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180578848
comment
byMalenfrant
14, 2026 @05:18AM
(#65923240)
Attached to: Iran Shuts Down Musk's Starlink For First Time
It appears to be more that the wannabe King is using existing unrest to try and gain power, with the assistance of the Western powers. The unrest would likely be happening without that, although it's debatable how much sanctions helped cause it. If The Western powers had any integrity or decency at all they would assist those looking to create a Democratic State, but that would be unlikely to have much love for those Western powers so instead they are favouring the wannabe King, who will need to show love to the West constantly if he wants to remain in power.
180546343
comment
byMalenfrant
08, 2026 @03:00AM
(#65909641)
Attached to: Google and Character.AI Agree To Settle Lawsuits Over Teen Suicides
We already have that. It's called Grok.
180416107
comment
byMalenfrant
18, 2025 @07:51AM
(#65866293)
Attached to: Another Starship Clone Pops Up In China
The gathering in Tiananmen Square was not primarily a pro-Democracy protest. It was a commemoration of the life and career of a recently deceased CCP official who had been promoting and bringing in reforms. The gathering was both to commemorate his life and to send a message to the CCP leadership that the people wanted his reforms to continue even though he was no longer alive to promote them. The pro-Democracy element inside the Square was only a small minority of the people there. The majority of the 'pro-Democracy' forces were gathered outside the Square and were heavily armed. It has since been shown that the CIA funded and armed these forces.
It's difficullt to see what the CCP could have done differently here. These armed forces attempted to storm into the Square and showed little concern about any civilians who might have got in the way of their march toward the CCP headquarters. In fact, from CIA documents since released all the actual fighting took place in the streets surrounding the Square, not actually inside the Square. Those same documents also state that more than half of the deaths were in fact of CCP forces trying to prevent these separtist forces enterring the Square. Those CCP forces took great care to avoid civilian casualties, while the seperatist forces showed no such concern. Again, this is all taken from official CIA documents written at the time but not released until much later. If these seperatist forces had been allowed to enter the Sqwuare civilian deaths would have been MUCH higher, whereas in reality civilian deaths were minimal, unless of course you count those heavily armed seperatists as civilians.
180409229
comment
byMalenfrant
r 17, 2025 @04:04AM
(#65863517)
Attached to: Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents
That's nonsense. Mathematics is plural because there is more than one type of mathematics. Arithmetic and geometry to name just two of them. If your course is in arithmetic and nothing else than calling it singular makes sense. But if it covers more than one type of mathematics then it is obviously plural.
180383555
comment
byMalenfrant
4, 2025 @10:21AM
(#65857535)
Attached to: Time Magazine's 'Person of the Year': the Architects of AI
No they don't. They put it into assets, which have a limited supply. This is the cause of house price inflation, and many other forms of asset inflation. This impoverishes everyone else because the rest of us simply can't compete for these assets against people who effectively have an unlimited supply. So it ends up with the wealthy owning all the assets then renting them back to the people who actually need them. This helps keep wages down because people need to work to pay these rents and so can't afford to withhold their labour. And so the cycle continues, the wealthy get even more of the available wealth,m and the rest of us suffer.
This is the inevitable result of Neoliberal, or more accurately named Neofeudal, economics. Post 1945 Governments were providing increasing amounts of the essential services, including housing, and this held prices down and kept wages up. Oil cartels started the reversal of this by causing artificially high prices, then Neofeudal economics caused the sell-off of Government assets, and all the gains we'd made since 1945 went into reverse.
180371867
comment
byMalenfrant
2, 2025 @03:12PM
(#65854293)
Attached to: Major Automakers Say China Poses 'Clear and Present Threat' To US Auto Industry
This is an example of the problem with Capitalism at this stage though. It's not just the car industry, it's pretty much all of them. Whichever industry you choose they become homogenised. When there isn't quite enough to go around competition works well enough to raise standards, increase production to the stage where there is enough to go around and keep prices down. But when there's a surplus competition simply doesn't work as well. Prices shoud decrease, but that makes profit difficult to maintain so instead of competing the industry players tend to work together to maintain higher prices and therefore profits. Artificial scarcity is maintained and new players are prevented from entering the market because that would increase supply and therefore reduce profits. Workers are squeezed, also to maintain profits. Wealth pools in a few hands which creates a feedback cycle which eccelerates the process, and this translates to political power further accelerating the process. At this stage Capitalism works alomst entirely against the interests of the general population and the previous prosperity goes into reverse. This can be held off somewhat through stringent regualtion, which is what the EU tries to do, but this can only ever be a holding action. Capitalism does not work for the gerneral population unless there is scarcity.
180369837
comment
byMalenfrant
2, 2025 @09:57AM
(#65853417)
Attached to: Major Automakers Say China Poses 'Clear and Present Threat' To US Auto Industry
The point of an economy is to provide goods for the people of that economy. Firstly the essentials, food, shelter, clothing. Then luxuries. China's economy is achieving that increasingly well. America's economy is getting worse at it. Capitalism is a decent method to raise an economy up from a level of scarcity to a level of reasonable comfort for the population, but once that level is reached it becomes an increasingly poor method. In fact once a reasonable level of comfort is reached Capitalism becomes actively harmful to the population and the eocnomy as a whole. This is the level where a more Socialist model should be steadily switched to, replacing the now wasteful and counter-productive Capitalist model. Sticking with pure Capitalism once the economy is productive enough is actively harmful and dangerous to your population.
180024090
comment
byMalenfrant
0, 2025 @04:51AM
(#65785306)
Attached to: What Happens When Humans Start Writing for AI?
It is not at all true. AI may be based on thousands of books, but that's in the same way that a Flat Earther's nonsense explanations are based on all the science that they've seen and failed to understand. AI is a badly designed and thrown together mish-mash of everything it's trained on, seen through a lens that distorts everything and is completely unable to actually understand even the simplest part of it.
Sure, there are some humans who are writing for AI rather than humans, but all that achieves is to accelerate Model Collapse.An LLM, no matter how carefully trained, is unable to evaluate what it's trained on, meaning it gives it all equal worth no matter how batshit crazy it might actually be. While the LLM algorithm has some uses if it's training data is carefully curated for a specific purpose, that curation is simply not possible for general purpose models which is why they are simply let loose to collect slop from all over the web.Despite some people still claiming they will improve, the opposite is the truth. They will get steadily worse and less reliable. Soon enough this will become obvious to everyone and the bubble will burst. With any luck it will take out a lot of the worst Techbros with it.
179709760
comment
byMalenfrant
08, 2025 @01:47AM
(#65711340)
Attached to: Can Cory Doctorow's 'Enshittification' Transform the Tech Industry Debate?
You can't have a wifi device that doesn't phone home because the manufacturer keeps the price down by selling your data. While the fee per user may not be much, in aggregate it allows them to reduce prices enough that nobody can compete without doing this. It's been tried quite a few time with seversl different types of device, but the increase in price to pay for not selling your data is more than most people are willing to pay and so none of these attempts were successful. So if you want a wifi thermostat that doesn't need an internet connection you'll have to make one yourself because nobody can make a profit from making one for you.
179230224
comment
byMalenfrant
14, 2025 @05:40AM
(#65658700)
Attached to: 'Dragonfly' Mission to Saturn's Moon Titan: Behind Schedule, Overbudget, Says NASA Inspector General
I don't think it's entirely that. It may be for things like NASA projects where innovation is much more prevalent, but there are other factors in Government projects as a whole. I suspect there's a large element of costs and time frames being deliberately underestimated. If the true costs were stated up front it may be more difficult politically to get something approved. HS2 here in the UK seems to be an example of that. The originally stated costs and time frame were ridiculously low and have risen steeply since, but if the full price had been stated upfront it's doubtful it would have ever got approval. That may well have been a good thing, but that's a discussion for another time. I suspect (but obviously can't prove) that underestimating such things is common in Government projects across the Democratic world so that things get started, then the later rise in costs is easier to sell and often becomes Someone Else's Problem anyway.
178643544
comment
byMalenfrant
2025 @10:59AM
(#65581738)
Attached to: Wikipedia Operator Loses Court Challenge To UK Online Safety Act Regulations
It's even worse here in the UK than the US. At least your Government and President campaigned on the platform they are governing on. Nobody there can truthfully claim they didn't know what to expect when they voted Trump in. Labour campaigned on a platform of progressive change, promising to govern for the people. The second they got in power they started clamping down on free speech and banning peaceful protest. It's a coup. They don't have a mandate for this.
The problem with this specific law though is that it wasn't this current Government that brought it in. It was passed by the last lot, who are now claiming they are against it. And the Far Right ReformUK also voted for it but are now pretending they didn't. Vote for Center Left get Far Right. Vote for Center Right get Far Right. Is it any wondser that the most likely next Government is a blatantly Far Right one? We get that whatever we vote for anyway, why bother voting against it?
178516278
comment
byMalenfrant
2025 @02:18PM
(#65555980)
Attached to: Zuckerberg Says Meta's AI Systems Have Begun Improving Themselves, And Developing Superintelligence is Now in Sight
An android is by definition male. The clue is in the etymology. Andro-id, meaning male being. A female version would be an ogynid. Asimov discussed this in a conversation about I Robot.
178224632
comment
byMalenfrant
025 @10:14AM
(#65484132)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do You Use AI - and Is It Actually Helpful?
I'm as certain as it's possible to be that LLMs are not the path to more accurate AI. They will be a part of it, but statistics just doesn't work that way. They are as accurate as they will ever be. Something else is needed to correct their errors, and to the best of my knowledge nobody knows what that is as yet. These Companies keep claiming they've found it but every time their claims don't stand up to any scrutiny. That's not to say it won't happen in the near future, nobody can predict when that sort of breakthrough will happen. But equally it may not happen for decades if ever. We don't understand how human thought and reasoning works well enough to emulate it yet.
So my answer was based on the models we have now. That's the question that was asked after all. Predicting what may happen in the future is a fool's game, but right now the models we have aren't good enough for anything but the simplest of problems, and only usable on problems that a human has already solved. Using them is the equivalent of looking up the answer to a question every time, and not bothering to remember that answer or understand the subject on the basis that it will always be available to look up. This is also making predictions about the future that may or may not come true.
Your machinist is fine for as long as a CNC lathe is available but without it may be useless. That's still better than a programmer relying on current AI because that lathe can at least do every job conceivable in that domain. In the programming domain AI can't yet and may never be able to.
178224174
comment
byMalenfrant
025 @09:15AM
(#65484010)
Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do You Use AI - and Is It Actually Helpful?
I think the point here is that it can be useful for someone who isn't really a coder, to produce just about usable simple things. But if you are a coder it's not really faster. Maybe in the short term, but in the long term it's worse.
As somebody who's been coding for 40 years, in multiple languages, I already have my own libraries full of the vast majority of stuff. These libraries are not just fully tested already, I understand them thoroughly and so can write the small changes to them needed for each project. I only need to test the changes, not the main body of code. If I use LLMs for it, I need to test every single bit of it every single time, and because I'm not learning the algorithm myself I make myself dependent on the LLM going forward. Even on those occasions where I don't already have something similar in a library it's better to write it and understand it myself rather than rely on an LLM, just in case I need something similar again in the future. And if I do the code I've saved will be fully tested in advance.
So in summary an LLM can be useful if you don't code often, and can speed up work in the short term. But using it will prevent you becoming fully experienced and will mean that you are always slower than someone like me no matter how many years' experience you get, because using it prevents you from gaining that experience. And it will always be useless for larger, more systems level projects because it is too unreliable and if you don't have my level of experience you won't be able to spot the thousands of subtle bugs it would put in such a project.
Not that most systems level projects aren't already full of these subtle bugs, but that's a whole different problem caused by Companies not wanting to pay people like me what I'm worth.
177944182
comment
byMalenfrant
025 @07:13AM
(#65431416)
Attached to: UK Tech Job Openings Climb 21% To Pre-Pandemic Highs
And then Microsoft will hire them all, at reduced salaries because there's a surplus, and laugh while all their foolish competitors fail. It's a dastardly plan but it mmight just work.
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