Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is scar (Score 1) 93

To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology.

Lots of pattern recognition, from quality control to medical diagnosis. Granted that is mostly “machine learning” not large language models, so “so last decade”, but extremely effective.

Basically any problem domain where we can recognize a good solution (and it is unambiguously different from bad solutions), but don’t know any step by step process to get to one have had success stories. Him, no there is more to it then that, it seems like we have spent far far longer not getting to trustable self driving cars then my rule of thumb says. We have made significant progress towards it though, it’s just that “mostly doesn’t drive the car into a lake” isn't a great result...so maybe “& has only a modest failure cost, OR humans don’t do it all that great anyway” is a useful addition.

Comment Re:I'm impressed with their tenacity (Score 1) 229

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

Comment Re:Now deport Elon (Score 0) 229

How about deporting him for lying on his citizenship application?

He entered the US on a student visa, didn't enrol or undertake studies (the purpose behind being on a student visa) and focused on his start up instead.

Clear violation of his visa terms. But because he's famous with money and has been perceived as an entrepreneur he's been able to avoid the same consequences as other people who have violated similar visa terms, i.e. citizenship stripped (as it was fraudulently obtained) and deported.

---

I have no dog in this race though as I'm not a US citizen, nor do I live in the US. In fact it's quite funny to see the US speed run an empire collapse. I just hope it happens without an all-out war outside US borders.

Comment Re:Overemployment is not illegal (Score 2) 34

[...] you're going to have an extremely hard time trying to make the claim that it overemployment is illegal especially when California and other states have made non competes illegal.

CA may have made non-competes illegal, but those are the “you can’t work for our competitors after you leave us” non-competes. It is generally considered valid to prevent someone from working for a competitor while they are actually working for you. Like Apple and Google both say you can’t work for a competitor while employed by them. Both consider each other to be operating in the same markets and thus competitors.

The claim Google/Apple would make isn’t that you can’t work 2 places at once, or even that you can’t in general work for Google and Apple at the same time, but that the employee made an agreement that they would not work for a competitor and lied about doing so. An otherwise legal act which is fraud because you agreed not to do so, claimed not to be doing so, and then did so anyway. So they would certionally have to worry about sabotage, and/or theft of work product. -- Ironically you might be able to wriggle partway out of it by claiming you “weren’t really working, just slacking for both of them at once!”, except neither judge nor jury would really find that acceptable...

Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 149

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Comment Re:No bother (Score 1) 183

enjoy your enjoyment of 'sound'.

as you get older (GOML) the sound of the sound matters so much less.

there were times that listening to a single speaker fm pocket 'transistor radio' was good enough to enjoy the songs.

have your fun with your rumble and explosions. as you get older, that shit becomes SO much less important, you wont believe how irrelevant all that hype really is.

Comment Re:So their fix is to make it worse (Score 1) 183

I have not been to a theater in - 20 years? more? I cant remember.

its been unpleasant for decades. and with home theater, unless you're a teen trying to escape home and get 'privacy' somewhere else, theaters have long outlived their usefulness.

I think I stopped theaters around the time I cut the cable.

all around, what passes for entertainment is just plain rotten and/or boring.

you can keep it.

Comment Re:I live (Score 4, Interesting) 149

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Comment Re:The HP logo on the lid (Score 1) 52

an area of the system which you can't look at or audit?

You can probbably look at and audit the PCFax area with some sort of enterprise tool, you just can’t write it. Or maybe they will even allow you to erase it and leave behind a “the PCFax report was deleted, so anything could be wrong with this computer! Odometer tampered with! Tampered!!!”

Slashdot Top Deals

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

Working...