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imperfect_light

The real question is if the money leaves AI stocks where does it go.
Re:OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems on Friday September 11, 2026 @10:36PM (#49668162)
Someone started that lawnmower and pointed it your direction. Why shouldn't they be responsible when the lawnmower runs over your foot and cuts it off?
Re:OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems on Friday September 11, 2026 @10:34PM (#49668148)
If an individual hacked these sites they would be criminally and civilly responsible.

Why don't we hold the companies launching AI agents to the same standard? They would be more responsible if there were some serious consequences beyond just bad PR.

I don't know how it works today, but 20 years ago bookstores wouldn't return unsold books (too expensive to ship) but would simply tear the covers off and throw them in the garbage.
People keep repeating the "rare books" without providing any evidence that they are rare. Anyone who has collected books knows there are massive volumes of old books that can be bought by the pound.
Re:AI companies are shredding rare books on Monday July 27, 2026 @03:49PM (#49074718)
Where's the evidence the books are "rare"?
>120 biolabs in over 30 countries

And yet the only ones listed in detail are the ones in Ukraine, huh.

Re:Ground stop at JFK due to staffing on Thursday October 30, 2025 @11:11PM (#45767940)
You should ask BigCo if they're only providing goods/services to their customers "for the money."
Re:An untidy history of AI across four books on Friday September 19, 2025 @11:32PM (#45310071)
He did so well with Theranos
Re:Heart attacks may be triggered by bacteria on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @04:27PM (#45267519)
Now we're seeing more colon cancer in young people. All of the discussion is around factors that change slowly (diet, alcohol, exercise), no one I've heard has pointed out that a pathogen would explain a quick change.
Re:Heart attacks may be triggered by bacteria on Sunday September 14, 2025 @12:15AM (#45237396)
Have always been fascinated with Paul Ewald's arguments (as laid out in his books The New Germ Theory of Disease and Evolution of Infectious Disease) that most chronic illnesses are due to pathogens.
This seems similar to the "let's just rebuild from scratch" impulse that has been tried so many times on very large complicated systems and often, although not always, fails.
Re:Intel CEO Letter to Employees on Friday July 25, 2025 @03:01AM (#44680402)
I'm not arguing that layoffs lead to a death spiral.

I'm arguing that if you're on a downward trajectory and your primary strategy is layoffs and cutting expenses, rather than investing, you're not going to recover.

Re:Intel CEO Letter to Employees on Thursday July 24, 2025 @08:13PM (#44677919)
Anyone have examples of companies that were in trouble and cut employees and spending heavily and that led them back to success?

My personal experience with working for such companies is that it leads to a death spiral, but I recognize my sample size is small.

Re:Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG on Tuesday July 22, 2025 @11:31PM (#44655483)
My question is less about PDFs and more about the notion that all the facts needed for the RAG are in documents. In my experience just a fraction of the questions that might be useful exist in a document somewhere. There must be a variation of RAGs that are pulling not from documents, but from databases using some semantic model.
Re:Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG on Monday July 21, 2025 @10:07PM (#44642574)
The emphasis on PDFs for RAG seems like something out of the 1990s. Are there any good frameworks for using RAG if your company doesn't go around creating documents left and right?

After all, the documents/emails/presentations will cover the most common use cases. But we have databases that have all the questions the RAG might be asked, far more answers than that which live in documents.

Re:The Price of Remission on Saturday May 10, 2025 @08:11PM (#43950107)
How do you know you're actually getting what you bought?
Re:Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer on Sunday April 06, 2025 @12:11AM (#43598904)
Quantum entanglement
Police in my city go to pretty much every protest and take video and photos (with big zoom lens) from the roofs of nearby buildings. It's always surprising to me that more people don't notice.
Re:The Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer's Science on Sunday February 02, 2025 @05:49PM (#42912683)
You're conflating outright fraud with a difference of scientific opinion?
Where are these numbers from? How does 5 million housing units from 2020-2023 (this was published in 2024) translate into "90K housing units"

>The United States has added almost 5 million housing units since 2020, most heavily in the South and most of them single-family homes, making a housing shortage look conquerable in much of the nation.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/05/16/housing-boom-....

>If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes.

You could really generalize and say this is about relationships in general. If people leave interactions with you feeling good about themself, it will be a relationship they want to continue and grow.

And the ratio of good interactions to bad needs to be at least 5X (at least that's what the Gottman Institute found with romantic relationships)

Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week on Monday September 16, 2024 @08:34PM (#41562732)
You think they all magically figured out they were overstaffed at the same time? It's 100% herd mentality. They're cutting because everyone else is cutting, just like they went on hiring sprees because everyone else was doing the same.

It's easy to measure short-term impact (we cut a bunch of people, we're saving money, we're more profitable) but it's very hard to measure the medium to long term impact of these cuts.

Note I'm not arguing these cuts are the wrong strategy, I'm arguing they have absolutely no clue.

Re:Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week on Monday September 16, 2024 @05:38PM (#41561229)
Reminds me of the famous Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably. Is it widespread, it is representative of most people on food stamps. Of course not.

Same situation here. Of course it's happened, some people have taken advantage of remote work. So what's the manager's excuse for not catching this?

Re:Pipe Syntax in SQL on Saturday August 24, 2024 @09:57PM (#41343676)
>But SQL is an old language with significant design problems, making it difficult to learn, difficult to use, and difficult to extend.

It's difficult to learn and use? Compared to what? The "difficult to extend" might be accurate, but I really question the initial premise here.

Interesting article but why is it 2.9G in Chrome?! Couldn't figure out why Chrome slowed to a crawl when I hit this site, reloaded it several times, still massive.
Re:LHM to permanently close and sell DEC-10 at auction on Friday June 28, 2024 @04:32AM (#40818769)
What are you basing this assertion on? It was closed because of the pandemic. When that was over Allen had been dead for several years, his instructions had been to sell everything and give it to charity so that's what his sister has been doing. No one attempted to reopen with alternative benefactors or see if visitors would come.

I was there right before the pandemic and there were a decent number of visitors (given that it was a weekday afternoon).

Re:LHM to permanently close and sell DEC-10 at auction on Thursday June 27, 2024 @07:05PM (#40816135)
If the museum was open I'm sure it would have plenty of visitors and support. Can't visit a museum that isn't open.

But the fact is that most museums rely, in least in part, on grants and benefactors in addition to visitors.

Re:LHM to permanently close and sell DEC-10 at auction on Thursday June 27, 2024 @11:39AM (#40811664)
It's not like there's a shortage of money for art museums or natural history museums, but we do seem to be closing museums (this one and previously the Boston one) detailing the history of one of the biggest innovations in human history.

When you say "world needs" you mean sports teams and personal space travel? It's safe to say all of them have plenty of money to save this small museum and still fund their hobbies and causes.

Re:LHM to permanently close and sell DEC-10 at auction on Thursday June 27, 2024 @02:45AM (#40807996)
The dude was sick on and off for years, could have had an army of lawyers setting up these places to continue after him, and didn't bother. Don't blame his sister who was left this mess.

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