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Comment Re:Ryzen 7 have a machne readable serial number? (Score 1) 116

Which field is the unique serial number? I don't see any such value.

$ lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
    CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
    Address sizes: 43 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
    Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 16
    On-line CPU(s) list: 0-15
Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
    Model name: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor
        CPU family: 23
        Model: 1
        Thread(s) per core: 2
        Core(s) per socket: 8
        Socket(s): 1
        Stepping: 1
        Microcode version: 0x8001138
        Frequency boost: enabled
        CPU(s) scaling MHz: 97%
        CPU max MHz: 3400.0000
        CPU min MHz: 2200.0000
        BogoMIPS: 6800.37
        Flags: ...
Virtualization features: ...
Caches (sum of all): ...
NUMA: ...
Vulnerabilities: ...

Comment What Economists Know (Score 1) 90

Why the AI boom makes inflation harder to tame

Through 2032, that number will reach $10.3 trillion, claims Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh in a paper published Wednesday by the Brookings Institution. For perspective: Remember the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2021 that became an inflation bugaboo? Projected AI expenditures are equivalent to spending every last dollar allocated from one of those bills each year over the course of a decade.

That spending – just on AI infrastructure, not on the technology itself – is on pace to comprise 1.9% of all US economic activity this year, according to Goldman Sachs. But that’s forecast to effectively double: On average, AI infrastructure spending will top 3.6% of America’s gross domestic product each year through 2032, according to Van Nieuwerburgh.

OTOH, as Herbert Stein put it:

What economists know seems to consist entirely of a list of things that cannot go on forever, and this may be one of them. But if it can’t go on forever it will stop. And if we never do anything that we can’t go on doing forever we will never do very much.

Comment Re:conspiracy theory (Score 1) 75

I have a personal website that I update irregularly. I publish everything by hand, written by hand. When I check the stats, I'm only visited by bots. I've had 1 (one) human visit this year. And it was a friend, who afterwards sent me a message telling me about it. One human visit.

Ya know, Slashdot has this thing called a URL that you can insert in your comments if you want geeks to find your website...

Comment Re:use it to vote? (Score 2) 124

Electoral fraud is not a problem today, but it was not always so. Stuffing ballot boxes was a common practice in many areas in the past. In Roane County where I grew up in E TN, this was an issue up until 1970. It was halted only because a group of good government advocates literally stood over the boxes from the time the boxes were distributed to precincts until the votes were counted. That group consisted of voters across the political spectrum from George Wallace supporters to George McGovern supporters. The one thing they had in common was a desire for fair elections. Their slate won resoundingly and booted out the very last remnants of the Memphis Crump machine that had dominated TN from the 1920s until the 1950s.

That group was able to win peacefully. But just South of Roane County, in McMinn County, TN, GIs returning from WWII solved a similar problem in 1946 by breaking into the Nat'l Guard Armory, arming themselves, and storming the county jail where the sheriff and his cronies had secreted the ballot boxes.

Comment Re:RECA (Score 1) 145

Thanks, I was going from an old, inaccurate memory on the unit. I've heard stories that in one of the buildings you could almost go swimming in the stuff. A family friend who won nearly every award that a chemical engineer can win and who had a major hand in the lithium production, told me one time that the mercury was in an inert state that didn't pose a lot of danger. He also used to claim that we should be as much or more concerned about the arsenic leaching out of old coal mines in the Cumberland Mountains above Oak Ridge as we should be about the various releases from the Oak Ridge facilities. I'm neither a chemist nor a biologist and can't really evaluate how true those claims are.

Comment RECA (Score 5, Interesting) 145

I grew up in the Secret City Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

As kids, we would ride our bikes onto the reservation woods in the area between the West end of Oak Ridge and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. There were gates that proclaimed this was illegal trespassing, but try telling that to 10 year old kids. Years later, I learned that there had been a couple of major releases of uranium hexaflouride over this area. There were also releases of strontium-90 into the local rivers. The plant had told their workers not to drink the water, but had waited 24 hours before alerting the downstream community water supplies. The Y-12 plant also released 2.4 million tons of mercury into the creek that runs through the center of Oak Ridge. The mercury was used to purify the lithium that was used in the hydrogen bombs (*).

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was dealt with and I seem to be cancer free today. I recently learned that because I lived in Oak Ridge and had cancer, I am now eligible for compensation under the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act changes that were passed as part of Trump's One Big F'Ugly Bill Act. This is the American Way (TM). Rather than preventing or fixing the problem before hand (cough, cough AI), we'll just pay off the victims after the inevitable disaster.

(*) To be fair to the scientists who worked on the Bomb, though, many of whom were the parents of my friends, the environmental movement really didn't get moving until the early 60s and the imperatives of a world war and the later Cold War took precedence over the local environment.

Comment Re:Silly (Score 1) 222

Not only do they get the road names wrong, they also get important info such as weight limits wrong. My BIL, who was the civil engineer for an Ohio county, used to complain that Google maps was sending semi-trucks down a road to a bridge with a weight limit that could not handle the load. A semi that approached the bridge then found itself in a spot where turning around was next to impossible. IIRC, they fixed the issue with a road sign that told semis no go since they could not get Google to correct their map.

Comment Re: "Trade issue" my ass (Score 1) 229

I woke up on April 17, 2009 and discovered I was Canadian. Canadian citizenship laws have become rather relaxed. My Mom was born in New Brunswick in 1931 in a house that is now part of King's Landing. Because Canada had no citizenship law until 1947, she was technically a British Overseas Citizen. The family moved to Detroit during the depression. Mom became a US citizen in the 1950s and lost her Canadian citizenship as a result. Didn't matter anyway for me because Canada only recognized citizenship if your father was Canadian. That was fixed in 1977. But then in 2009 Canada restored Mom's citizenship and gave it to me as well. But under the 2009 law, I could not pass it on to my kids because I wasn't born in Canada. Looking at your links, that requirement seems to have been relaxed.

Comment Re:Trained on human written content... (Score 2) 80

It has been known for a long time that the behavior exhibited here is sub-optimal. Reputation effects have been shown to matter in games that are played for more than a single turn. An agent that backstabs on one turn cannot be trusted during future turns. Tit for tat, a strategy of cooperation, followed until another player backstabs and then punishing the backstabber, followed by an attempt at collaboration again is the strategy with the highest payout. In a long running game, that should eventually settle into cooperation for longer periods rather than what is described here which seems to be lots of unnecessary attempts to screw over the other guy. See, for example, The Evolution of Cooperation, by David Axelrod, 1984.

My PhD microeconomics classes in the mid 1980s had a hefty dose of game theory looking into these kinds of problems for oligopolistic markets where each agent used its observations of other agents' pricing to help set its own pricing. The result was that you could get prices set by each agent that looked collusive even though the agents had not explicitly talked to one another.

This shows an important distinction between LLMs and real profit maximizing agents. The LLMs don't seem to be able to learn over time what is the best long run objective function. Statistical token streams don't give rise to any real self-analysis where an agent asks itself if the strategy it is using is the best strategy or could be improved. I'll bet that a simple deterministic program that uses observations of other agents pricing coupled with tit for tat punishment and which never explicitly talks to competitors would beat programs like Claude hands down at a profit maximizing game.

Comment EFF On Phone Searches (Score 1) 182

Cousin of mine is a lawyer for EFF who works on 4th Amendment border searches of phones. These links don't address the issue of the duress password, but here is the EFF on the latest court ruling on phone searches by Customs and Border Protection. But other court rulings have had different outcomes. Seems to be an area that will have to percolate up the appeals chain to be resolved.

Comment I have been disappeared. (Score 1) 45

After a decade or so on FB, I was booted off. They told me I had to prove I wasn't a bot by sending them a video. I declined. I was on FB because it was a convenient way to keep in touch with old friends now scattered across the globe. My friends knew who I was. There is no reason I would need to prove anything to anyone. FB seems to have deleted my account and 10 years worth of posts. None of my friends can find me anymore and I cannot log in. I have been disappeared. Oh well.

Comment ESR Is Not Understood By Devs or Their Management (Score 1) 55

Each time I log into my Vanguard brokerage account using Firefox 140.12.0esr which was the previous esr from Mozilla, I'm greeted with a message that tells me I should really be using the most current browser both for security and features.

I dinged them on it last week via their chat link and yesterday I received a call from their tech support. The guy had no idea what the esr version was and told me that they would not support it. I tried to explain using many of the points in the post, but it seemed to have gone in one of his ears and immediately out the other.

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