Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Genetic counseling for your best possible kids? (Score 1) 41

I'm having trouble interpreting your reply, but it sounds like you are advocating for active forms of genetic intervention whereas I have fairly strong reservations against such intrusions. Rather I think the right to reproduce should be guaranteed, but we can legitimately look at how the dice landed before an actual human being is involved... Ma Nature's evolutionary approach is basically blind and the bad shuffles merely become food and fertilizer faster.

But I may be an evolutionary extremist. For example, I can imagine keeping frozen embryos as a kind of reproductive insurance for cases where your child doesn't live to reproductive age... Plus special insurance for new mutations provided at a governmental level.

Comment You get what you didn't pay for? (Score 1) 38

My main reaction to this article was "Yet another reason not to use Firefox on my smartphone". (Main reasons are privacy and security concerns. I prefer to keep some eggs in separate baskets. Another reason is resource demands on the smaller device.)

However your FP triggered a different question, though I also feel a bit rude to ask you for clarification and thereby exploit your hard reading of the full story beyond the Slashdot summary. Nothing above you about the google, so...

Based mostly on your FP, I think the full story here is that Firefox took money to work the google's Gemini more deeply into Firefox. I certainly understand the google's motivation even though so many of the Gemini results cannot be understood. And I even understand that Firefox's motive is clear enough given how broken their business model is.

However I always approach such "new feature" stories from the perspective of "Would I pay for that?" And the answer is almost always negative. I'm not saying that I could pay as much as the google, but if a LOT of people agree with me and we all chipped in, then maybe we could have more of the features we want and fewer of the features we hate. Firefox has implemented a number of features that I would pay to go away...

Too bad we don't live in such a world, eh? We just have to suffer slings and arrows of outrageous features that we have to adapt to. Okay, I do like learning new things, but not so much when they are bad new things being rammed down my browser's throat.

Comment Genetic counseling for your best possible kids? (Score 1) 41

On the one hand, the negative moderation and your comment make me wonder if that was a situation where anonymity was justified.

On the other hand, I'm wondering if his use of anonymity encouraged his post to go overboard?

Me? I was looking for references to genetic counseling, but you might be in favor of dead children. The way Ma Nature sees things involves equilibrium, and the equilibrium calls for more dead babies in the sense of having kids who don't reproduce. The math is actually quite simple. The genes are shuffled at random, so half the children are luckier than average and half aren't. The "natural' solution is four or more kids for each couple, but only two of them live long enough to reproduce. And yet parents tend to dislike that approach. (Threatening to go overboard, but I would argue babies are so helpless that our love for them has to be in some sense excessive or absolutely none of them would survive.)

Comment It's a brainworm! (Score 1) 97

Kind of hard to interpret your FP, but that's how "the rush to FP" works, isn't it? The "it" in your Subject must mean "gibberish" or "commit the act of spewing gibberish", but I'm focusing on the "reason" part as an implicit question about why. On that basis I react negatively to your simplistic and absolutely dismissive answer. And I offer my Subject as an answer to your implicit question.

I do sort of agree with your negative sentiments towards LLMs, but I think they cannot be dismissed so easily for two main reasons. One is that so many people are eager to find an oracle and they eagerly want to believe whatever their favorite genAI says, up to the point of rationalizing hallucinatory gibberish. Never forget that "People believe what they want to believe." (I think the first time I heard that was from Dr Bill Martin about 50 years ago, but it's still true and even seems to be getting worse.)

The second reason is that the blending effect of the massive input tends to make the LLM output sound plausible just because of its similarity to "the center of mass of" the training data. Whatever the genAI says, it always sounds like something you've heard before. Or more likely like many things you've heard many times.

But my reaction was that the specific problem of this story is more like a brainworm. Usually that's a song or musical phrase that gets stuck in your head, but it can be an image or idea that becomes a kind of fixation. Therefore I am quite interested in how these brainworms are triggered because the triggers might work on humans, too. If so, I'm sure the applied psychologists are already hard at work figuring out how to abuse us with that new technique. Least malevolently for selling us a different brand of toothpaste but at the worst levels pushing stuff like building support for civil wars. Can you imagine "We've got to sink the Bismark" mutated to "We've got to sink Chicago"? (Did I just trigger a brainworm? Long time since I've heard that song...) [And then I searched this discussion for any mention of brainworms, but there was only a kind of reverse reference in a sig...]

By the way, I also think this topic is related to how facial recognition can be poisoned with a recognition icon. Some years ago they discovered how to make a small image that when included in a larger image would trigger recognition of a particular person without regard to the rest of the image. My memory is already fuzzy, but they essentially distilled the signature of a person and then included that signature in any input image to create a high probability match without regard to the actual faces that actually appeared in the image. And now I just thought of a funny game to play with the technique. Put one on your forehead, a different one on your right cheek and a third on your left cheek and you become three people depending on which angle they look at your face. Scatter them about and you could become a multitude?

Comment Re:software abandonment (Score 1) 65

the only think that doesn't "work" as vivo claims, at least that I can remember at the moment, is that season passes got sloppy on rescheduled programs--sometines it catches the reschedule, and other times it doesn't.

The rest are dropped features--some outright, like suggestions and continuous recording, and others hidden behind an "upgrade", like the ability to record all series premiers.

They've dropped everything that distinguishes a tiro from any other dvd--well, except for needing to pay them for s subscription, I suppose. And their rf remote control is nice; hopefully I can get it to talk to the pi for mythic (although realistically, I'd usually run it through my appletv and that remote)

Comment Re:Good that UK is building more nuclear power pla (Score 1) 56

You need things that are powered by BATTERIES if nuclear power (or any other type of electricity) is going to fix the climate problems.

You have posted anti-battery propaganda.

Therefore I conclude you actually don't care one bit about nuclear power and are just trying to be a nay-sayer. Good day.

Comment Re:We need to sign the good stuff (Score 2) 33

I do believe "authentic" watermarks would help a lot. They will have to be locked to a lot of details about the file, you will not be able to color correct, resize, crop, or change the compression method. Probably allow cutting movies between frames however. Some one-way writing of the watermark is put into the camera, with the decoding key/result added to a database that does anything it can to insure only actual cameras are registered.

Watermarks people want to be remove can be made much harder by making the test for the watermark much more expensive, slow, and/or locked down so only authorized users can run it. Videos detected with the watermark are remembered so any similar-enough video also acts like it has the watermark, even if it has been manipulated enough to remove it. It also has to be very hard to create the watermark by anybody other than the registered creator so people can't use this to reject real videos.

Slashdot Top Deals

The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong -- until the next person quits or is fired.

Working...