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

Waymo, at least, has explicitly taken responsibility for whatever their self-driving cars do. And, honestly, it doesn't seem possible for a self-driving system's maker to avoid liability, because there's absolutely no other entity to assign it to. Tesla avoids liability (so far) by explicitly requiring human supervision. But if they ever want to claim level 4 or 5 they're going to have to take responsibility.

I think such a disclaimer would be invalid in all jurisdictions, if they even tried to make it, which I don't think they'll do because it would be ridiculous. As for settling... yeah, that's what basically always happens with automobile accidents. The at-fault party (or their insurer) pays the costs of the injured party. No one even bothers going to court unless there's a dispute about which party was at fault, and one thing about self-driving systems is that they have incredibly-detailed sensor data, all logged and available for review, so there really won't ever be any dispute about fault.

lgbtqrstuv people are free from feeling judged. Slavery is freedom. War is peace.

True, but keep in mind that this is not universal. For me, and for two of my children, writing by hand reduces learning and retention. We have some sort of dyslexia-adjacent disability that prevents us from "automating" writing the way most people do. When kids learn to write, they learn to draw the letter shapes out line by line and curve by curve, but for most people the shape-drawing quickly becomes automatic. Not so for me, or my kids. Writing takes focus and attention, not on the text being written, but on the shapes being drawn. Interestingly, this appears to have no effect on reading; all of us read (and type) rapidly and accurately.

I realized in high school that the common wisdom that hand-written note-taking helped with retention not only didn't work for me, but was actively harmful to learning. I wish I'd had the option of bringing a laptop to class, but in the mid 80's laptops were more "luggable" than portable, didn't have batteries and were far more expensive than my family could afford. So I just listened without taking notes, and studied by reading the textbook. Luckily, school came easily to me so I was able to do well without notes (or all that much studying). In college I learned to ask the professors for their lecture notes to study from.

Whether it is fast food, rent, prices at the pump, or this evolving patchwork of hotel cancellation rules, it ultimately reduces to the same underlying force: pricing power shifting toward the seller whenever consumers have limited alternatives or information asymmetry tilts the playing field. As soon as hotels realised third-party services were exploiting flexible cancellations to arbitrage room rates, they recalibrated their pricing structure to insulate revenue precisely the same way landlords adjust lease terms in tight housing markets, or fuel companies adjust margins when crude prices swing.

Consumers experience these adjustments as policy changes, but businesses experience them as price corrections to protect yield. The mechanisms differ. Non-refundable rates instead of cancellation windows, variable menu pricing instead of dollar menus, etc. but the logic is identical: once a loophole or inefficiency threatens revenue, the industry retools the rules so that the cost lands with the customer rather than the operator. On top of that you have the rising prices, often folded into the new policy because the higher price is thereby disguised. In that sense, the story here is not really about cancellation policies at all; it is about how every sector continually reshuffles the fine print to defend its margins.

I personally used the Hilton system recently and I can say they know they can charge more and be less flexible without losing customers. I'm guessing it's the same for other chains. But it may be that hotels will be more willing to allow late cancellations if a human took the time to make the reservation. i.e. they know for that person 20 different hotels aren't lined up for all but the least expensive to be cancelled.

Irrespective of the nationality of the people making decisions, I think what the GP is getting at is that there were different philosophies over the decades at Microsoft. Amongst the things Ballmer is most famous for is his "Developers, developers, developers, developers" mantra...and the idea was to make Windows the easiest platform to develop software for, and the developers would write software that would encourage the proliferation of Windows in the market. It was a rare case of growth by "trickle-down economics" - take care of the developers, and the developers would grow the market for the platform.

Microsoft's method of increasing shareholder value during the Ballmer era was indirect - value was sought after by market capture, which was fulfilled more so by third party developers than by Microsoft itself. By contrast, the Nadella era has been about "increasing shareholder value" by pushing everyone to Azure and Office subscriptions and by putting ads into Windows and by data harvesting.

Neither era was some sort of pinnacle of customer care; both were concerned about increasing shareholder value. I think the GP is at least somewhat justified in having concern about Microsoft's shift toward increasing shareholder value by making the Windows platform being actively-user-hostile, rather than developer-friendly.

It wouldn't be the elected elites. It would be the bureaucrats making the rules whom, after tailoring regulations to favor some companies over others, would then go work for those companies.

Fiber does not have to mean iptv, there is this thing rf over glass, basically ( cpe end) the ont has a coax port, and tv distribution troughot the home is traditional rf on coax. tho I suspect this was mostly a translation mechanism so existing coax costumers with multiple stns could me moved to fiber without having to change all their stbs and run ethernet to every tv. Esentially saving time for installers

No, they shut uhf(vhf broadcasts down to reose the spectrum for iot and fixed wireless internet. When it comes to satellite it's on the broadcasters, they see their audience shifting from satelite to cable + liniar streaming + vod, and have decided not to renew contracts with ses et all. Nothing yo do with local cable cos. Nite this is for Europe in generak and Norway specifically and mey not apply to the US

I agree. To do C well you have to be very disciplined and add a lot of design patterns that are unnecessary if your main going is just making something work. It's exactly the same with JS (hence why Typescript and endless libraries are so popular).

As you move into application level code it all becomes quite tiresome. Doing basic things requires dealing with clunky designed object models which slow you down at best, and can trip up the inexperienced at worst.

C++ at least provides better tools for structuring code, but it also doesn't really enforce any canonical methods but instead throws a whole lot of different methods at you (because that's really the aim of the language). The end result is extremely dangerous.

I don't like the fanaticism around rust, but i can see the point of the language. It does appear to be a better option than C++ at least, and ultimately nobody is ever going to replace C for where it is really needed as it does this job so well.

My wife is one of those who left.

Yes, a lot of it is to do with the over worked and under paid, but not all of it - a lot of it is also due to the unbelievable stress of the responsibility heaped on you as a doctor, coupled with the diminishing respect for being a doctor by pretty much everyone.

For example, GPs being told that they have to open in the evenings and weekends, despite not having enough staff to run a 9-5 Monday to Friday service already - and your budget is being taken by the pharmacists who are doing random pointless examinations or reviews on anyone who comes through the door (because the pharmacy makes money that way, but they can charge the GP for doing it). And if you refuse to, then a GMC complaint is raised.

How about being rung up by the police at 6pm and told to do a wellness check on a patient, despite it being the police’s responsibility and not yours - but because you have now been told, you have a duty of care if anything happens. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about the physicians associate refusing to take your guidance, and putting in complaints if you have any feed back at all which isnt glowingly positive, despite them being under your license and insurance. Which means a GMC complaint being raised.

How about having to spend £100,000 and two years of your life defending your license because someone thought you had too much to drink at the staff party and thus must be an alcoholic, with no evidence at all.

How about the government dictating how much you pay into your pension fund each month, how much you will get back, the pension fund being massively in profit to the point where the government gets £6Billion in rebates from it annually, and STILL requires you to pay more in and take less out

How about patients coming into your consulting room clutching the Daily Mail, complaining that you get paid too much because thats what the newspaper says and ranting for 20 minutes, and then still complaining that you are running behind.

How about the only way to get a specialist training position is to have an interview on one specific day of the year, but your current training program absolutely refusing you the ability to go to it?

I can go on and on.

Windows 95 and 98 shipped with "Progman", a UI shell that loosely mirrored Windows 3.1. Windows XP, and even Vista, shipped with a "classic mode" Start Menu. My standards are lower now; if they could stop breaking ExplorerPatcher and OpenShell, that'd be great.

And do what? Develop UWP apps to be sold in the Windows Store that was so poorly implemented and curated that it's useful for almost-nobody - the developers still writing desktop Windows software likely have an established distribution channel at this point, so they don't need to pay the MS tax. The users have no need for it because they're either doing everything in a web browser, or using their existing software that already has a distribution channel of some kind. This means that the software on offer amounts to mostly-shovelware.

Tangential because it's Office...but they could show they're listening by making Copilot an icon in a corner when logging into Microsoft365, rather than spitting the user into a chat window by default. They're still trying to find a use case for on-device AI, and it's pretty telling that they're shoving it into the OS via annoyances, while their best example (Recall) is something that made more people say "that's creepy" than would say "that's useful". Copilot is the new Clippy in Office, there are memes about how plain-English formulas in Excel make obvious mathematical mistakes, and this is all on the backdrop of sucking everyones' data into OneDrive.

...So, by the author's admission, AI isn't a feature that matters? ...Seriously, I'm half asleep and I can still come up with holes in this argument...I don't think it's going to stop until the AI bubble implodes; the best we can hope for is for MS to implement fewer nags about it, but if Edge is any indication, I've got no confidence.

Antibacterial soap doesn't contain antibiotics... At least, it never has in any country I've lived in.

Their properties are supposed to be chemical in nature, not medication based - the fact that they haven't exactly stood up to scrutiny isnt surprising, but they arent adding to the current antibiotic-resistent problem...

It will live on on the various worlds of Alastair Reynolds books...

I generally agree with you, but I dont think the OP works at SpaceX, they are just a fanboi dissing on anything else - and they are the target of my comment.