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180710600
comment
byKisai
026 @04:08PM
(#65961486)
Attached to: 'Reverse Solar Panel' Generates Electricity at Night
"Radioisotope Thermoradiative Cell Power Generator"
This is intended as a space craft power source. As in satellites.
180694734
comment
byKisai
026 @07:41PM
(#65957874)
Attached to: Seven of the World's Ten Best-Selling Smartphones in 2025 Were iPhones
Samsung and ... Google.
Nobody else exists, or matters.
180665448
comment
byKisai
26 @11:04AM
(#65952396)
Attached to: How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
They made a huge mistake here. Destroying the book (there are literately scanners for scanning books without destroying the book) means that they no longer have the book they claim to have the right to use.
180660652
comment
byKisai
6 @02:26PM
(#65950638)
Attached to: Washington State May Mandate 'Firearm Blueprint Detection Algorithms' For 3D Printers
This feels like a political ploy where "you wouldn't vote against saving children would you?"
The "cloud" controlled ones could, or even be required that the file be submitted online for it to be compared to known weapon designs.
But that doesn't work for offline systems, and there's plenty of systems that already exist. Going back to the 80's.
The easiest way to prevent ghost guns from being made is by making ownership of equipment that can make it something that requires a license itself. The same way "printing money" can't be done with a laser printer, because the materials that money is made of is not something you can just go out and buy. No license, no access to materials.
But let's also be direct here, potato guns have been a thing for far longer. They are considered firearms in the same way airsoft guns are. An AI can not and will not know the difference between Airsoft and a real replica weapon. Hell these AI's think a bag of chips being held is someone holding a gun.
So the easiest way to reduce the ability to make a ghost gun is to require a license to obtain materials. If you want to order any 3d-printer ready material, you go to whatever store/website, enter your license number, enter the serial number of the printer, and the order will be recorded and tracked by the state. Someone who then is making a business of selling ghost guns would be easier to track because once one of the guns shows up, they analyze the material, and look against the database of who bought that material in the last 2 years (because 3d printer filament expires within 2 years.) Then they can do the rest of the detective footwork, like looking at who purchased from the person with a 3d printer.
180655600
comment
byKisai
6 @05:28PM
(#65948642)
Attached to: Work-From-Office Mandate? Expect Top Talent Turnover, Culture Rot
Here's the thing. The more "Corporate structure" a company has, the most waste is has.
There should never be more than 1 person running interference for anything. If I, J-random-IT-worker is talking to J-random-idiot-employee, I should be talking to HR not directly to them. Likewise I should not be running to the CEO for every stupid thing. This is what the "manager"'s entire existence is supposed to be, the person who schedules staff, makes sure staff like each other before putting them together on the same team, and so forth.
If you put someone who does not want to be there on an "in-office-mandate" you've just scrubbed your entire team with sandpaper. Likewise, if everyone wants to work remotely, you can't force them to, it will just cause a lot of conflicts. The people who work the best, in-person, have their own offices. The people who work on the noisy open-floor-office-plan, do not want to be there. They are more productive at home because it's quieter and less distractions to deal with.
So in large companies where you have managers upon managers before you get to the CEO, things start getting lost.
Your CEO, and Corporate board, should be talking directly with the managers of your teams. End point. If you have any additional layers, your company is too big and is wasting a lot of money on management. Companies that merge often tout the cost savings by removing redundant positions (eg HR, Legal, etc) but that's about where it ends, you end up adding so much extra overhead on the actual people doing the work the bigger the company gets, that the company eventually just dies. Corporations do not know how to do mitosis.
Companies should be splitting in half as as survival tactic, not getting bigger. All these huge media consolidations has had nothing but negative consequences for everyone involved with the companies. Internet service providers, likewise, have merged so many times to capture growth, that the customers who were customers of the better company, don't want to be part of the worse one who bought it, so eventually all that customer acquisition cost is wasted, and the market share goes back down.
That is why only Apple is a dominant player in mobile. All the other players rely on Google to not f*ck them. People who work for Apple, like to work for Apple. The complete opposite of Google, where google constantly tries to do sh*t with AI, making people feel extremely doomed about their job prospects of working there. If you can make an AI do it, then why do you need people in the office?
180655110
comment
byKisai
6 @03:25PM
(#65948442)
Attached to: US Congress Fails to Repeal 'Kill Switch' for Cars Mandate
It's a catch-22
Ideally, the kill switch exists, but the kill switch is not something that can be activated by LEO's, but only something that can be activated by the dealership. So they need to identify the vehicle, who owns it, and then ask the owner for permission to "kill it", and the dealership can hand over the frequency and password to LEO kill switch signal. No permission, no kill switch.
If someone reports their vehicle stolen, they can hand this information over so the dealership can disable the car before ends up in a shipping container to Africa. If LEO's are involved in a car chase, if the vehicle has been reported stolen, they can kill the car there. If it has not been reported stolen, report the vehicle to dispatch, dispatch can get someone to get ahold of the owner, and get permission to kill it. No permission, no kill.
Once a car is "killed" by the system, it can only be reset by the dealership.
180619328
comment
byKisai
26 @07:19AM
(#65936724)
Attached to: Netflix Wants Plots Explained Multiple Times Because Viewers Are on Their Phones, Matt Damon Says
Nah, if I could make the rules, I would make sure no film is ever made again.
Make everything multi-part drama's, not like a TV series, but as a 2, 4 or 6 hour "story" with firm breaks at every hour. Put that film production to good use to tell the story that needs to be told, and break it exactly where it needs to, and not these "it has to be exactly 90-110 minutes because god forbid seats are empty long enough in a theatre to clean it."
180619320
comment
byKisai
26 @07:17AM
(#65936720)
Attached to: Netflix Wants Plots Explained Multiple Times Because Viewers Are on Their Phones, Matt Damon Says
People won't do this for Netflix or Disney+ or any other streaming video (eg youtube)
The reason is simple, if it's not live, they can just pause and rewind it. Ruins immersion but if you want to make a video (or even a video game) and make sure people are paying attention you have to repeat plots points every 20 minutes.
Particularly with video games, you need to assume the player will need to pause even during dramatic story telling moments. So the best way to solve both issues is make sure that the viewer/player can hit pause without having to wait for a good place to pause, and still be able to remember where they left off even a week later.
Hence the only stuff that needs to not do that are films that are released to theatres before streaming. Television shows have PVR's so there's no point even doing bottle episodes anymore, just push out the entire story back to back to back, and if someone missed something they can go watch the previous episode on the PVR or VOD on Netflix or whatever. It's really only films that demand certain kinds of attention.
180618510
comment
byKisai
26 @02:39AM
(#65936458)
Attached to: Bank of England 'Must Plan For a Financial Crisis Triggered By Aliens'
More or less.
UAP's (UFO's) are pretty much a fiction, part of it owing to not understanding the physics of things, and part of it because the pilots of jets/planes and other high speed military craft are not scientists and don't think logically about werid stuff.
Like breaking "the speed of sound" people often don't realize creates a shockwave which causes damage. That's why you don't see any commercial aircraft at M1+, this is also why like "breaking the speed of light" is impossible, because if you could accelerate past Light Speed, stars would appear to stretch as you start seeing light go backwards toward the star. Or maybe light might just disappear behind you entirely since you're moving faster than it's being sent.
Yet the average military person doesn't understand stuff like this. They see objects moving in wierd directions and don't recognize that their movement is what's making it look like these objects are moving in unusual directions.
So most of the UAP stuff out there is pretty much pilots hallucinating something they didn't have time to process, and when you look at the low resolution cameras, you can't really tell what anything is because cameras are even less reliable than human eyes. Rolling Shutters on smart phones for example produce the "jello" effect, so things that are moving will appear bent or warped.
180617766
comment
byKisai
6 @10:06PM
(#65936152)
Attached to: Germany's EV Subsidies Will Include Chinese Brands
Incorrect. The subsidies are to get people to pick EV's over fossil fuel cars. The EV industry doesn't need the subsidy, the customer does.
Once you cross a specific threshold, then you start dialing back the subsidy so certain companies (eg Tesla) are unable to dump unsold product, and companies like Chinese and Korean EV manufacturers are unable to put their garbage products next to better products and demand the same price. Before people forget, the reason for the long decline of American brands worldwide is that they were marketed as "premium/luxury" products that were far worse products than the premium/luxury products sold in Europe and Japan.
Tesla fell into that trap. Their products are not luxury products, despite being marketed as such, and Elon basically destroyed any possibility of them being considered Luxury products in the future as long as he has any say in what Tesla makes.
Subsidies should only go customer's pockets to buy the EV's, and into initial buildouts of EV charging infrastructure outside cities. Like you have to realize the oil companies didn't exactly build gas station infrastructure properly in the first place. They were just built in parallel with the development of cars, and the first "gas stations" were pharmacies. Most gas stations until the late 70's were also "service" stations, back when cars were easily repaired. Today a lot of gas stations are little more than a 4 pumps and a kiosk in a parking lot.
180614500
comment
byKisai
6 @09:26AM
(#65934512)
Attached to: China Birth Rate Falls To Lowest Since 1949
The solution for China is pretty straight forward. Step away from the "Boys first" culture.
Give every family that has a child money, and encourage having both boys and girls.
This entire culture of having only boys and aborting girls if they don't have a boy, is why their population is declining. So you end up with towns and cities where there is a huge mismatch between genders and ages.
But what's killing Chinese people is the same thing killing Americans. Women live longer, so the census reflects a higher bias towards "there are enough women for the number of men out there" but the reality is that you need to actually establish this at both the school and workplace that every classroom, and you will find that there are classrooms that are heavily skewed towards boys, but workplaces that are heavily skewed towards women doing clerical work. Men are doing the dangerous jobs and are going out drinking after work while the women stay inside on computers and go home to their children, rather than drinking.
180584868
comment
byKisai
026 @08:57AM
(#65926022)
Attached to: Warhammer Maker Games Workshop Bans Its Staff From Using AI In Its Content or Designs
There is very minimal application for AI for games (be it digital, tabletop, card, or AR/VR)
Like the entire point of a D&D adventure is that you are collectively telling a story. If you let the AI in to tell the story, then it's no longer your story.
There are a few small applications where I feel the AI might be usable however.
a) generating monsters, loot, lore and scenario for a dynamically scoped event. Basically it allows the DM to create a lore-compliant monster at will, how it got here, why it's here, why it's attacking, what loot it has, for an event where none of that information is useful, you just need a quick mook to beat up that is in the way of opening a door. The thing the DM actually has a human written story for is behind the door. You just need the party to "make noise" by attacking the mook so the door is opened from the inside.
b) Generating a dynamic* map, I'll put a star beside this, because this would only work for a situation where you have not planned for the party to go in a direction, and the party insists anyway.
A good DM would not need an AI, and tabletop stuff should never need AI. But if you're running a campaign that people can jump in and out of, it might be useful to track the "history" of the game via specially crafted chatbot that listens to the story but never chats except when a player asks "did that happen?" in which it then says how long ago something happened, and to what player. That's just to keep the players honest and the DM from forgetting.
180582756
comment
byKisai
2026 @08:48PM
(#65925374)
Attached to: House Sysadmin Stole 200 Phones, Caught By House IT Desk
I feel this was probably "IT Administration", the person who actually does the approvals to order (not the person approving the budget), these people are usually not that tech savvy, but it would explain how they managed to order devices and not have them deployed directly to the staff. In large government and corporate environment's it usually goes
A) Employee requests a device to do their job via an internal form
B) IT Administration approves the purchase by talking to their manager to see why it's needed
C) Device is shipped directly to the employee's location by the "warehouse/depot" that installed the corporate software on the device
D) IT tech at that location physically hands the device to the user
To me this feels like the IT administration for a specific office ordered the devices and since they had the approval rights, nobody asked about it, and it had to be over time, otherwise accounting would have asked why there was a large purchase of devices without a directive from top.
180582730
comment
byKisai
2026 @08:43PM
(#65925364)
Attached to: House Sysadmin Stole 200 Phones, Caught By House IT Desk
Probably because it wasn't the system administrator, it was probably the "IT administrator" who is usually not a tech person, but rather the person who approves orders, and is usually the person who have to fight to get a better device when the options are "shitty option A" and "shitty option B"
180582722
comment
byKisai
2026 @08:41PM
(#65925362)
Attached to: House Sysadmin Stole 200 Phones, Caught By House IT Desk
I feel there is more to this story. Having worked as "third party outsourcer" for a major global company,
- Often there are directives to recycle things, even stuff new in box, stuff that was ordered as spares. That can explain the quantity.
- I would be interested in knowing how old the devices were when they were sent to the pawn shop
I don't see how the same person who ordered them is the same person who took them to the pawn shop. These are different roles.
Usually office administration orders things, while techs deploy things, so the only way this ended up being the same person, is if the administration staff was capable of ordering items for staff without their signoff. Someone in the accounting should have caught this, because they would have had to approve the order. Which means I don't think this was 1 order of 200 phones, but probably 200 orders of phones over a 2 year period, each assigned to different staff to not be caught by accounting.
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