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Comment Patrimony and Hypergamy are real (Score 1) 195

This isn't really news. It has been proven time and time again that hetero-female hypergamy and hetero-male patrimony exist and have real reproducable effects across cultures. It is instinctively understood by humans cross culturally that young healthy fertile women are the most valueable individual humans and that men need to be "managed" by society and civilisation in order to "exploit" them to build and maintain a culture. This is why women get more lenience when they commit crimes and this is why men are forced to use money or other indirect metrics like of value such as military or academic rank to gain a place in society. If those metrics no longer carry, men stear clear because "useless" (see contemporary US academia for details on that effect). People in currency-bound civilisations know that a man who's made himself decently useful "needs" more money than a woman to make his efforts worth while for him to establish his place in society. If we guys want lad(y/ies) _and_ offspring, kitesurfing and motorbiking all day won't really cut it for most of us if we can't establish a source of excess resources to offer up to the ladies.

This is also an evolutionary mechanism to keep men in check. If that doesn't happen, you get men organizing themselves and turning away and and eventually against society. Fascism is basically nothing other than the hetero-male tribe instinct going into survival-mode. If you don't want 15%+ of grown men going that route and _literally_ leveling the playing field for a hard "society reboot" you have to pay them and give them (a chance with) women and reproduction. ... Or sedate them with videogames and internet-porn, as the case may be. The latter will likely only work for so long. QED.

Comment Mission critical software? FOSS only. (Score 1) 91

I consider anyone who thinks otherwise an amateur and don't trust their judgement.

I would give some leniance in very special situations where there is a clear, thoroughly planed migration path to FOSS and the problem has very good reasons to require a currently existing tried and true proprietary solution that is cohesive and losely coupled to everything else in the company. Something like that however requires deciders to know what they're doing and those joints usually have their systems under control and can tell a vendor to go and f*ck themselves with confidence if anyone gets pissy or turns up with a fresh absurd future pricing table. Organisations like these usually are 95% FOSS already and basically follow the same rule stated above, for obvious reasons.

Those who don't get 20+ years of this VMWare, Oracle, SAP, whatever sh*t we've been seeing ever since the dawn of time.

Bottom line: Mission critical? FOSS only. Break that rule and I'm getting ready to cash out of your gig ASAP.

Comment Quick question (Score 1) 46

[Fundamental physics has never been more dead] As Sabine Hossenfelder accurately observed in her latest video

Quoting Sabine Hossenfelder as anything just outs you as anti-science.

Quick question: Is she wrong?

The previous post made a point, which you totally sidestepped.

I have no opinion on Sabing Hossenfelder either way, but I get the impression that physics has largely stalled over the last few decades.

So... I'm just wondering, Is she wrong?

Comment There's different types of video (Score 3, Interesting) 90

Teslas, BMW's, Rivian, and Mercedes have cameras all around the vehicle that are always on, and if a security incident is detected they will save the video from a few minutes before the incident to right after the incident.

A quick search shows that Tesla theft (by example) is 90% to 99% lower than the national average, and I assume the other types are similar.

People do not stop stealing cars because of cameras. But I guess Flock is desperate for some good press, so we get propaganda lies now.

People do not steal cars because of *flock* cameras, they are always on, and the data is available to law enforcement with no oversight.

Personal vehicles save video locally, and it's only used when an actual crime is committed.

I'm in favor of public surveillance that's kept local to whichever user, in the manner of a ring doorbell video (if that were kept local, which it is not). It prevents crime without violating rights - the burglar shouldn't have been on the property to begin with.

This leads to an interesting thought. Flock is a company that keeps videos across the country and tracks vehicles, and soon to include facial recognition. Flock cameras would be entirely acceptable if the video were "owned" by someone local to the actual camera, so that police would have to query the owner to get a video.

I'm not sure who the "owner" would be in this case, but hypothetically if the camera were on the telephone pole outside of a house, if we consider the video owned by the property owner then the possibility of a rights violation would go down precipitously.

Just a thought, and an under-developed one.

We need new ideas to help solve new problems, here is one to chew on.

Comment Science denier, anyone? (Score -1, Troll) 83

The reasonable conclusion is that the Greens are more intelligent than you. ... And I think that's probably the worst insult I've ever used on Slashdot *pats self on back

A couple of things about the issue.

Firstly, it's usually explained using insult and hyperbole. That's not a way to get others on your side. There's an old saying "it's not enough to be correct, you also have to be effective". It's usually used on... wait for it... nerds, who are typically very smart but cannot communicate well, and who fall back on insults when they cannot communicate well.

Secondly, for some reason no one wants to debate the issue. The mantra is "the science is settled", which isn't really how science works, but there are STILL gaping logical holes in the entire edifice that no one wants to clear up. Such as: other than rising global temperatures, the theory hasn't made testable predictions of any consequence that have actually come true. For example, in 2005 after Katrina, someone noted that "due to climate change, hurricanes will become stronger and more frequent", and then we had about a decade of no major hurricanes.

Thirdly, and this is the one that really bothers me: even if the science is settled, even if the conclusions are correct, climate change does not indicate what should be done. I've reviewed probably two or three dozen experiments aiming to mitigate the effects over the years, they ALL had the best of intentions, and they've ALL failed, sometimes spectacularly, and always adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than if we had done nothing.

In the meantime, since 2000 when Al Gore brought the issue into the public eye, I've seen the rise of solar panel farms, windmills are everywhere in the midwest, and we've gone from about 2% renewable (year 2000, mostly hydropower, and discounting wood) to about 30% today (also discounting wood). New technology is taken up at an exponential rate, so expect those numbers to rise faster in the near future.

Several technologies have been developed that we're right on the edge of deploying (carbon capture by electrolysis, fusion energy generation, robotic labor (various companies)) or in the middle of deploying (EVs, various companies) that should help enormously.

And finally, the issue has become political. The premier maker of EVs, the one who made EVs that people want to buy, is vilified by the political side that wants you to believe in climate change. A sect of that side wants to replace capitalism with communism, even though the resource utilization of that model is one third to one half of what we have today, and would slow down the innovation and advancement that might help us solve the issue.

But if you're not on board, you're a science denier.

It took 40 years to convince everyone that smoking was bad for us, now we have to endure the people who think they're right and have to insult us because we don't believe them.

Stop badgering us about it, it's not about science it's about economics, and it won't be a problem in a decade or two.

(Note for the observant: This post is rife with observable trends and verifiable facts, so expect the other side to downvote it into oblivion, because that's the way to convince people.)

Comment CS was the standard path .... (Score 1) 152

... for "I want to program for a living.". CS is way more than that, but that was the reason many people chose it. Since AI now can code as good as humans and explain to a human what it's doing, studying CS to program is less of a thing now.
CS and it's"applied math"thing won't go away, but that was less people will study it sounds quite plausible IMHO.

Comment Distributed responsibility and transparency (Score 4, Interesting) 286

This is an example of one of the legitimate challenges facing the increased integration of AI into warfare.

The more fundamental problem is distributed responsibility and lack of transparency.

Until recently, drone strikes required a long sequence of command decisions, starting with intel gathering, analysis, decision, orders, and remote command of the device. No one is directly responsible when something goes wrong, the failure is distributed among many players with the result that no one has to bear the consequences.

For example, the "collateral murder" incident, where apache helicopters gunned down civilians and journalists.

In normal situations, we have Derek Chauvin, who was an individual who caused the death of one man. He went to trial, the evidence was examined, and guilt was assigned. Trials are more-or-less held in the public light, and journalists and interested parties can examine court records and in some cases reanalyze evidence (not all physical evidence is kept or available, but for example, DNA evidence can sometimes be reexamined).

That's how it's supposed to happen.

Contrast that with erroneously ordered drone strikes that hit civilians instead of legitimate targets.

I suppose the biggest, most egregious example would be George Bush taking the country to war because Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction", and of course one were found, and the security services swore up and down that they told him there were none, but he stated "well, the message didn't get through".

And skated responsibility. Completely.

To bring this closer to home, software engineers implement all sorts of insecure, inconvenient, and privacy violating features with no moral pushback. Even if it's completely obvious that something is an anti-feature, people do it because a) their job depends on it, and b) it's someone else's decision. And if there's a breech and ten million social security numbers get made public, the company simply fixes the problem and continues. No responsibility is assigned.

I was satisfied to see videos of the "narco terrorist" boats get destroyed, and then the survivors killed. Not the actual killing, but just knowing that the event was recorded and analyzed in the public sphere, and there was a conversation about it, and it was investigated. That seems like it was handled the right way.

Death is permanent, it can't be undone. If we're going to kill people, regardless of whether it's AI or anything else, it should be transparent and put into the public discourse.

No one is assigned blame for screwing up, that's the more fundamental problem.

Comment People with mental illness like hats. (Score 1) 55

It keeps the head warm and improves mental performance. A warm head performs at a better rate. Like a warmed up body or the people doing hot yoga. I'm a more or less bald ADHD candidate and I wear buffs as "spare hair" and observe a similar effect.

There's a reason we keep ill and injured people warm.

Bottom line:
This sounds plausible IMHO.

Comment How it works (Score 1) 55

But how does that work?

Red light is thought to activate a regeneration mechanism within the body.

It interacts with some of the compounds in mitochondria that promotes healing and cellular recovery. It also has a biphasic effect: too little does nothing, too much does nothing, but the right amount can have therapeutic value.

Comment Could be true. (Score 1) 61

Since their whole shtick is blocking ads and trackers where they can it's likely that they get to first paint faster than other browsers. I use Brave as my daily driver and am reasonably happy with it. It has most of the blockage you need built right in.

The Web without a powerful stream buffer/blocker/anti track setup is basically unusable these days. I'm totally bedazzled whenever I see sorry ass normies using a regular browser without any of that. A nigh surreal experience.

Comment More BS Jobs. (Score 0) 63

Goes to show: Many (white collar bullshit) jobs are a social thing, not a productivity thing.
In ohter words: Using computer and AI is more and more a cultural technique rather than a job. Meaning we have more liberty when chosing what we want to do with our life and time.

Which, if you ask me, is actually a good thing. Let's hope this trend continues on a positive path.

Comment It doesn't matter if it's really AGI ... (Score 1) 189

... or not. What matters is, if it can replace the person with two non-trivial degrees at some highly qualified job. And to that I do believe we are closing in on. Seeing what current agents I ran install on my phone are capable of compared to just 6 months ago it pretty telling.

I'm getting ready to do something entirely different than senior web software development real soon now. Perhaps I will be needed as something like that until I retire, but I also won't be too surprised if my current type is positively obsolete in 2 years.

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