…these guys would stop trying to predict an increasingly unpredictable future and concentrate on accurately reporting real progress

…remember the contingent of naysayers who said the internet was a passing fad?

I remember both of them, and I remember thinking they were full of shit. Aside from Bill Gates and some other forgettable nobody, no one thought the Internet was a passing fad. However, just about everyone on Slashdot thought that most of the companies in the dot com boom were doomed to failure, even (especially?) as paid pundits talked up the brilliance of the companies’ CEOs.

I see history repeating. The underlying technology has some cool uses (though not worth the catastrophic cost of building the models), but it’s pets.com all over again.

As the current administration has demonstrated repeatedly, when a metric shows negative, just change the metric (or remove it)!

Are you talking about the administration running India?

No kid should be on social media. Period.

Besides, isn’t addiction something diagnosed by a physician ? I would testify in court i would not venture in giving actual medical diagnostics. I would use other words.

Muthahfuckah, if you spend TWO THIRDS of your waking time doing a single thing, YOU’RE ADDICTED!

Doesn’t matter if it’s sports, working out, gardening, watching TV, stroking your micro-dick, or browsing InstaShit, spending 16 hours per day on one thing is one of THE most obvious signs of addiction I can think of. And I bet this teenager would display genuine withdrawal symptoms if separated from their phone.

For the non nerds reading this, the Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise in the Star Trek universe designed as a no-win scenario. The goal is to test a cadet’s character in the face of certain death. According to canon, James T. Kirk is the only person to ever “beat” the simulation by reprogramming the simulation so that it was possible to rescue the stranded ship. When accused of cheating, Kirk’s logic was that he changed the conditions of the test. In the corporate world, if the goal is “Problem Solving,” the person who changes the conditions to find a faster, more accurate solution isn’t a cheater - they are an innovator. KPMG failed their own test IMO.

It’ll be interesting to see how they define what an artist is.

Writer? Poet? Painter? Musician?

Do you need an established body of work? Many times it’s the beginner who’s starting out that needs a subsidy more than the chap who’s been doing whatever for 50 years.

Several countries do provide personal stipends, working grants, or quasi-salary systems for artists.

France
Through the “intermittents du spectacle” system, performing artists can receive unemployment-style income support between contracts, if they meet work-hour thresholds. It’s not a universal artist salary, but it functions as income stabilization.

Germany
Artists can receive working grants (Arbeitsstipendien) that support living costs for a period of time without requiring a specific deliverable. There’s also the Künstlersozialkasse, which subsidizes health and pension insurance for self-employed artists.

Nordic countries
This is where it gets serious.
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland offer multi-year working grants and, in some cases, long-term stipends that function almost like partial salaries. Norway has had lifetime grants for selected artists. These are competitive but substantial.

Netherlands
Individual artist grants exist via national arts funds, often covering living expenses during creative periods.

Ireland
The Basic Income for the Arts pilot (launched 2022) provides direct monthly payments to selected artists. It’s explicitly personal income support.

Canada
The Canada Council offers individual artist grants covering living and creation time. Some provinces provide additional stipends.

Yes, give it away; there are plenty of needy people in the world. Or else stop over-producing clothing and footwear in the first place.

In some cases they could also remove the branding, and sell it as cheap unbranded goods somewhere.

Textiles are technology. It is one of the most impactful and advanced technology we have. You think of it is as industry in large part because of how long we have been doing it. Also, most of the textile engineers are female, and I am betting you are not.

Carbon Fabric is the exact same thing as dense carbon fiber, just without a ton of resin to make it hard. Kevlar, Tencel, Phase Change Materials, Wearables, are all advanced technology. Not to mention new printing processes and treatments for fabrics.

As to why this particular story is on slashdot, it highlights legal actions against manufacturers because the manufactures are evil. This industry in particular is known for their outright evil - from both excessive margins and abusive employee/manufactuing conditions.

A lot of luxury brands destroy perfectly good clothing that has minor defects.

They get their logo wrong? Destroyed. Color off? Destroyed.

They care more about their image than the waste.

It’s not even that. A lot of clothing is destroyed simply because it didn’t sell. Season’s over, throw it in the discount outlet store, doesn’t sell within 3 months? Destroyed.

but they also have a large-enough contingent of peaceniks and America-haters on staff that it’s awkward for them in the office when they do take on the military as a client.

I don’t hate America. I hate what America has become.

Translated into English: “Anthropic has insufficiently bribed the Trump regime and must therefore be punished.”

> By the time I was a grown-as man, that went out of vogue and the identity-first stuff was back in vogue. But it wasn’t like the bad old racism and sexism of old, you see. It was enlightened and scientific now. So instead of keeping down the womenfolk, we were gonna keep down the menfolk to even it out! And instead of a maximum melanin allowance, we’re going to Reverse The Polarity! and impose a minimum melanin quota in hiring! But the jew-hatin…we can still have that, we just gotta reframe it as anti-settler-colonialism to help ourselves sleep at night.

None of this ever happened. You just told yourself that. Why? I can speculate. I can speculate you thought women getting jobs meant men wouldn’t. I can speculate you thought treating black people with respect in some way meant white people wouldn’t have what they have. I can speculate you were simply blind to the discrimination that existed. Maybe you really weren’t intentionally discriminatory, and you thought that meant nobody else was either. Or maybe it was the opposite: maybe there were sexist and obnoxious things you did, maybe you sexually harassed co-workers, or made racist jokes in the breakroom, and you didn’t want to be held accountable.

But no feminist called for keeping down the menfolk. No civil rights campaigner called for firing white people for being white. No LGBT person forced you to have gay sex or change your gender. At worst you had to refer to someone born in a woman’s body using male pronouns, which was easy because they wore male clothing and had a male haircut and no make-up, or else be treated as a jackass.

And it was stupid of you to tell yourself those lies and to vote for people who ran on those lies being true, because now we live under fascism, and there’s a great chance that the next few elections will be rigged, and the power of government used for the foreseeable future to make a tiny minority wealthy, and to enact violence against all those who complain about it, together with arbitrary groups designated the scapegoat of the hour.

And yes, you’ll be a victim. Perhaps more of a victim than the average liberal. Liberals fight against this crap, and yes, at least two were murdered in plain sight, on video, in a way no rational person could describe as anything other than murder. But that makes us harder to steal from than the administration’s marks. The people who believe these lies will believe everything. And the administration will take full advantage of that.

I know you don’t see yourself as a mark. And I know you’re now getting unreasonably angry at me for suggesting you are one. But… victims of successful con-artists are the hardest to convince.

Rumor has it that Microsoft is going to allow the next XBox to be used as a desktop PC. Steam stuff already allows that. I’d assert that it might be wise for Sony to take a look into that. If Sony could make the next console function like a thin client or zero client, coupled with management abilities, businesses would buy those in mass quantities, especially if Sony made some VDI software that worked well. The trick is to get enterprises to buy the consoles for something as well, as it is a lot easier to sell 20,000 items to one buyer, than 1 item to 20,000 people.

.. The current generation PS5 already performs at 60 frames per second on most 4k content - Where is the NEED for a new console right now?

No, the current generation can fake 60 frames per second and fake 4k. And they produce a shitty image full of artefacts as a result. But I do agree with you there isn’t a need for a new console. The real need is that we go back to making optimised well running games rather than just throwing assets at an engine and hoping FSR can make it run in a playable way.

Predicting the future isn’t easy.

The .com bubble was pretty much “Oh hey, computers have been around for a while and they’re great, now the internet is arriving so let’s make sure we don’t miss out. Let’s pump all of the money into any company that has a web page or might consider making one, in case they conquer the internet.”

LLMs feel to me more like, “Oh hey, someone added an LCD screen to a toaster and they claim next year they’ll make the airline industry irrelevant, let’s put all of the money into toaster factories!”

That doesn’t mean LLMs will have no place where they’re useful. But, barring a new breakthrough, it’s hard to see how what is in essence a “pick next word” algorithm might turn out e.g. a new Google.

But, as mentioned, predicting the future isn’t easy. Perhaps I’ll look like a luddite in a few years time. Then again, my track record of greeting 3D movies with “meh” every time they roll back into fashion, is pretty darn good. :p

Here’s one case where the answer to a question in the headline certainly isn’t “no”.

This is all a bunch of bullshit.

none of the articles at Ars Technica are ever AI-generated.

Except this one, which obviously was AI generated. Don’t lie to us about vagaries. This was the site’s “senior AI reporter” using AI to write fabricated stories. Are we truly supposed to believe that the juniors aren’t using AI to generate stories as well?

“Isolated incident” my big fat hairy ass. This reporter wasn’t “tripped up”. He was caught red handed and is unable to cover this one up.