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Comment I hate this cliche. (Score 0) 10

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through the cracks is trivially predictable. It's the expected behavior. Successfully reconnecting a whole ton of little blood vessels and nerves is fairly exotic medicine; predicting that thing will go poorly without substantial follow-up is trivial even by washout premed standards.

This isn't to say that it isn't ghastly, or that I could imagine being in that position; but 'unthinkable' is closer to being a claim of unpredictability or unknowability; which is wholly unwarranted. None of this was unthinkable; but nobody really cared to check or wanted to know all that much.

Comment Re:2 out of 10 - Could do better. (Score 1) 142

Cars already have odometers which record and show mileage, they already have annual inspections where the value from the odometer is checked and recorded and there are already legal penalties for tampering with the odometer. It would be trivial to pull that data out of the existing database and levy taxes on the vehicle owner based on that.

Comment Re:UK arrests 30 people a day for speech (Score 1) 45

If you have a "diverse" group than an inherent part of diversity is that some of the group will disagree with diversity and even be hostile to the greater good of the group.
There are many who perceive countries that welcome immigrants to be gullible idiots that they can take advantage of, and will take advantage while it's beneficial to them and then quickly abandon that country if it's no longer to their advantage.

So you can only benefit from limited diversity, the members of the group must still have common goals and values otherwise they'll be detrimental to the group as a whole.

Comment Re:Easy Fix... (Score 1) 38

Especially when basically all methods of sabotaging cables(except possibly very near shore) are 'remote'/disposable; if only at the tech level of 'put anchor on rope because water deep'. Nobody is going to give a damn about losing an inert metal chunk.

Reportedly, none of that is public, the business of tapping a fiber line underwater is considerably more fiddly, and enough mines might make that a hassle; but it would also make install and repair far more expensive and probably just theatre when you consider the risk that someone at the telco isn't updating their ASAs.

Comment Re:AI as a sacred prestige competition (Score 2) 26

I think the parent commenter was proposing an analogy to the various temples-overtaken-by-jungle and cathedrals-and-hovels societies; where the competing c-suites of the magnificent seven and aspirants suck our society dry to propitiate the promised machine god.

I have to say; datacenters will not make for terribly impressive ruins compared to historical theological white elephant projects. Truly, the future archeologists will say, this culture placed great value in cost engineered sheds for the shed god.

Comment Re:Air cooling (Score 1) 26

At least for new builds/major conversions; it's often a matter of incentives.

There's certainly some room for shenanigans with power prices; but unless it's an outright subsidy in-kind you normally end up paying something resembling the price an industrial customer would. Water prices, though, vary wildly from basically-free/plunder-the-aquifer-and-keep-what-you-find stuff that was probably a bad idea even when they were farming there a century or two ago; to something that might at least resemble a commercial or residential water bill.

If the purpose is cooling you can (fairly) neatly trade off between paying for it in power and paying for it in water; and when the price differs enormously people usually choose accordingly if they can get away with it. In the really smarmy cases they'll even run one of the power-focused datacenter efficiency metrics and pat themselves on the back for their bleeding edge 'power usage effectiveness'(just don't ask about 'water usage effectiveness').

You can run everything closed loop; either dumping to air or to some large or sufficiently fast moving body of water if available; but the electrical costs will be higher; so you typically have to force people to do that; whether by fiat or by ensuring that the price of water is suitable.

Comment CPU - GPU - ASIC (Score 2) 33

GPUs are designed for graphics, for anything else they're basically a general purpose CPU that just by chance happens to be better than other general purpose processors for this specific task. Once the market becomes big enough, someone will expend the resources to develop ASICs which will outperform the general purpose GPUs.
Exactly the same thing happened with bitcoin.

Comment I'm not that optimistic. (Score 1) 99

Even if the prediction of comparatively controlled impact is accurate; I think it's worth considering just how grim it is likely to be; not in purely economic terms; but in the character of the work.

Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thing from dealing with someone who is merely ignorant; but learning, especially if they are enthusiastic about it.

Even if everything is fine in terms of job pace and security and all; that seems like it is shaping up to be a really hellish aspect of dealing with bots. The experience is sort of a somewhat weirder simulation of dealing with a chirpy, people-pleasing, very-junior type; except they are far more likely to lie than to admit ignorance; and they never learn(possibly the SaaS guys hoovering up your interactions in the background will make the next iteration better, possibly not, progress seems to have slowed considerably after only a brief period of improvement; but a given release is more or less full groundhog day).

That seems like a nightmare. Everything that sucks about teaching or mentoring; but precisely none of the rewarding aspects.

Comment Re:We're in the group (Score 1) 214

That's the inherent problem with classes, you have to teach 30+ students the same but they're not all capable of learning at the same pace or in the same way.

Kids who can't keep up fall behind, while those that are faster get bored and start to misbehave so they get labelled as troublemakers.
You also have the peer pressure from other kids, who will mock or even bully the top and bottom percentages of the class respectively, discouraging them from participating.

Catering to each child and teaching them at their own pace is obviously going to work best, but it doesn't scale to a school system.
If one or both parents is free to teach the kids that's great, but there are many cases where they aren't - some parents don't give a shit and are happy to send their kids off to school, many parents have to work and simply don't have time to teach the kids even if they would be willing/able to do so, and some simply don't have the ability to teach.

Comment How cute. (Score 2) 23

It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 1) 210

What AI can't do is to take a whole feature off the backlog and implement it. Yet.

It can in some cases, depending on various factors like the codebase it's working with, the nature of the feature and how well you describe it.

You will often need to refine the prompts, or prompt it further to address bugs or things it decided to implement in a strange way. It also tends to work better with code bases that are smaller or more modular, and with code that was developed using an ai assistant rather than existing code bases.

You're right about it being like junior developers, it's good for getting mundane things done but does often need a lot of guidance.

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