Posts by Pascal Monett 18980 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
What on Earth was the point ? It was a mini. Put it on the surface and snake a cable down to wherever to put a terminal at the bottom.
That's about as stupid as putting backup power generators in the basement of a building that might get flooded. No, you put them on the roof.
Once again, first-world short-sightedness comes back to bite us in the rear. Ah, the days when top-level executives gave themselves massive bonuses for having outsourced a chip fab to China . . good times, eh ?
Well now here we are, restricting China from exporting the production from the tools we put in their hands. And when we put those tools in their hands, China was already the despotic regime it is now.
Ah yes, but money. Money now, worry about the consequences later.
There's a lesson here, somewhere. I wonder who will learn it ?
Only one possible answer : the entity whose name is on the document. If it's a website, the owner of the website.
Stop splitting hairs in two. If a company builds a false-facts-spewing tool and makes it available, the company is responsible for the fallout. If I buy a second-hand vehicle and cause an accident, I can't go say it's the previous owner's fault. Companies that build these hallucinating tools should be responsible for the hallucinations.
Maybe, once the company has been dragged to court and found guilty, it can then turn and slap a lawsuit on the company that built the drunken slob for it, but it's the company that is using the tool that is responsible.
What about someone who uses such a tool to make legal documents for personal situations ? Well don't, first of all. Go get a lawyer to do the job. Second, the individual used a website, so he can attack the owner of the website.
Responsibility is simple in this case. Except for the obvious fact that companies will be dragging their feet as hard as they can, and lobbying like mad to get out of paying for any damages - as they have always done. But that doesn't last. Even the tobacco industry has had to bow in the end. Bil Oil will too, some day. Let's not start messing around with Big AI without laying down the ground rules firmly.
"The development has spurred the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security to initiate an inquiry into the purported 7nm chip, and how or if it was made using American technology."
I seem to recall reading in these very hallowed pages that there is one company in the world that makes it possible to engrave chips at the bleeding edge of technology, and that company is not American, it's Dutch.
So I take it that the USA has the patents and has licensed ASML to use them ? Or is all this just some more USA! USA! Rah Rah Rah chest-thumping ?
I would have liked to by a fly on the wall of the meeting that decided to go get pirated material to use as training data.
Mgr - "Okay, guys, we have this ginormous potential waiting on training data. Where can we get that ? Ideas ?"
Mkting - "Well, we could strike deals with the Project Gutenberg website, they've got plenty of free books. I'm sure they'd be willing to help."
Mgr - "How much would that cost ?"
Mkting - "It's free for the customer, but we'd need a deal where we can get stuff in bulk. Shouldn't cost more than a couple thousand."
Mgr - "How long would that take ?"
Mkting - "I guess a month or two to negociate the deal and have a contract written up."
Mgr - "Too long. We need to move forward now. Any other ideas ?"
Dev - "Well, I know this site where we can get just about everything. All I'd need to do is write a script to automate the downloads."
Mgr - "What about the contract ?"
Dev - "Um, well, there isn't any. It's BitTorrent-like, you just go choose and it drops in."
Mgr - "And we can get recent stuff, no problem ?"
Dev - "Well yeah. Pirates love recent stuff."
Mgr - "Pirated ? So no contract and no money ?"
Dev - "Nope. And it's untraceable."
Mgr - "Go for it !"
But I guess this is what happens when you hire someone from Business School to head an open source project.
Open source and Business are two different mindsets, and they are incompatible.
This is why.
Once upon a time, in the halcyon days of yore, a merger would be followed by a transition period of at least several months, period during which everyone pretended that they were all being integrated into the new happy family. Only after that would layoffs be presented to the employees by tearful managers regretting that they had not found their place in the new team.
Crocodile tears, to be sure, but the play respected the script.
Today, apparently, time is money more than ever before, and we're talking layoffs before the merger has even happened. Okay, it's a surprise for no one because we've seen this play a million times, but does a smidgen of decency really cost that much ?
Oh, silly me, it costs, so it has to go.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, why does SK Broadband think it has the right to single out Netflix and wring money out of it ?
Netflix pays for its broadband usage already. SK Broadband's clients pay for their usage.
If SK Boradband feels that it is not being paid enough, it should adjust its prices, not attack a specific website.
What reassures me is that it is a judge. He did not simply ask ChatGPT to write his ruling, he consulted it for a specific part, controlled the result and was satisfied enough to include it in his ruling.
That is called using the tool properly, not like those two lawyers who took ChatGPT results and included them without controlling the content.
There's several reasons why lawyers are lawyers and not judges, and this is one.
I'm terribly sorry, but I just can't bring myself to sympathise with anything a Google mouthpiece complains about.
You are hoovering up every bit of data you can (with and without permission), storing it forever in bit barns the size of Texas, and using and abusing that data to sling stupid ads for which you get paid all the money.
You have no right to complain about anything.
It does not appear that you know diddly squat about what you're doing. You just fired thousands of people, now you say you know you have to hire ?
Don't you have some kind of program that can give you indications on what your company needs ? Maybe you should use some of that.
Oh, and just a question : is there a managers 101 where it states the wait time to look good between massive layoffs and announcing thousands of hires ? Because that manual needs amending : six months ain't half enough.
Yeah, and drug dealers always give the first hit free.
This is just another bait-and-switch. Once Unity was certain that theirs was the market standard, boom! time to turn the screws.
Kind of makes you wonder just what the other "open" toolboxes have in store.
We're going to end up with a saying : beware the open-source developer bringing gifts.
For who ?
Does Chromebook "support" still start the moment it leaves the factory, instead of the moment it is purchased ?
Because that's what I heard about Chromebooks. It's support life starts when it leaves the factory. If it sits in storage for nine months before being purchased, the poor sucker has lost nine months of support.
With a friend like that . . .
In any case, I still abhor companies that sell hard product and pretend to arbitrarily and artificially determine its lifespan. A Chromebook will last until the keys fall off the keyboard. If Google hadn't succeeded in brainwashing everyone to think that three-years-and-chuck-it was a good idea, I'm sure that there would still be first-gen Chromebooks chugging along merrily.
Software doesn't rot, hardware does. The lifetime of a product is never the software.
From that picture, it seems to me that this suitcaseomobile is made out of plastic. Given this report, that calls into question Honda's declaration of going toward carbon neutrality.
Of course, I understand that an aluminum casing would very much make that abomination heavier but, if it is made of plastics and batteries, it is basically a toxic mess of a product.
Well what do you expect from a bunch of Hollywood producers ?
They live a life of dreams. Reality only dawns on them when the police knock at their door.
Besides, who still thinks NFTs are a thing ? You're paying money for something you can see for free on Google Images.
And they failed because security was too tight to allow that. Good on Rollbar for that.
Now, apparently, Rollbar needs to firewall its internal network a bit more to prevent lateral infection, that might have stymied the attack and made it fail completely.
In any case, points for resisting a complete takeover.
In the category of rogue planets or stars, the possibility of direct collision is almost zero. But you don't need a rogue star, or black hole, to collide with Earth in order to destroy Humanity (and possibly all life on Earth as well).
A star or black hole passing close enough to our Solar System will throw planetary orbits out of whack, likely ejecting several, if not all. That would logically depend on how close it gets. But one thing is sure : if Earth gets ejected, we're all on a timer to the deepest freeze we will ever know.
However, even if none of our planets are actually ejected, the outer planets' orbits will certainly be perturbed, which will very likely in turn perturb the orbits of the inner planets. Not to mention everything in the Kuiper Belt will go nuts, and whatever is beyond as well.
So, even if the Earth possibly stays in its actual orbit, the amount of asteroids being josled by all this will be enormous, and there's every chance that we might see a new Late Bombardment in the years that follow.
The only question is, at what distance are we doomed by a passing star or black hole ? If it is two light-years away, are we safe ?
No, you'll have enough for what you think you need to drive.
Any nasty surprise and your EV will not have enough juice to get where you need to go.
Frankly, to me an EV is already seriously limited as far as range is concerned. To give people an excuse to drain them for supplying power is the height of stupidity. There's already a waste of energy charging the damn things, now you want to waste more energy discharging them.
We don't have fusion yet, and too many countries are using coal. Stop the madness.
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