CommentRe:It's probably do it on purpose (Score 4, Interesting)27
Russia doesn't need NATO to break Russian things.
CommentRe:Stupid should be painful (Score 1)74
Air travel is safe because it has hard and fast standardized checklists, so airline personnel don't have to make shit up as they go along. They always follow the standard procedure.
Suppose a tablet gets jammed into a passenger seat. The procedure is that a flight attendant retrieves the device from the seat and inspects it. If it appears OK they can give it back to the passenger, but if it's damaged, say the chassis is bent, they'll put it in a special fireproof bag, and the flight continues.
What if they can't get the tablet out of the seat, so they can't inspect it? How are they supposed to decide whether it's safe? If it's an iPad, given Apple's build quality and engineering it's probably fine to leave it there, but suppose it's an ATOZEE or BYYBUO brand tablet -- one of those weird brands on Temu or Amazon Marketplace that slap their name on garbage from a random Chinese factories and then disappear if there's trouble and the get sued. No way you should trust one of those.
Clearly they can't be expected to know which devices are well-engineered, and which aren't. They can't know which devices may have recalls due to battery problems. They can't even trust the passenger's description of his tablet as an "iPad". Maybe that's what he calls all tablets.
The flight attendants need a decision tree, every leaf of that tree has to be safe, it can't require them to have personal knowledge of the quality and safety of every brand and model of device on the market, and it can't require them to take anything the passenger says for granted. That means you treat every tablet you can't retrieve and expect as a cheap piece of Chinese white label shit. From time to time that'll inconvenience hundreds of people for something that's 99.9% likely to be fine, but that's how airline safety works. A 0.1% chance of an unquenchable fire in the cabin is treated like a big deal.
CommentHow much does the size count in this case? (Score 1)17
TFA says: "though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain."; but it also indicates that these are specifically the 'AI' division types; rather than just a small slice of the workforce generally.
Given where the hype is currently; I'd assume that the bot herders would be the segment of the workforce that would be most likely to be able to exert influence. Is this group too small even for that; or is this strictly a question of a legally defined percentage for collective bargaining to kick in, in which case being a small but influential subset of the employees would make no difference because the measure is purely size?
Given where the hype is currently; I'd assume that the bot herders would be the segment of the workforce that would be most likely to be able to exert influence. Is this group too small even for that; or is this strictly a question of a legally defined percentage for collective bargaining to kick in, in which case being a small but influential subset of the employees would make no difference because the measure is purely size?
CommentRe:Soft! (Score 3, Interesting)89
Aside from the question of whether it's a good idea; there are also fairly massively different incentives at work.
New companies have a habit of dying, but they also have enough room for potential growth that equity compensation has a chance of turning into dramatic amounts of money. Not necessarily oligarch island money; but significant alteration of whether work is something you need to do money.
At one of the relatively mature outfits? Aside from the company's performance being down to thousands of people who mostly aren't you; it's overwhelmingly more likely that any employer stock is going to behave like a less diversified version of whatever your 401k has in it; unlikely to get wiped out, but no particularly dramatic gains are expected.
New companies have a habit of dying, but they also have enough room for potential growth that equity compensation has a chance of turning into dramatic amounts of money. Not necessarily oligarch island money; but significant alteration of whether work is something you need to do money.
At one of the relatively mature outfits? Aside from the company's performance being down to thousands of people who mostly aren't you; it's overwhelmingly more likely that any employer stock is going to behave like a less diversified version of whatever your 401k has in it; unlikely to get wiped out, but no particularly dramatic gains are expected.
CommentRe: Repairable? (Score 1)148
Yes, I considered that possibility, which is why I referred to a car amplifier, which is a proper stereo made for a car.
CommentRe:55 hours seems to be the healthy limit, WHO car (Score 2)89
Getting more hours out of the labor units and a better chance that they'll die or be incapacitated enough to be fired before they get old and expensive enough that we'd need to find a pretext to resource action them?
Sounds like a win-win for management.
Sounds like a win-win for management.
CommentRe:Repairable? (Score 1)148
We don't know the details of the vehicle's construction.
If the panels can be removed with a hex key, then those panels are probably not structural, but rather are bolted onto something else that *is* structural. So think of them less like the body panels in a modern monocoque vehicle body, and more like fairings.
Monocoque bodies are clearly superior if you are just concerned with weight and stiffness, but the advantages may be somewhat less in an EV with a skateboard chassis, where you're starting out with a very heavy and rigid base, and the efficiency penalty of extra weight is somewhat smaller than it would be for an ICEV. If you're envisioning a vehicle body that can be easily and radically reconfigured by the owner, maybe you'd take the additional weight penalty of some kind of space frame above the skateboard chassis that would allow easy body modifications while ensuring rollover and side impact protection in the modified body.
CommentRe: Repairable? (Score 1)148
You can get bluetooth speakers with greater than 120 db SPL output. Or car amplifiers in the thousands of watts RMS range with bluetooth input if you're doing a custom audio installation.
CommentRe:"user friendliness" (Score 1)220
It's also about where you want to put your complexity.
If you are more or less directly interacting with a user: you will almost certainly want to be able to handle case insensitive searches. You'll probably also want to let them change the font and the text size and color and have the timestamps displayed correctly for their region and time zone.
It's just much less clear how much of that you want to make the filesystem's problem. You could drag a full timezone system into the filesystem so that timestamps could be intrinsically timezone-aware. If you wanted to. Maybe the better part of a CSS implementation so that the color, size, and font of the file name could be as directly connected to the file as the name is. Wouldn't that be awesome?
If you are more or less directly interacting with a user: you will almost certainly want to be able to handle case insensitive searches. You'll probably also want to let them change the font and the text size and color and have the timestamps displayed correctly for their region and time zone.
It's just much less clear how much of that you want to make the filesystem's problem. You could drag a full timezone system into the filesystem so that timestamps could be intrinsically timezone-aware. If you wanted to. Maybe the better part of a CSS implementation so that the color, size, and font of the file name could be as directly connected to the file as the name is. Wouldn't that be awesome?
CommentRe:HEADLINE IS WRONG. So was the pilot (Score 0)74
Does Lufthansa not carry thermal containment bags? I thought they all did now. (Note the old age of my link - 2016 - is actually a plus in this case... airlines have been taking action on this for years.) If the iPad isn't even in runaway, sealing it in there just in case seems like you have covered the risk very well.
CommentRe:Somewhat unexpected. (Score 1)49
I'd be interested to know how happy or unhappy Intel is about the situation: on the one hand anything that helps keep fab utilization as close to 100% as possible is presumably a positive; and, in the case of the Lunar Lake parts, the new-hotness may or may not actually be higher margin since there's more TSMC material in there and the co-packaged RAM made dealing with DRAM prices Intel's problem rather than the OEM's problem; but on the other it can't be entirely encouraging that the customer response skews so heavily toward "we don't want your improvements; we want cheap"; and (though Intel's data alone wouldn't be able to tell us whether this is the case or not) it would be actively bad if people do care a lot about battery life, or improved integrated GPUs, but the people looking to sell those are simply not going to Intel to provide them(obviously Apple isn't; but AMD is certainly relevant in mobile again, and not just as an ultra-budget option; while MS is at least trying to make Qualcomm happen).
Given how hard Intel goes on 'system TOPS' (counting the combined computation of CPU, GPU, and NPU if present) in their 'AI PC' marketing stuff; rather than Microsoft's NPU-or-nothing focus in their "Copilot Plus PC" marketing stuff; I would imagine that Intel doesn't much care about people not caring about their NPU all that much: they've got one they can sell you; it meets MS' requirements for their little copilot sticker, so they won't lose out in any tickbox-based procurement contest; but the meaning of OEMs preferring Intel's cheaper parts could be substantially different for Intel depending on whether it's a "buyers are price sensitive; especially with the current state of global trade" thing; or an "honestly, people who care get Strix Point; but someone needs to fill the cheap seats" thing.
Given how hard Intel goes on 'system TOPS' (counting the combined computation of CPU, GPU, and NPU if present) in their 'AI PC' marketing stuff; rather than Microsoft's NPU-or-nothing focus in their "Copilot Plus PC" marketing stuff; I would imagine that Intel doesn't much care about people not caring about their NPU all that much: they've got one they can sell you; it meets MS' requirements for their little copilot sticker, so they won't lose out in any tickbox-based procurement contest; but the meaning of OEMs preferring Intel's cheaper parts could be substantially different for Intel depending on whether it's a "buyers are price sensitive; especially with the current state of global trade" thing; or an "honestly, people who care get Strix Point; but someone needs to fill the cheap seats" thing.
Commenttwo at once (Score 1)97
The feature I would really like to have is the ability to show two sets of subtitles at once, that is, closed captions in the language of the audio, and a translation into English or another language I know well. This would be great when watching a show in a language I don't know well. I don't know if there is much of a market for this, but I would think that a fair number of language learners would like it.
CommentSomewhat unexpected. (Score 1)49
The part of this that is genuinely a bit surprising isn't that nobody cares about glorious 'copilot+' NPU AI PC whatever; but that Intel is apparently having a hard time selling people on the actual improvement between raptor lake and meteor lake; which is the battery life.
Performance was basically a wash; but that's the generation where Intel significantly improved the efficiency situation.
Performance was basically a wash; but that's the generation where Intel significantly improved the efficiency situation.
CommentCurious (Score 4, Insightful)73
Is he honestly so high on his own supply that he buys the "people would love ads if only they were more 'relevant'; because obviously there's not actually any tension between things you are interested in seeing and things that someone will pay to have rammed into your eye" concept; or is this just one of those situations where you look at your burn rate, remaining VC cash, and complete lack of plans for profitability and make a statement that isn't secret but is intended for the investors rather than the targets?
CommentIt explains so much. (Score 1)56
Someone who says "humans who can complete higher-level tasks, such as creativity and judgment, should not be stuck answering emails" is definitely someone you'd want to have to communicate with.
From the unfortunate occasions when I've been forced to try to talk to them; I'm pretty sure that Redmond has already culled anyone meeting this description from public-facing communication.
From the unfortunate occasions when I've been forced to try to talk to them; I'm pretty sure that Redmond has already culled anyone meeting this description from public-facing communication.
