... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.
The Metro wouldn't be safe by modern standards. Of course an old Honda Civic hatchback wouldn't be, either.
Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.
The 3 cylinder Geo Metro in the 1990s achieved over 40 miles per gallon. 30 years later you're telling me we lost that ability?
Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.
The fact that the government is mandating fuel efficiency means that most people don't care. If they cared, nobody would buy the inefficient cars so the manufacturers wouldn't make them, no need for government intervention.
The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.
I traveled to poor countries where traffic is 90% scooters. This is all they can afford. I hope we can do better.
Being inexpensive to purchase and operate is one advantage scooters have over automobiles; the other is that they are small enough to maneuver quickly through heavy traffic and easier to find a parking spot for in congested areas.
I don't think slashdot has had any actual developers working on its since the early 2000s. It's a mature legacy codebase, destined to run as-is until it can't anymore, then go away.
Because we don't want them to instantly kill the first kid who jumps the fence, or the next careless service technician. Automated industrial robots (which is what these cars are, really) have these things for a reason.
I really hope that Waymo's cars aren't relying on their Nader-beepers to avoid killing people. They should be (and AFAIK are) relying instead on their video cameras, LIDARs, and other sensors to stop the car before it hits the wayward kid/technician.
Remember that these are the people who invented the use of CTRL-ALT-DEL hardware interrupts to "secure" the Windows login screen. That tells you all you need to know really.
Yes, they should have done it the right way instead!
Err, what was the right way? It's not obvious to me, given that Microsoft doesn't have design control over the hardware its software runs on.
Do you really think Karen in Finance is going to request an RDS instance and vibe code a nice react frontend for her CRUD??
At this point, my biggest fear is that she will -- and then call me over to debug the AI-generated codebase, when it inevitably doesn't work quite right.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that OpenAI and its competitors are trying to do the right thing here and make their AIs as harm-free as possible.
Not everyone will be that responsible, however. Now that it has been demonstrated that a suitably sycophantic AI can compromise the psyches of significant numbers of people, it's only a matter of time before various bad actors start weaponizing their own AI models specifically to take advantage of that ability. "Pig butchering" will be one of the first job categories to be successfully replaced by AI.
Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
I didn't do anything crazy like actually read the article, but I did go as far as to read the third sentence of the summary, which began like this:
[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex [...]
.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.
Stop chasing these false "scarcities" that continue to crop up from time to time. Build your systems with used or NOS parts that are 3 or more generations back.
That's good advice for individuals building a home system for personal use. It's not really applicable for businesses and companies, though, since they likely don't have the expertise or the man-hours required to cobble together their business-critical systems from used parts. They're going to want to buy new, from a company that give them good support if/when anything goes wrong.
The [AI] infrastructure isn't going to get shut down and sold off it's going to get used.
It'll get used, if using it is more profitable than letting it go dark. Given the infrastructure costs of keeping all that hardware running, it's not a given that it will be. Once the investor $$$ stop flowing and the debt limits are hit, we'll see how much of the AI hardware build-out can really pay for its own room and board, and how much was just 'peacock feathers' whose only real purpose was to impress gullible investors into handing over their money.
The weird thing about that scenario is, they made it into a kid's movie.
people on benefits always find constructive things to do with their time, they never get depressed due to lack of purpose and end up on drinks, drugs or in prison.
You're not thinking it through -- the goal isn't just to put everyone on benefits and make them spend the rest of their lives clicking the TV remote and waiting for their next welfare check. If you want to do it right (and the robots provide sufficient surplus resources to support it), you go a step further and hire people to do the job they always wanted to do, whether it makes a profit for anyone or not. If that means we have 100,000 ski instructors and 300,000 mediocre artists, then so be it; the robots do the grunt work, and the people are paid to do their preferred avocation.
Not that I expect that to actually happen, of course; in the event the robots actually can replace all labor, the upper classes will make sure that economic surplus goes to themselves, with only the absolute minimum getting distributed to anyone else.
Frankly, Scarlett, I don't have a fix. -- Rhett Buggler
