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  1. J

    Parents are more likely to keep unlocked, loaded guns if kids get gun lessons

    This is actually nonsense - look at how Australia went from being a place where guns were lightly regulated to a place where they are fairly heavily regulated. It involves not just banning certain weapons but also putting buyback policies into place to get existing weapons of the streets. Hell...
  2. J

    Martin Shkreli pisses off NFT collective that bought his (not so) unique Wu-Tang album

    Now this is interesting. If this is true (and it's Martin Shkreli so that's like a coinflip) and he did acquire 50% of the copyright on the album when he purchased the album, did the government seize that copyright as well when they seized his assets? Or does he still own half the rights to that...
  3. J

    Elon Musk says Tesla is an AI company now. Here’s how plausible that is.

    This view is correct if you view Tesla as a young automotive company that is going to grow into a mature automotive company over time. The model of "how business works" that we in the US are taught through pop culture and even in our classes (depending on what kinds of classes you took). But...
  4. J

    Google loses DOJ’s big monopoly trial over search business

    I've spent years bouncing between DDG and Google because DDG just never cut it completely. Until about 3-4 months ago when I noticed that I wasn't checking Google after DDG searches and instead whatever I needed was on the front page of DDG. Somehow the Bing backend got a massive improvement...
  5. J

    Astronomers discover technique to spot AI fakes using galaxy-measurement tools

    Adversarial training - you generate an image, feed it to a detector built to find this kind of thing, then use the results to retrain with an eye towards optimizing against the detector. It's not exactly trivial to train away but since that's how these models are already trained adding another...
  6. J

    US agencies to probe AI dominance of Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI

    You will notice that this isn't a "smacking" - they are starting to investigate not prosecute. Nobody's bringing charges - they are looking to see if laws or regulations have been violated by any of these companies. That's good! That's what we want regulatory bodies to do! They should be...
  7. J

    Google starts deprecating older, more capable Chrome extensions next week

    For years I've found Firefox to be far more performant than Chrome. I have dozens of tabs open in multiple tab groups on Firefox - no issues. I switched over 4 or 5 years ago at this point and have almost no issues. The one issue with Firefox is that there are still some intranet sites I have...
  8. J

    Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups

    If it's a massive risk to data security to provide this information to regulators then it is a massive risk to data security for Amazon to have it on their servers in the first place. Especially when the regulators are looking for the data to discover the extent of (alleged) wrongdoing by the...
  9. J

    Democratic consultant indicted for Biden deepfake that told people not to vote

    Some of us are old enough to still have land lines with answering machines. (I'm willing to pay a small bit of money for the entertainment it provides - stringing along someone from "Apple" calling to tell me that my iPhone has problems and they need to fix it remotely is always good for a...
  10. J

    Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama

    For those who were curious as I was as to what the Sky voice sounded like, here's a comparison clip of Johannson in Her with the Sky voice: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8UVSXnefk To my ears, which are admittedly terrible, I can tell the difference and its not an exact match. But...
  11. J

    Democratic consultant indicted for Biden deepfake that told people not to vote

    And to top it all off - Biden wasn't even on the ballot for the NH primary because they scheduled it before the dates the national party decided would be allowed. So Kramer was trying to get people who were turning out for a write-in campaign to not show up and vote. There's "putting a fake...
  12. J

    Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama

    I struggled with this too, but what I came down on was that what they really wanted was to have Johansson do the voice. That the overtures weren't seeking permission, but rather what they wanted was her endorsement of the project and her name on it. Because that would be a coup. As to why? I'll...
  13. J

    On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

    Because the dream of the capitalist since slavery was outlawed is to figure out how to make money without having to pay people wages to do labor. The reason for all of the money being thrown at this technology is because of the dream of owning a fleet of cars that will go out on the streets and...
  14. J

    On self-driving, Waymo is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers

    The chess vs. checkers analogy in the title is I think very apt. But maybe not for the reasons typically associated with that analogy. Because they are playing two different games. Checkers is a short term game. You don't need to look that far ahead to win. Chess is about the long term - making...
  15. J

    Tesla shareholder group opposes Musk’s $46B pay, slams board “dysfunction”

    The end game for Tesla is that in the best case it's going to get acquired by someone for their tech and their charging network. In the worst case those assets will be acquired via bankruptcy sales to repay secured creditors. Before either of those happens their stock price has to "crash" to a...
  16. J

    Feds probe Waymo driverless cars hitting parked cars, drifting into traffic

    Incredibly hard. Driving is an incredibly hard task to program for - much harder than many people expect. Especially when you're getting noise along every signal you feed into the system and you're using statistically modeling to try to predict what you should be doing at every moment. Those...
  17. J

    Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles

    I vascilate between wondering if this move is a pure "make number go up" move on Musk's part because Wall Street investment types love seeing layoffs regardless of whether they make sense or not, or if Musk is just seriously losing it as he's burned veneer of his identity as a brilliant business...
  18. J

    TikTok ready to “move to the courts” to prevent ban in US

    Our First Amendment definitely prevents a lot of the kinds of actions against domestic enemies that you can take against foreign ones. Foreign adversaries don't get constitutional rights, but domestic terrorists still get their rights (until convicted). The First Amendment arguments are a...
  19. J

    China orders Apple to remove Meta apps after “inflammatory” posts about president

    This is the real problem. Apple's money depends on being able to get cheap labor. If they had to pay more for the labor, their business model falls apart. So they're beholden to an autocratic dictator who doesn't like that people mock him online by comparing him to Winnie the Pooh and have to...
  20. J

    Roku forcing 2-factor authentication after breach of 600K accounts

    If you rip your DVDs properly you can bypass all of that and just get the good stuff. Handbrake is a wonderful little program.