Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:So much Irony here (Score 1) 116

A group of runner women wanting to make sure that they're not fucking a dude that 10 other women are fucking.
Women have rosters of men. But it's not okay for men to do the same thing.

Men seem to care if a women has fucked 10 different men over his life. Women are mostly just making sure the men aren’t fucking ten women right now. Either way I think people owe their potential partners the truth, although for the most part I think expecting people to have had zero or close to zero prior partners isn’t a reasonable expectation while expecting them not to have other current partners is a common and reasonable (although not universal) expectation.

Comment Re:If "Tea" was really a "dating safety app"... (Score 2) 116

Who in their right mind would post that kind of stuff on a "dating safety app?”

I think the disconnect is you think the women are posting “I’m cheating on my husband and it feels so good!”, they are posting “I think my husband is cheating on me” (and some info about the husband) and getting back “He is, that bastard told me he is single!” (and maybe some info to confirm it, like intimate pictures the wife never saw, or dates he was with the other woman).

In other words it is getting some actual value (assuming the “other women” are telling the truth, which if the various wives have a reasonable standard of proof is going to be not too too hard to establish -- like someone won’t have pics of their husbands in any sort of sexy pose unless the husband at the very least was distributing them with the intent to cheat, maybe they haven’t actually had sex with anyone else yet, but they would have been doing the “check out my horse sized cock, wanna screw” type thing at the very least).

Comment Re:Non-Logging Polices (Score 1) 116

They are, I’m sure TEA has violated laws, but in general a jury is receptive to “no, we totally didn't give this info to anyone we shouldn’t have, some other dude broke in and stole it (online attack == broke in)” so they won’t be heard accountable by a court for violating user privacy, but they WILL be held accountable by potential future customers who for at least some time into the foreseeable future will remember “oh TEA the people that can’t keep anything private? I think I won’t be signing up”, which will likely also result in them not making growth milestones and not getting additional rounds of funding, and just sort of withering and vanishing from the earth.

Which helps future non-users not get their private data hijacked.

It doesn’t help them find out their husbands are cheating, or talk to other women who might be able to get them through tough times by telling them how it sucked for them too but it “got better” or whatever (yeah “whatever”, if I knew what helped maybe I would be better at helping people with emotional issues work through them, but I’m crap at that, so as much as I would like to be the kind of friend that supports my friends in tough times I’m more the kind of friend you go have dinner with and play some boardgames with and don’t really unburden your soul to ‘cause I’m full of useless suggestions and no real helpful whatever it is people offer each other).

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: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: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!!!”

Comment Re:No they arenâ(TM)t (Score 1) 52

It is not in HP's interest to instigate more trust into a used computer purchase. This serves to help the used computer market, at the expense of the new computer market.

Maybe.

One reason Apple can charge more money then other companies for new iPhones is people believe they can sell a year or two old iPhone for a reasonable amount of money. HP may believe their products will retain more value over time in the used market then competitors even if the sole reason is because “PCFax says it is good” for HPs and non-HPs don’t get a report because they come to the party late and don’t offer the feature for several more years. Once people get in the habit of buying HP “because you can resell it for like half the price of a new one” the prices of new ones can start to creep up. It would make sense to pay $600 for an HP with an identical spec to a $400 Dell if you believe that in two years the HP will sell for $300 and the Dell will sell for maybe $100, or maybe cost you $10 for an eWaste sticker. Even more sense if HP gives you a 2 year repurchase price because they think the used price will be high enough (i.e. you pay $600 today for the laptop, and it includes a $200 coupon for a 2027 purchase of a new HP if you send the old one back...)

Again the actual HP might not be any better then the Dell (or may be somewhat worse), but it has a PCFax listing that says “great shape! SSD 100% ok! Battery 97% original capacity, great for 2 years of use! Never been dropped! Never had the screen replaced! OEM RAM!” while the Dell’s says “no information, anything could have happened to this pile of junk, buyer beware!”

Comment People buy stuff that doesn’t exist yet all (Score 2) 77

I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.

The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized. Oh, plus afford the fertilizer.

CBOE exchanges billions of dollars of futures a day, granted it isn’t all “farm stuff” anymore. Google buying energy that won’t be produced for ~7 years isn’t really any more astounding then someone buying tons of corn from plants that just went into the ground last week and won’t be harvested until October, and that has been happening since 1973.

Comment Re:I like that we are going to burn our entire wor (Score 1) 77

When it gets to this point, the choice of the population is to starve to death or create a new, parallel system that serves em. It's normally what happens in communist dictatorships etc..., so you can bet the elites are trying to not get to this point, or the system will just get away from em.

Sadly the elite tend to believe their own propaganda about exceptionalism and think they got to the top because of talent not luck, and that what happened elsewhere and in the distant past is irrelevant because they are just too awesome to fail, get pulled out of their limos and beheaded by the ignorant lazy masses of unachievers. Which just increases the chance of history repeating, or at least rhyming.

Comment Re:Insanity (Score 1) 77

Sure it is insane to bet that in 7 years fusion will be working...if in fact Google is relying on this as opposed to that purchase being a fancy way to fund some long term work on reducing power costs and take advantage of tax breaks to basically fund that with tax payer money and not their own.

So it is basically Google spending someone else’s money on something that has a chance of directly benefiting Google. Which I’m sort of ok with because if it does manage to produce that energy (even if it takes >7 years) it’ll also produce energy for the rest of us (either directly as in one big ass facility, or indirectly when they publish a million papers “here is how we made it work” and spin up companies “we built that one over there, give us a billion dollars and we will make one for you too!”). Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.

Comment Re:What's next for dark matter theorists? (Score 1) 64

This is just some normal (non-dark) matter that we expected to be out there but was previously unobserved. It has nothing to do with dark matter or dark matter theories. We infer vast amounts of (otherwise unobservable) dark matter from its effect on gravity, and that has not changed from this.

Comment Re:Auto-deleting chat criticism is weird (Score 2) 22

The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country. [...]

But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.

Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).

Google’s chats self deleted in more like 45 to 90 days. Seldom long enough to survive into a litigation hold. The chats didn’t have an archive hold tag you could apply (one of the chat systems had a possibly accidental loophole, groups had their own retention policies settable per group, so if you had stuff you wanted to save you could make a group to discuss a document or design and set a year retention policy or whatever).

Google also quite deliberately had internal communications about “communicate with care” and pushed employees to discuss things in person and via chat and not email if it was business related as opposed to purely technical. It was very obvious we were being told to communicate anything that might be the topic of a lawsuit over chat (or in person) and never email. Durability of the messages and discoverability was mentioned. It wasn’t “do all the illegal stuff in chat”, it was “be aware that business practices can be very legally sensitive and are best conducted in person or if by electronic means in chat and never in email”, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

I mean nothing strictly illegal about reminding people what forms of communication work how, and all the documents had a retention policy, it just happened that the policy was generally “burn in a month and a half” which for a typical business would be very very suspicious.

To give Google a little break though with the volume of business Google use to conduct via email it is extremely different from companies that one would accuse of being shady with a 45 day burn policy: most traditional companies have “some” email, Google like many tech companies and especially tech companies where most of the management layers were ex-technical did communications relentlessly by email. At most phone companies if it would have been a phone call it would be an email chain. Meetings well, google still has way too many, but meetings got summarized in email (frequently by several people). If it happened it was probably in at least 8 if not 300 emails.

Post chat change though, things got memory holed. If it happened maybe there is an email, maybe. Likely lots of chat about it, all vanished into the mists go time (45 days back). Aruments about the 300th time a button name got changed? Chat, maybe a little email. Discussions about who a “target audience” for a product was? Absolutely in chat, never in email. Never never, never ever in email. What kind of user does a proposed feature appeal to? All chat, never email...

Slashdot Top Deals

Moneyliness is next to Godliness. -- Andries van Dam

Working...