Posts by MrAptronym

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

AI coming for everyone's jobs (except mine, because I am a special boy).

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

This isn't an AI story.

The AI part is BS. They fired IRS enforcement agents because they don't want to be doing audits and collections. That's it. Saying "Oh, we'll do collections because 'AI Boom'!" is just a lie you say when being questioned by the senate, because you cannot say the truth. AI is just a smokescreen here, I guess they may payout some AI contract (Perhaps to xAI?), but they have no intent of actually replacing agents with an AI. The complete lack of even the most basic details should make that clear.

The point of this push for 'Government Efficiency' is not to push for government efficiency. Treating it like that is missing the point. We are engaging with grifters and conmen on their own terms, which is a crazy thing to do. They are doing this to strip down the govt for parts. They will loot what they can and leave an ineffective husk where you have privatized any function you can make a profit off of and rendered all of the regulatory agencies completely incapable of fighting you in the future.

Palantir loves the smell of DOGE budget cuts in the morning

You can be sure the public* will see a major tax cut in the near future!

*the public that matters, as represented by corporations and the ultrawealthy.

OpenAI pulls plug on ChatGPT smarmbot that praised user for ditching psychiatric meds

"Sycophant-y"? The word "Sycophantic" exists.

Yes, that is really all I wanted to comment on.

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

I mean, it is definitely not 'ok' to exploit cheap labor in other countries, but that is indeed how the global economy operates. Even if you make sure the phones are constructed using ethical labor and pay the extra, you would need to do that for the entire value-chain. (And I have bad news about where many of our metals come from)

Most jobs are not about to be replaced by AI. If onshoring happens, then robotics will take some tasks probably, but not all. Building up the factories and supply chains takes literally years. The US cannot manufacture the components and we cannot produce the raw materials. That is one reason you don't generally just drop 150% tariffs on a whim. None of this is how you suddenly fix a globally exploitative system. The US does not have a massive surplus of people looking for so called 'unskilled' labor jobs. Our unemployment is relatively low, and many people within the country work in specialized fields. It has been long enough since the bleed of manufacturing happened that we as a country are simply not the same pool of labor we were at that time.

US wages for factory workers may be much higher than some nations, I will in no way deny that a Chinese factory worker is way worse off than any non-slave in the US, but pay and benefits for US factory workers are not 'good'. Compared to the cost of living in the US, the wages are still generally exploitative, only less so. However, tariffs will raise that cost of living further. If you want to make the system less exploitative you don't just move where you exploit people, you make a more equitable system. Tariffs are essentially an additional tax on goods for consumers, and poorer people must spend a higher % of their income on goods. It is a way to move your tax burden to the poor. Tax cuts on the rich combined with tariffs, slashed govt. services, slashed govt. labor regulations and onshoring manual labor is not going to make a better county. It is simply cementing the oligarchy.

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: Just don't!

Both my parents and my sibling provided their DNA to 23andme, so it doesn't even matter if I am more privacy focused (Well, marginally. I don't do anything that is a pain, but I won't opt in to this kind of scam). They've got my number, and now whoever buys this dataset will have it too.

I'd make a Gattaca comparison, but given the current power players in the US, maybe my best hope is that they all stop believing in DNA.

China bans compulsory facial recognition and its use in private spaces like hotel rooms

China will keep using their facial recognition systems, while private parties are excluded, an unfair system, unlike the one in the US, where everyone is allowed to invade your privacy freely!

Joking aside, there is quite a bit of the tech in China, I have friends over there who unlock their apartment complex's gates with face recognition. It is also a very popular way to unlock your phone of course, as it is elsewhere. None of the Chinese I know seem to be concerned about privacy in regards to any of these systems, but I wonder how consents will be obtained for things like building access.

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Re: Subs mean an off switch

I am just worried one of two things will happen:

1. They will give frequent and annoying pop-ups whenever you accidentally do whatever common gesture they map Gemini to, and tapping the wrong spot will subscribe you. (My phone already asks me to activate Gemini every time I pull from one corner of the screen).

2. Tie important non-LLM functions to the subscription as well, so that your life gets harder if you don't pay. They will act like this is an upside somehow.

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Re: Hmm

What a silly argument that it is worthless to consider the cost and benefits of a government program. I am sure it feels great to be all "Taxes suck, government spending is all bad." but I bet you expect to drive on roads or have fires put out. You also probably expect that when you buy something, they have to actually give you that thing. When you go to your job to earn YOUR hard-earned dollars, you may even expect not to be poisoned or crushed. Those are government initiatives. Perhaps you'd rather live in a world with no government services or investments?

Maybe you do not think it is worthwhile for the government to fund science. You may not care about the money that generates for the economy over time, the soft power that brings the US or the general good that science and technology can bring to people. Maybe you think that funding any science outreach is dumb and bad as well. Then make that argument.

Re: Hmm

How much do you think the NSF costs? It is less than 0.1% of the federal budget. Do you even know what they do or how *you* benefit from their work? You would want people who understand the thing they are in charge of to be doing the cuts.

This is not 'budget tightening', this is a combination of looting and a vindictive stab at people perceived as being against the administration's ideology.

Re: US scientist, come to Europe or Canada

Sad I gave up on academia and entered industry. Maybe I should have put in for a post-doc in europe when it was an option.

It's over.

I am an American, and I got my PhD with an NSF fellowship and a NASA grant. I did much of my work at a DoE facility using a synchrotron the government paid for. I met my wife in grad school, and she came here to study in the US and work on a NASA grant. The US has been *the* destination for research across dozens of vital fields, but we have been slipping for a while. Funding has already been slipping relative to China and a couple others. Places are catching up. The US has now shown itself at best to be an unreliable place for long term projects. The ideological tests on what research to fund will drive away entire fields. The proposed 15% caps on overhead would eliminate the American research institution. (Not that there isn't admin waste, but this would not even keep the lights on.) With RFK Jr at the helm, the NIH is rapidly losing its legitimacy and will soon all be as much of a farce as NCCIH is. Destroying the infrastructure of our established research system is not something we just recover from.

I hope that there will be research opportunities in Europe and elsewhere for the next generation of talented American academics because I don't think they will get their chance here anymore.

Even if the US avoids the complete descent into permanent authoritarian control, this is probably the end of our prominence as a leading force in science and technology. In two months, Trump and his cronies have destroyed one of the real successes of America in the 20th century. This is what you get when your popular conception of technological innovation are useless silicon valley parasites devising new ways to siphon money as middlemen. This is what you get when the public face of intellect is Elon Musk. This is what you get when your idea of power is petty bullying and extortion. The United States will only remain a world leader in the march towards oblivion, gleefully destroying our environment, rights, economy and the very knowledge that we had tried to improve things with. Rest In Piss.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

Turns out that breaking things is easier than building them, who knew.

Re: I don’t care

Naw, now its just 'woke' not to buy one. I don't think he pretends to care about the environment anymore. Doesn't play with his new demographic... though neither do electric cars.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Re: Only the beginning...

Such a good point about Science and Nature. That is where the splashiest papers in most fields go. A single Science or Nature paper should never convince anyone of anything lol

I am not a physicist at all, but experimental science is broadly concerned with tests to prove something that has never been done before. It is certainly difficult, and choosing the right tests and criteria is hard. In many instances though it will be obvious that certain specific criteria need to be proven to a high confidence, but these criteria are only obvious to other experts in the field. You are right that those of us who are outside the field are not likely to be able to evaluate the claims, but I think skepticism by independent, reputable scientists in the field is a bad sign. Standard ranges on tests often proves to be impossible due to the non-standard nature of cutting edge science, but we do often have bare minimum criteria you should need to establish within a field. The 'how' of establishing those for your particular study is still a huge question.

For what it is worth (not much), based on my limited time as an academic, I do think this matches a common 'BS' architecture: a widely publicized paper in a journal like Nature where a group claims to be not just one step ahead but many. In my field it was often "New earliest signs of life" or else "X isotope signature disproves Y commonly accepted paleoclimate conditions". When I was reading lots of papers, these would usually be immediately and obviously pretty deficient.

As Carl Sagan popularized: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'

From pantyhose to power cells, nylon gives lithium batteries a leg up

Re: Very specific subset of batteries

I asked a friend who is actually an expert, and it seems that Li-Metal with liquid electrolyte batteries are a bigger segment of research than I thought!

Re: how does the length of a brontosaurus compare to that of a thesaurus

I think the brontosaurus is more like 140 Mya in the Jurassic...

I'll leave now.

Very specific subset of batteries

I haven't fully read the article, since I am at work, but it is worth noting that this applies only to lithium metal batteries with a liquid electrolyte. I am not a battery scientist, but I have seen a strong focus on solid electrolytes with Li metal. Solid electrolytes have a lot of challenges, and who knows if they will be overcome at scale, but don't have the fire safety risks of liquid electrolytes. Conventional liquid electrolytes may be a more technically feasible approach for Li metal batteries, but combining the fire risk of a conventional electrolyte with the fire risk of the metal (Which also burns in contact with water) doesn't feel like the favored approach from what I have seen.

Not saying this isn't an accomplishment, but I am also not sure why this one electrolyte additive study is getting news? If we have any experts in chat, I am curious how big a segment this kind of battery set-up is in the research?

Huawei to bring massively expensive trifold smartphone to world market

I checked one out at a Huawei store when I was in China, it does feel and look nice. The wider aspect on the device when folded relative to a Samsung Fold (the phone I use) is really appealing. Each of the three portions is really very thin as well. I do wonder how the outward facing screen hinge will hold up to daily wear and tear though.

That said, from what I recall, the processor inside the thing is not exactly stellar, and while most phone processors may be overkill these days: if I was using one of these devices I would really want to be gaming on the large screen or something. I wonder how it performs in that context?

Doesn't matter to me I suppose, as an American I can be fairly sure it isn't coming to our market any time soon.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

How is "No use case" not the only point?

Why do any of the other details matter if even the industry people won't act like there is a compelling use case? Why is there even a product then?! (We all know why.)

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

Could I be out of touch? No!

I wonder if we are just out of touch? I have no idea if everyone find genAI products as distasteful as I do. Business people are obsessed as anyone could predict, most tech people I talk to are distrustful at best, but I genuinely have no clue what the average user thinks. A lot of people clearly use the tools, but it also feels like no one is going out of their way to pay for them. People still hate WIndows 11, the iPhone 16 is seeing a slump in sales, but it isn't like people have stopped using google. Is convenience just going to be the deciding factor?

I would rather disable every one of these things, and I choose tools and sites that avoid them when I can. The same is true of targeted ads for me though, and most people seem fine with that. It feels likely to me that society will simply accept generative AI without much fuss (and all the surveillance, plagiarism, misinformation and environmental destruction that entails). Microsoft seems to be taking the approach of just adding it to everything and jacking up the prices for all users, rather than making it a standalone service. Even if generative AI is disliked, are people going to stop using MS products? No, they will simply pay more and MS will attribute the profits to AI.

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

Re: While I'm asking questions ...

Cool petty grievance politics Anonymous Coward.

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

Re: Artificial intelligence. Genuine Stupidity.

First, social media sites were rolled out and took over the internet. Then the iPhone came out and changed how we use computers. Then Uber came out and showed that you could make a middleman app and skim massive profits.

Since then, silicon valley has been desperate for a new thing, but no one wants cryptocurrency, no one wants NFTs and no one wants (or can define) the metaverse. Gen-AI at least seems superficially like it may be useful, and you can always rebrand things like machine learning, so companies are all in on this fad.

Re: .. the prospect of tariffs on technology made in China

Genuinely thought this was a joke. Not looking forward to the next four years.

Does the AI bit even matter?

Is anyone buying "AI PCs" or are they just buying new computers that happen to come with the additional processing units? Is this demand driven, or are manufacturers just moving in this direction? (Maybe to justify billions of dollars of investment?)

The fact that Apple's computers seem to be dominating the "AI PC" market seems telling, because Apple has its own ecosystem and I have not seen evidence that people are switching to mac for AI stuff. All their new computers will be classified as "AI PCs", but that doesn't mean it is driving sales. It isn't like we have two models, one with the extra AI junk and one without it but otherwise the same.

The "copilot+" branded computers are the only mainstream product that I see being marketed as purely focused on AI and the article makes it clear that people do not seem interested.

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash comes out with real-time conversation, image analysis

Re: "most people aren't ready to delegate purchasing authority ... to unreliable AI models."

I don't think most people will. Remember when voice assistants were the new hotness and everyone was talking about how we'll never actually navigate an online store again and instead just ask Alexa to order us toilet paper? I am not convinced this is a thing any user really wants, companies want it.

Then again, people bend under sustained pressure. I remember back when 'Horse Armor' DLC for $5 was made fun of by gamers, and now it is regular practice to pay $5 for a 2% chance of getting some PNG. Maybe if you blast an entire generation with chatbots for a decade or two they will be happy to just ask google to buy whatever it wants.

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can't send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

Re: Some good ideas but at what cost

Well, within China social media consists of heavily regulated platforms like Weibo that strictly mandate that political views align at least vaguely with the CCP's. They also have pretty strict content moderating policies for things outside of what we would usually call politics. In many respects the site is already an echo chamber, and even for those items where dissent is allowed, the mob mentality is strong and dissent certainly isn't encouraged. I doubt this regulation is changing any of that, so what it is aimed at I am unsure.

Whatever you are thinking of for sites like the X-alikes, that doesn't quite apply here. Social media in China is kind of a different beat from what I have seen. They are already in a very restrictive space.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

What free market? They have excellent platform capture. Some people with minimal software needs will go to Apple's ecosystem or possibly a chromebook. A very small portion of people with more technical knowledge and the will/patience will go to the other flavors of Linux and a fraction of that to the BSDs.

For most people who need to use a computer for browsing, a few work programs and maybe some gaming, there isn't a real alternative that would seem viable to them and they will just delay upgrading until they need to and then complain about the new version. My dad has been running windows since it came on floppies. He has complained about how much he hates windows for almost my entire life but he has never ever actually tried to stop using it.

Probably only 800 million to 1 billion left on the Earth as a habitable world. The planet itself will of course last a lot longer.

Data is the new uranium – incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous

I worked in a lab that had, a decade before my arrival, bought a kilo of a uranium compound (not yellowcake, not even enriched). The lab only actually used a gram or two a year at most. The lead for the lab did this because it was much cheaper to buy in bulk: Maybe 4 times the price for 20 times the chemical.

Then the funding for uranium projects dried up and we just had about 980 grams of the stuff left. The govt takes accounting very seriously, so the material (held in a locked room) had to be accounted for every quarter. The area was checked for contamination monthly, security was maintained and paperwork was kept in perpetuity. We could have gotten rid of it, but it turned out the material would cost thousands to dispose of. So a part of my job was to maintain compliance on this single locked up container of the stuff. Every month I swabbed the room, I did my training, I filed and signed my paper work and calibrated the detection instruments. It also meant I got to take the locked room as my own private lab space, away from other pesky people in the lab :P

I wonder how many people are in a similar situation with servers full of unused data right now.

Microsoft's Copilot 'Wave 2' is a tsunami of unanswered questions

Re: Meeting summaries

So... my boss turned on the meeting notes. It does overall a pretty good job in exactly the way you would expect AI to. It is mostly accurate, except when it isn't. I would estimate it transcribed the points of the conversation with ~95% accuracy. It has minor inconsistencies, and sometimes it transcribes things in a way that is extremely misleading (a discussion about changing a text field to a dropdown menu was described only as 'automating' a process). It also assigns action items to the wrong people. The worst bit is how wordy it is though. A 45 minute meeting turned into 3 full pages of single spaced notes. It all reads the way AI writing reads: full of buzzwords, anodyne, and soporific. Overall, if you go and fact-check / edit it afterwards it is probably usable, and it does likely take less overall effort or time than typing the notes yourself.

The issue is that reading and editing those notes makes my work day more miserable. I find AI text unpleasant to deal with in any volume. I am no great writer, (should be self-evident here) but I have intent in how I word and write things. AI writing reads like what it is: an average.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

To a lesser extent, Tesla does do this. "Full Self Driving" is a future-looking promise. In the past they have done mid-model-year updates too. They also not-entirely-coincidentally are considered one of the least reliable cars you can buy... so...

AMD stalls Ryzen 9000 launch over poor chip quality

Easy PR win...

Watching Intel getting (rightly) raked over the coals for their quality issues, this seems like a no-brainer.

I don't think anyone will complain about the delay, and if they release a non-faulty (acceptably faulty?) line of processors after this then it just further draws favorable comparisons to Intel. This is a huge PR win for them as long as they don't mess it up.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

It isn't really a reg comment thread until someone brings up systemd

Windows 11 is closing the gap on Windows 10

Finally being forced into it...

Just got the notice at work that we are beginning our transition to windows 11. The rollout is in stages, so I should be safe for a couple months, but I am actually surprised by how much I am dreading the switch

On the other hand, I switched my home computer to Fedora a little over a year ago. Have not regretted it for a single minute.

AI to boost datacenter capex by 28.5% and become the top server workload

If these industries had to pay for their negative externalities, they would not exist at all.

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

Re: All I want to know

With windows getting... more windows-y and Proton finally getting games working reliably I finally made the switch to linux for my home computer last year.

I feel like I am rare as a linux user but not a power user. I used to be in IT, but these days I have forgotten 90% of anything I ever knew to go study rocks. I am shocked at how usable Linux is these days. As a kid I spent days getting things set up and troubleshooting to get a laptop minimally operational. With this install I had my home computer going in an hour and was playing Baldur's Gate III the same day. I definitely know more than the average person on the street, but certainly no expert at anything computational now.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Re: AI Search is shit

That is such a huge and obvious problem, and AI slinging companies keep just ignoring how often these models are wrong. The feeling really seems to be that magically these models will stop hallucinating because... technology always gets better? If the entire point is that these AI searches are supposed to be saving you time by compiling information then they need to be really consistently correct. If I need to verify any AI answer like that to make a decision, then what are we even doing here? Even if it was right 99% of the time, it would still be too unreliable for anything meaningful.

For the questions they give as examples it is even more unbelievable: What does it mean to be the best yoga studio in Boston? How would determine that? That is a case where personal preference is obviously important. Optimal cost, exercise intensity and atmosphere will clearly be different for different people. AI companies keep using these examples of things like trip planning or finding a service business, but those are among the last things I would trust to a system like this. This feels just like the rush for voice assistants a decade ago: people may use them to get the weather, control lights or play music but almost no one trusted them to even buy toilet paper for them.

If google is simply going to be scraping pages and giving you their information without even linking through to the actual websites then they are just a parasite on the people and websites who actually make content.

For years they have been trying to keep your traffic on google, or on the pages that pay for ads: now they can simply not link anything and give you scraped answers.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

Re: Users Use Applications.................

Yeah, I am not an apple fan and have a lot of issues with them as a business, but one thing I will give them is solid long-term support for virtually all their products.

Tesla layoff circus runs into fourth week with another round of cuts

Re: Who would work for Tesla when they enter the upcycle?

I know a few talented people who have worked there in the past. The plan is simple: Get in, get paid, and go to another company at a higher level after a few years. You don't go to a place like Tesla for stability.

Re: Clown.....

I think this varies country to country. In China for instance there is a large EV market thanks to very strong incentives (Good luck winning the lotto to get a care plate for your ICE vehicle in Beijing) and a lot of smaller cars with less range can thrive there. In China my understanding is that most of the middle class do not keep cars a long time already due in part to increased emissions testing demands the older a car gets? (That is what I was told by a Chinese driver anyway, extremely tenuous on that lol) In the US, range is a massive cause of fear for electric cars because Americans have proven ourselves to be incapable of building any infrastructure and we rely on cars to be able to do absolutely anything. I think in the US range and battery cyclability need to be improved before we see more widespread adoption. Small cheap cars are basically unsellable in the US because... you know how America is. I don't think battery prices will become incidental any time soon, but reliability could be improved.

Tesla acts like a silicon valley company and is speedrunning the last century of automotive manufacturing lessons. Their huge lead time, reputation (and in the US, their unique way of selling and maintaining cars without a third party) has enabled them to goof around making the least reliable cars on the market and making them terribly. I think that really is changing though, while EVs may not be replacing ICEs any day now like some people though, they have secured a place. Basically everyone is entering the market now and Tesla's lead is slipping. Tesla *does* need to change a lot about how it operates, and a restructuring may be part of that, but I do not imagine that is what is happening here. They should be bringing on people who know automotive standards and getting more organized, "Move fast and break things" doesn't work when your product is designed to move fast, and it could break things.

Re: Clown.....

Similarly, I think the supercharger network in the USA is definitely a lot more reliable than competing networks. I think much of that comes down to the simplicity of the machines: no screens, no chip readers and presumably a much simpler set of software (I have seen both crashed windows and linux boxes on one network near me?) A lot of these networks seem kludged together from whatever parts they can get, at least from the outside the Tesla network appears very standard. In theory the experience at another charging brand could be better: no app, just tap your card or apple pay and you are good to go... but I think it is rare for me to see a charging station without at least one broken charger... Of course I cannot use Tesla's chargers with my vehicle, so I am stuck.

I would not describe them as fast though, pretty average. Old superchargers output up to 100 kW, new ones 250 kW. the slowest available chargers I have used are about 150 kW, and most new ones can output 350. Doesn't make a difference for most folks though, my car only accepts ~200 even when low and under best conditions, and on a cold day I may get below 70.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: Tesla is screwed

Please, it was an emerald mine.

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

Why is it legal to sell this information to other American companies?

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Re: ATT user here

I am in western North Carolina and an ATT user and had no connectivity until 2 PM. Everyone I know on ATT at work today too. I am very curious to hear what the problem was.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

What a tragic read. I think it is really sad how short term and financially driven space has become. It is a trend you see in the rest of science as well.

Sierra Space bursts full-scale inflatable space habitat module

Re: Safety margins

Right? One of my worries with space exploration, especially by corporations, has been that they will allow more lax safety and less rigorous testing. Happy to see things being done thoroughly. Not that NASA and legacy contractors have a spotless record, but it could be much worse.

Re: Do they have external protection against orbital debris?

From the article "The team has plans for a series of tests in 2024, both at sub- and full-scale, including development of the primary atmospheric barrier and micrometeoroid orbital debris layers."