud is useful for a few very specific things. Specifically, one off requirements (i.e. I need to temporarily use a few thousand CPUs/GPUs to run this study/calculation and never need to do it again once it is done), and initial ramp up/expansion (i.e. we need to start working now and we can't wait for our datacenter to finish building before we start work, but have a specific timeline for when we use the "cloud" and bring the work back home as the datacenter(s) come online).

Comment In other words, we can't innovate anymore.... (Score 1) 22

I mean, that is really it, at the root cause level, Tick-Tock is gone (and has been for a while really) because they no longer have the people and teams in place to innovate. They lost those people really a decade ago now when they sat on their heels and were content to watch AMD struggle with their bulldozer designs and decided to stop their then very regular Tick-Tock approach that lead to the dominate the market, and instead add additional months/years between when the cadences continued to improve the manufacturing lines (the "Tick") because their technology was easily 2 generations better than their competition, and all the energy efficiencies, power usage, heating requirements showed that to be the case. This was why they dominated in the datacenters, which is where the real money is located in computing. But the rested while AMD continued to innovate, and purchase ATI, getting them a foothold in the then just emerging GPU computing space (a market space which has since kicked off the mainstream AI computing revolution)...

Comment Slashdot needs new category of articles... (Score 2) 9

I believe that it really needs to add "Enshittrification" as a category/tag. Part of this very lawsuit is about the enshittrification at WP Engine, after, surprise, a private equity group bought/buyout and stripping of functionality/features all in the name of cost cutting before parting out/selling out all the rest of the company it bought. I can't think of a better example of enshittrification than this kind of behavior.

Comment Intel's fall will become a case study.... (Score 3, Informative) 22

This will certainly be discussed and looked at for decades from now in the future. The missteps that have occurred and the technology advances and shifts the spelled the downfall of the once complete dominant technology company in the world that led the drive and datacenters of the internet's initial rise and expansion, only to collapse on itself due to resting on its technological lead and loss of the key internal personnel that drove their dominance in chip manufacturing and the ramifications those items had in the years to follow with the rest of the chip manufacturing world catching and surpassing Intel's once overwhelmingly dominant lead.

Comment Re: The main issue... needs cart slot... (Score 1) 51

It really needs the cart slot or some way to add games that people may own. I highly doubt that there will be any official way (I suspect there are too many copyright issues even with games that are 40 years old).

I did at least see that some of the games are many of the good ones, like "Shark! Shark!", "Astrosmash", "Sea Battle", and "Night Stalker". But some of the best games are probably missing, like Commando, Atlantis, Advanced D&D, Advanced D&D Treasure of the Tarmin, Tron: Deadly Discs, Beauty and the Beast, Thundercastle, SKI, Hover Force, Demon Attack....

Comment Re:The purpose of the space race (Score 1) 107

We went to the moon to try and beat the Russians from getting there first. And it wasn't known if we would be able to beat them there either. This was all to prevent the Russians from actually scarring "us", like they did when they launched the first satellites, and the first people into space. The philosophical blow of allowing Russia to reach the moon would have possibly set back the fight between capitalism and communism decades. The loss of reaching the moon first on Russia was almost immediate, with the complete dismantling of their lunar space program and them not even attempting a lunar landing (they did at least repurpose the design of their lunar rover for use in cleanup of the Chernobyl disaster as it was the only vehicle design with enough radiation protection to the electronic control systems to be able to survive long enough to operate).

Comment Interesting to see this play out.... (Score 1) 231

From a fundamental standpoint, I 100% agree with this level of fee on H1B visas. It was intended for bringing in people who had specializations that didn't exist locally, not for bringing in people who would simply do the work cheaper then the local labor pool. This has led to all kinds of stagnation in compensation especially when there was high demand for the jobs as well as rising cost of living.

That being said, remote work has shown that some of this can be done without being at the office anymore. I think some businesses will look at this again and review their recent back to the office policies, and the need to have workers live/reside near certain tech hubs/centers, and will use it as an excuse to then pay the going rate of where the person resides, not the rate of compensation for the work itself....

Comment Re:Not a lot of people paying attention apparently (Score 2) 52

3. The opposing lawyer.

Pretty sure the opposing lawyer caught it and brought it up, which is why it was in the appeal in the first place. They just were not able to convince the judge in time for the original claim. Many of these kinds of things were probably cited in various fillings with limited time to respond (some things have less than 7 days to respond, which does not give enough time to dig down to all the citations, and may only provoke a more generic response that they could not find the case/reference).

Comment Yes, you get a tracker, and you get a tracker... (Score 1) 375

Everyone gets a tracker!!!!

I mean, really? Really? The government's own policy is to not wear health and fitness trackers because they can and are being used to track people's locations and exposed quite a few "secret" locations around the world where there happened to be concentrations of people doing workouts and training in remote bases and small camps of soldiers/special ops units who were maintaining their fitness and readiness.

More of the do what I say, not what I do....

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