Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Say hello to Wirth's law (Score 1) 70

OTOH the nice thing about software is that it's easy to update, so anyone is free to replace their slow/inefficient software with a faster/efficient version as soon as they obtain it, at which point their fast hardware should run the efficient software very quickly. Nothing (except possibly bad management decisions?) is preventing anyone from creating efficient software, either.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 147

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of human culture for thousands of years, appearing in ancient myths and legends.

Perhaps it was referring to golems? That idea dates back to 400-500 BC, although really they behave more like traditional computer programs than anything we'd currently consider intelligent.

Comment Re:Yo Dawg (Score 3, Insightful) 9

I don't need an AI to write my code, since I can write code myself. That said, it could be nice to have an AI inspect my code and point out anything it suspects might be a bug... there are already lots of static analysis tools that do this sort of thing and they are great, but I think AI might be able to find different classes of bug that are beyond the capabilities of static analysis.

Going a bit further, what would be even more useful is an AI that can run my program and exercise its GUI (or fuzz its inputs) and monitor the resulting behavior the way a human would, to look for faults during execution. Human-driven SQA is always a lot of tedious work, and a production bottleneck.

Comment There are cheaper ways to generate heat (Score 3, Informative) 50

In a fission nuclear plant, nuclear fuel is used to generate heat to boil water to run a steam turbine.

That's all well and good, but there's no reason the heat has to come from nuclear fission; any similarly reliable heat-source would do just as well. Perhaps there are cheaper and safer ways to obtain the required heat? You can do a whole lot of drilling with $80,000,000,000 dollars, especially since without any radioactive material to worry about, you don't have to spend all that money on security, failsafe backup systems, and long-term waste disposal anymore.

Comment Re:Wind, Solar and Batteries are cheaper and clean (Score 1) 180

What the world would really like is something that performs like nuclear fission (lots of 24/7 reliable baseload power, deployable anywhere) but without the big upfront expense or the catastrophic risks (pollution, storage, proliferation) to manage.

Is there such a thing? Could there be? Nuclear fusion might be one answer, and they've made good progress, but it's still a bit iffy and even in the best-case scenario it won't be applied at scale for some years yet. Geothermal is seeing some interesting developments that might allow it to be deployed more broadly, so that's what I'm currently geeked over. Short of that, there's always good old-fashioned renewables+lots of storage, which can be made to work, but requires a lot of infrastructure.

Slashdot Top Deals

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves. -- Lazarus Long

Working...