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Comment Holy shit, have some self awareness (Score 1) 73

My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

This doesn't pass the 'would you say the same thing if it wasn't your baby' test.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 113

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 113

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment correct incentives (Score 1) 146

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

Comment Re:Don't hate the player, hate the game (Score 1) 75

You're right, they could have made that choice. However, they would have priced themselves out of the market, as while they would have gained a small uptick in 'I want a cool Linux computer' sales, they would have faced a massive loss in 'I want a game console' and 'I want a Blu-Ray player' sales, which were the two primary drivers of PS3 sales.

Console price is king. There's a reason Sony's entire console launch presentation for the original PlayStation at E3 in 1995 was, and I quote, '$299.'

You can find it on YouTube, if you're interested.

Comment Re:Its very puzzling, isn't it? (Score 1) 97

While the energy source of wind and solar are free, building and maintaining the plants is not free.

If all they were building were a single 100MW data center, sure: renewables would be cheaper to build. But they evidently are planning a major campus that will consume most of the plant's 615 MW output over the next 25 years.

A solar installation, in a favorable location, capable of supplying 600MW around the clock (with battery backup) would have to be roughly 1800MW in capacity. It would be among the largest inthe world, on the order of ten thousand acres in size at a build cost of maybe 2 billion. The battery backup system to ensure 99.9% uptime would be 9x the size of the largest li-ion grid storage system ever built, and set you back on the order of 4-5 billion dollars.

While it's probably cheaper to go renewable than build a *new* nuclear plant, if you can reactivate and one for just two billion that looks like a bargain, if you have a use for all that power. Inability to save money by load following is the financial Achilles' heel of this generation of reactors, but if you have a guaranteed customer for most of your output, years in advance, that's as close to an ideal economic case for them as anything could be.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 2) 86

ToS is the strongest argument, but the distillers are not parties to the ToS. They get their data from data brokers. It is possible that data brokers are violating the ToS, but it would be hard to write ToS that precluded running queries for third parties without creating problems for consultancies and other businesses. Even presuming the ToS could be written to preclude the data brokers doing that, it doesn't affect the resulting model.

But the general shape of the argument brings us right back to unclean hands: we worked hard on this model and it's not fair for you to profit off our work in a way that doesn't have our permission.

Comment Re:Laws were broken. (Score 1) 160

The problem here is that when you turned on the TV for the first time and clicked the 'I accept' button, you agreed to the recording, and probably agreed that you'd be responsible for letting anybody else who might be in range of the TV know that they're subject to recording.

Is that going to hold up in court? Who knows, but can you afford to spend the money to find out? Somebody eventually will, and you'll get a coupon for twenty bucks off of a new TV as the settlement.

Comment Re:It's just like The Osbornes! (Score 1) 70

I think the fair-minded position is to see what people think when the documentary comes out. You're essentially arguing a negative here -- that there *can't* be anything of value that hasn't been said yet.

Also, I don't think saying something *new* is necessarily critical. Sometimes saying something obvious but in an interesting way is worthwhile.

In this case, Holmes gave access to the filmmaker. Obviously she has an agenda. If the filmmaker is smart, he has an agenda that's different from hers. If he knows his business he'll find something interesting to show you from that conflict.

Now looking at the trailer -- holy shit that woman gives off batshit crazy vibes. That's new to me. I expected her to be slick, persuasive, like Saruman in Lord of the Rings: someone. you'd need real strength of mind to resist being persuaded by. If I'd just handed someone like that my business card, I'd get it back on some pretext then head as fast as I could for the door.

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