Many, many PC games can be played with a controller connected to the PC's USB port. Support for HID protocol and XInput protocol is widespread.

Gaming exclusively on modern consoles on grounds that games for Linux or Windows are presumed malware means you'll probably get indie games years late or never. This is because it takes time for an indie developer to build enough of a reputation in the industry to become eligible to buy a devkit for a modern console.

Unless by consoles, you mean things like the NES and Genesis, which are still getting brand-new indie games decades after Nintendo and Sega stopped supporting them.

That's because you're taking the default, most expensive, booking option. On hilton.com, which I almost always use for business travel, click through the "more rates" link and you'll typically see rates for prepayment with no cancellation, rates with 2-3 day cancellation and rates with 24-hour cancellation. Also rates with free breakfast, rates with double points, etc.

Only consumers who are okay with possibly not being able to book a room.

I actually do this quite often on vacation. We like to fly to an interesting place with only a rough itinerary -- basically a list of things we want to see in approximate order based on a rough driving route -- then during the trip we book each night's accommodations that day, usually mid or late afternoon. By searching the whole area reachable by driving from our current location (and in the direction of what we'd like to do the next day) we can usually find a really good price on a decent place, and very often end up finding nice places that we'd never have stayed otherwise.

A few times we've really hit the jackpot, such as one night we spent at the fantastic Liss Ard Estate in southern Ireland, paying about 120 EUR for a room that usually goes for upwards of 500. That was so nice we almost decided to stay a second night. Another time, a call directly to the hotel got us the owner who offered us the night in a nice room for 50 EUR on the condition that we pay in cash :D . The flip side is that we have a couple of times had to stay places we really didn't like. It's likely that if we do this for long enough we may eventually have to badly overpay for a room (since hoteliers sometimes hold back a small number of rooms they hope to rent at very high rates when things are busy), go to a hostel, or even end up sleeping in the car. But on balance it's a risk that has paid off for us, mostly because it makes our vacations flexible and casual rather than tying us to a rigid schedule of locations, or keeping us restricted to one region.

I highly recommend this vacation strategy if you can be flexible and a little adventurous and when traveling in countries where you speak the language (or many of the locals speak yours) and which are generally safe. We've done it on a western US road trip (UT, NV, CA, OR, WA, ID), and in New Zealand, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Italy, Slovenia, Portugal and the US Virgin Islands. This is a vacation strategy that wasn't really possible before smartphones and Internet booking. I guess it could have been done pre-Internet, but it would have required a more adventurous mindset than I have at this point in my life, or than my wife has ever had.

For business travel I want my hotel reservation locked in, well in advance.

Ther is this thing called debit carsd, no monthly bill to remember and no innterest if you forget ( obviously) and you are nor writteb up for having access to a line of credid(this might just be a thing here in Norway, but yea if you want a mortage and have a stacbk of vvs even if you have no balance on any of them)

We used to use 3rd party booking sites. If everything went fine, there were no issues. If anything went wrong, it was a disaster. Hotel overbooked? The hotel won't help you. Wrong room type? The hotel won't help you. Can't find your reservation number? The hotel won't help you. You get to call Expedia and pray that a human picks up and can do something for you. This happened once to a friend, where a hotel was overbooked so Expedia got them a new hotel room on the other side of town. Didn't help our friend who was going to a conference at that hotel. If he had booked through the hotel, they would have put him in a sister hotel a block away.

We only book through the hotel sites now. You have a lot of leverage with the staff when you are sitting in front of them and they are responsible for filling your reservation. Also, if you are a rewards member, you can call the rewards number and they will usually fix anything the staff won't, or can't, fix.

Yep, and just like happened to the Internet, after the bubble bursts everyone will realize the tech is useless and it will quickly fade into obscurity. Same thing that happened with the telecom bubble and the railroad bubble. So much fiber / track that got laid and then never used.

Completely different situation. A human is making the decisions in that case. Google Maps even warns drivers not to blindly follow it. This is entirely different from a fully autonomous vehicle which is moving without any human direction or control.

Umm, none of the suits against OpenAI for suicides have been closed out, they're all still pending. It also isn't remotely the same thing. A self-driving car operating without any human control that kills someone is clearly at fault and there is no one to shift the blame to. The case of LLM users committing suicide is very fuzzy at best.

As the other poster says, the reason for the shortage is because successive British governments have cut funding in the NHS in real terms, and are now flailing around as those cuts have really started to bite.

And every time the doctors or nurses strike to make a point, they get gaslit because "think of the patients".

Healthcare systems run on two things - staff, and good will.

The government has reduced the staff well below minimum, and burned up all the good will, so now theres nothing left. Fewer doctors are coming into the NHS through British training schemes because those are capped and indeed some have been reduced recently, and more doctors are retiring early or leaving the country.

And thats not counting the doctors who were forced to retire early because of the Tory governments cap on lifetime pension contributions - when the government dictates how much you pay into your pension, and also dictate that above a certain threshold of lifetime contributions you become liable for a huge tax bill immediately, and you cant withdraw from the pension contributions without also forfeiting the pension itself, then your only option to avoid a huge tax bill is ... retirement....

For a pro-capitalist, anti-socialist country, its astounding how much US law makers get involved in the running of businesses, whether it be with regulations, hearings or "opinions". US law makers love to do it.

Of course, its all performative - calling CEOs into hearings to berate them rather than actually doing fact finding, basically using the hearings as a court where the people appearing have already been judged and sentenced. Got to be seen doing something, but lets certainly not fix the issue through good legislation, because berating people in public is more fun.

Quite the opposite (until a couple of months ago I worked at Google, on Android, and wrote a lot of Rust): Much Rust code requires more reviews. This is because if the reviewer you'd normally go to as a subject-matter expert in the area isn't also an experienced Rust developer (common), what you do is get two reviews, one from the reviewer who knows the area, and one from an experienced Rust engineer.

The reviews still tend to go faster, though, because there are a whole lot of things reviewers don't have to check. When reviewing C++ code you have to watch carefully to make sure the author didn't write something subtly incorrect that could smash the stack or create a race condition. When reviewing Rust code you can just assume that the compiler wouldn't allow any of that, so you just focus on looking for higher-level logic bugs. Unless you're looking at an unsafe block, of course, but those are (a) rare and (b) required to be accompanied with thorough documentation that explains why the code is actually safe.

I can answer this, at least for Android (which is the topic of TFA): Android requires all new native code to be written in Rust, unless there is some specific reason to use C++. And, really, the only valid reason for using C++ is that the new code is a small addition to an existing C++ binary. So, effectively everyone on the Android team that works on native code and isn't just making small maintenance changes to existing code is "recruited" to write Rust.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that software engineers at Google are significantly more capable than the industry average. So while I don't think your point has anything to do with the successful results in Android, it might well be a significant factor in other environments.

When looking at defects that constitute security vulnerabilities, this is false. In typical C/C++ code about 75% of security vulnerabilities are due to memory safety bugs.

If you believe that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous, that may be the only path that makes the human race a viable long term player.

And I've yet to see any well thought-out argument showing that AI doesn't have the potential to be wildly dangerous. If anyone has one, please post it!

The closest I've seen are:

1. Humans are incapable of creating AGI, so the AI companies are simply going to fail.
2. There is a hard upper limit on intelligence, and it's not far above human-level, so even when AI companies succeed at creating AGI, superintelligence is impossible.
3. If AI becomes superintelligent, humans will be able to use the same technology to augment their own intelligence so we won't be at a disadvantage.
4. High intelligence naturally and inevitably includes high levels of empathy, so AI superintelligence is inherently safe.

All of these are just unsupported assertions. Wishful thinking, really. (1) makes no sense, since undirected, random variation and selection processes were able to do it. (2) Is plausible, I suppose, but I see no evidence to support it. (3) essentially assumes that we'll achieve brain/computer integration before we achieve self-improving AGI. (4) seems contradicted our experience of extremely intelligent yet completely unempathetic and amoral people, and that's from a highly social species.

The other common argument against AI danger that I've heard is just foolishness: Because AIs run in data centers that require power and because they don't have hands, they'll be easy for us to control. People who say this just fail to understand what "superintelligence" is, and also know nothing about human nature.

A less-foolish but equally-wrong argument is that of course AI won't be dangerous to humanity. We're building them, so they'll do what we say. This assumption is based on a lack of understanding of how we're building them and how little we know about how they work.

Generally, when I talk about the risks of ASI, the responses aren't even arguments, they're just content-free mockery of the idea that AGI could ever be real. I think it's just genuinely hard for many people to take the question seriously. Not because there aren't good reasons to take it seriously, but because they just can't bring themselves to really consider it.

That is very, very far from the only thing that can go wrong. Human extinction is within the range of possibilities.