Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Wasn't an offensive joke (Score 0) 19

She posted kill all the Mexicans and they freaked out because school shootings are so easy to do because firearms are so readily available and we aren't allowed to take them away from people who are irresponsible or mentally ill.

This is about gun control and school shootings not AI but you're not allowed to talk about gun control so here we are.

Comment This has nothing to do with AI (Score 0) 19

Except that they're using an automated system to try and detect School shooters.

This is a gun control issue not a AI or technology issue.

The problem is we don't have a solution to gun control in this country. The other countries solved mass shootings by just taking all the guns. If you just take a few of the assault rifles that doesn't do shit, Columbine happened during the assault rifle ban

The correct solution is to have a process for taking firearms out of reach of mentally ill people but that means taking firearms away from their parents and for a wide variety of extremely emotional reasons we are not going to do that.

And I don't think just locking the parents up is going to work either. There is little or no evidence that extended punishment works as a deterrent even for obvious crimes. Not that I've opposed for charging them with manslaughter.

So right now the solution is a bot monitor is everything you do and if they think you're violent you are relentlessly punished. No actual help of course. We never help anyone in this country we only hurt them.

Our hypercompetitive civilization is not going to survive. But there's no way we can get away from it because we were all taught during our most malleable time that competition solves all problems. It's called 4 to 14 look it up...

But it means that instead of actually helping people that might become School shooters our solution is to hurt them as much as possible in the hopes that they just go away.

That doesn't work when you have tens of millions of them because you've abandoned so many people to poverty and misery.

I guess what I'm saying is we're just fucked in human civilization is going to collapse and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do anything about it because we are a fucking bunch of dumbass 12-year-olds.

Comment Dude this shit was put in place by Nixon (Score 1) 60

It's mid-70s stuff. It was part of moving the manufacturing that couldn't be automated over to China and Japan.

The factory workers were fucked either way because automation was coming for their jobs. But nobody likes to talk about or think about technological unemployment because the moment you do people start braying like donkeys repeating the word Luddite over and over and over again occasionally stopping to belch out a comment about buggy whips.

I used to wonder why Europe let the Russians put Trump in office but now I know those dumb motherfuckers think they can take over from America as the predominant global currency.

Short-term China's going to steamroll them and long-term has the American empire collapses we're going to invade Europe and Russia and even eventually china.

Because that's what dying empires have to do. You expand your borders to loot other countries so that you can fill the coffers back home because you're all you're incompetent mismanagement.

Of course this time we've got nukes so that's going to be fun. Said it before I will say it again I just wish I had died before all this crap.

Comment With the gerrymandering in Texas (Score -1, Troll) 41

And also Louisiana and well every other Red State I think it's safe to say you aren't going to be getting anything through Congress.

It's possible Gavin newsome has the cojones to get the Democrat governors together to counteract the gerrymandering with their own gerrymandering, but after so many years of my party rolling over I'll believe it when I see it.

Still if he wants to be president he doesn't have a lot of options. At the rate we are going there aren't going to be elections in 2026 let alone 2028.

The funny thing is assuming the Democrats don't pull off and upset a whole shitload of people who have been voting Republican since Reagan or about to find out what that means. Starting with their 401ks going to the Elon j Musk memorial trillionaire fund.

Comment It's okay they can still just convict everybody (Score 2, Insightful) 19

Like they did with those postal workers.

What I like about criminal justice systems is that they are all absolutely fucked up and terrible but they each have their own unique flavor of fucked up and terrible.

That's what happens when you focus on punishment instead of harm reduction. But a lot of people find punishment fun and not in the kinky fun way in the sadistic way.

Comment Re:Welcome to the +1 troll club (Score 1) 91

Everything is political now

Mike Masnick wrote an article on Techdirt recently about why he’s leaning in to “political” coverage on the site. To put it succinctly:

When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

I get that there are people who might want to escape politics in the safe haven of technology. I don’t understand people who still insist that it’s possible to participate in and use FOSS apolitically. Too many things are intertwined to be able to separate the development and distribution of FOSS from politics.

Anyway, go read the full post by Masnick. And the rest of Techdirt, too. I’m continually impressed by his take on the tech world. I don’t always agree, but I always find his coverage worth reading.

Tab Overflow: Markdown for timelines, AI for 78s, the superpower of being glue, and maddog on Red Hat Still working on the next installment of the Clone Wars, but in the meantime some interesting things I’ve stumbled on the past few days. AI Audio Challenge: Audio Restoration of 78rpm Records — The Internet Archive is looking for “a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records” in its 78rpm archive and clean them up. They have 1,600 examples of 78s that were cleaned up manually by humans, and are hoping that they can be used to train a program to do the work in an automated fashion. See also: AI@IA — Extracting Words Sung on 100 year-old 78rpm records.I have a lot of concerns how AI* is and will be used overall, but automating restoration and preservation of materials seems like a really good use of these tools. (*Some folks are very pedantic about terms like AI. I am not one of them, so I’m just being lazy and saying “AI.” Sorry.) Valuing undervalued superpowers: Being Glue — Great post on julia ferraioli’s blog about “Being Glue” by Tanya Reilly. Part of julia’s “Influential Articles” series, this one looks at the importance of “glue work” and how it gets overlooked or considered non-essential. Instead, the argument here is that glue work skills are superpowers even though doing a lot of glue work means you’re less likely to succeed career-wise.If you’ve done any job interviewing lately you may recognize questions that ask you to highly your individual, personal accomplishments and not what you’ve done to help teams succeed. You can have 1,000 instances of how you’ve helped a project or organizations succeed but nobody cares. They want the big thing you launched, etc. IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view — If you’re keeping up with the Clone Wars, this post by Jon “maddog” Hall is required reading. Yes, he addresses the “freeloader” question. Decided to make you read the full post to get there, though. It’s worth the time. I’ll just say this, no disagreement registered. Markwhen for Markdown timelines: Happened to catch this on Hacker News, a Markdown-driven calendar and planning app. I’ve been looking for something to display timelines around the Clone Wars posts but hadn’t found anything great. This might fit the bill. Note that the site is geared towards the web service and editor, but you can install the CLI utility and generate your own timelines as HTML.



why yes, I do have an LLM training on my posts, why do you ask?

Comment Our courts side with whoever has the most money (Score 1) 138

And while copyright holders have cash AI is worth trillions based on the possibility that it could replace most if not all white collar workers.

At best this will hit the supreme Court where they will declare that it's fair use. The decades of precedence around storing the contents of copyrighted material won't matter.

There is no way something is valuable is AI is going to get derailed by a little thing like the rights of the copyright holders. This is happening and we all need to get comfortable with it.

We could do something about the antisocial aspects but well, I don't think we have it in us. It requires way too much deviation from the things we were taught during the critical 4 to 14 age demographic...

Comment Welcome to the +1 troll club (Score 0) 91

It's an exclusive club of members who achieved a positive troll mod on slashdot.

The easiest way to get into the club is to point out that old people are in charge and the world is a hellscape therefore old people, who let's remember go on endlessly about personal responsibility, our responsible for the state of the world.

It's Schrodinger's boomer. They're in a quantum superposition where they are both completely blameless while at the same time completely in charge.

Comment Re:Life isn't as cool or dramatic as that (Score 1) 60

Honestly I don't think the NBA thing matters so much as legalizing stock buy backs in the first place.

I think the only reason it took so long for Intel to go all in on them is because they were making so much money hand over fist in the '80s through the early 2000s because of the . com bubble and because they didn't have any viable competition whatsoever.

Don't forget all the antitrust violations Intel did. The only reason they aren't the only company for x86 CPUs is because Microsoft propped up AMD because Microsoft knows what happens when there is only one company and one game in town.

Comment Sure it was (Score 0) 60

It still is you just don't understand the first thing about the American economy.

America is an empire. Our military is the iron fist. That's pretty obvious and even you've got to understand that.

But what about the Velvet glove? It sure is shit isn't foreign policy we're not very good at that.

It's our monetary policy. We use our national debt to lock people into our currency. The enormous military means that it's a safe bet because nobody's going to drag us into a war. And the big threat to a currency is wartime spending look at Russia. Short-term economic bubble that collapses and explodes the second to fighting stops...

So we use the debt to artificially inflate the value of the American dollar and then we bring in trillions of dollars of imports for a fraction of their actual value.

If you haven't figured it out I will spell it out in simple terms, this is imperial tribute.

The idea that we are extracting tribute is so counter to everything you were taught in the critical 4 to 14 age demographic that it's basically impossible for most people to wrap their heads around.

I did not figure this out on my own much much much smarter people that nobody listens to besides me figured it out and explained it to me in simple terms.

And now Donald Trump is basically fucking that system over in order to have a national sales tax.

Within 10 years you will no longer be able to afford a nice fancy suv. Hell you might be taking the bus to work.

And you've got a 50/50 shot of losing your house. If you're retired you are fucked because they are coming for your retirement. They will raid your 401k and if you take the money out they'll find a way to get it anyway. You could put it in a bank but that's going to end up getting eaten alive by inflation when they artificially lower interest rates without solving any of the underlying economic problems...

We are at the point where the Republican party no longer believes we are going to have elections and they are ruling by Fiat through Donald Trump. This will continue for at least another seven and a half years assuming he doesn't drop dead. Well into Donald Trump's third term.

It's possible the Democrats will somehow through sheer miracles put the brakes on this but I have serious doubts. They are just up against too much and they kind of need some poking and prodding from the left wing but the left wing is too busy being pissy little bitches too do anything helpful. They would rather spend their time bitching about Nancy pelosi then stopping fascists from killing them...

Anyway if you are at all anyone who might be targeted you need to get a passport right now. I mean as in if you even have so much as a slightly large nose or maybe one of those afros associated with white boys now would be a good time to make sure you can get out of the country. And if you're queer yeah, you are are they going into hiding or into a camp.

As for the rest of us half will be homeless with all of our assets extracted from us in order to create trillionaires and the other half will be struggling to afford cat food. We will not own cats.

Comment Re:"our diverse ecosystem" (Score 1, Insightful) 60

It is funny to watch you guys just fall in line behind the heritage foundation and Donald Trump as their mouthpiece.

Not that I want to defend this fucker. His shortsighted stock buy backs fucked the company hard.

But the part I find funny and what's almost certain to get me modded down is how Russia is no longer a viable threat having proven that they can't even take over a nation of 20 million without throwing half their population into the meat grinder.

But we need a big scary threat in order to keep the military industrial complex going and to keep you scared and to keep you from questioning why shit never gets better in your life.

The only other real candidate would be India and since they do all our it work they're out the door.

So it's cold war 2.0 time here. Of course we have every indication that we're about to hand nuclear launch codes over to religious lunatics so I'm not so sure that war is going to stay cold this time.

But we're all over 50 so what do we care we're not going to get drafted right? And screw those kids they never call anyway!

Comment Life isn't as cool or dramatic as that (Score 4, Insightful) 60

This is just a banality of evil.

Intel spent the last 15 years doing non-stop stock buy Backs instead of investing in their company .

As a result they only had enough money to bet on one or two technologies and if either of those didn't make gangbusters money they were fucked.

Neither of the two technologies they have been working on have paid off. And they didn't blunder into anything amazing through sheer luck with smaller investments because trying to get into those spaces like the ultra low power mobile CPUs or competing with Qualcomm on cell phone modems was always going to be incredibly expensive and starved for cash from stock buy backs.

This is a symptom of the crap that started in the '80s where we started to dismantle everything we put in place after the Great depression.

I'm just glad we aren't doing any of the things that historians say caused the last Great depression like engaging in widespread incredibly risky integration of high-risk assets into Wall Street and main Street or having droughts or doing a massive and utterly pointless trade war in order to create a national sales tax or....

Comment Hey guys, I'm building a machine (Score 0) 91

So I am building a machine that takes the energy from Boomer threads and converts it into electricity and these kind of threads really messed that up.

The sudden increase in power cause the machine to explode and it's taken out about a half a city block.

Anywho could we maybe cut back on these threads for just a little bit while I work out the kinks? Thanks.

Comment I have a much more frightening idea for you (Score -1, Flamebait) 91

Civilization isn't declining or ascending. It's not a straight line up.

We have periodic bouts of civilization improving and growing.

And then periodically we just decide to burn it all to hell because of reasons.

The civilization you are enjoying right now his basically only existed for about give or take 75 to 85 years.

It's basically a post world war II innovation.

If you go back further you quickly run into the industrial revolutions and the workhouses and various forms of de facto slavery and all sorts of other horrifying things. And you do not have to go very far back to get to that, like at best 50 years.

There is absolutely no reason that the things you enjoy about civilization have to endure. Think of it like a car. What happens to your car if you stop doing your oil changes?

We stopped doing the basic maintenance on our civilization. So yeah bad shit's going to happen and best case scenario we are going to get techno feudalism. Worst case scenario we are going to hand a nuclear launch codes to a bunch of theocratic religious lunatics who think they are protected by a golden dome.

Then again the end of the human race might be better than the techno feudal civilization guys like Peter thiel and Elon Musk have planned for us. I definitely do not want to live in that world. It is somehow worse than actual feudalism.

Slashdot Top Deals

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Working...