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Comment Re: How dense can they be? (Score 1) 37

It's not impossible, but the switch would be expensive. It's probably easier and just as effective just to shield them, and tie the shield to the chassis ground.

Another option would be to switch power to the radio chip, if it's in a package which makes that convenient. This might also disable bluetooth if you do it to the infotainment system, or cause a code to be set...

Comment Re: Mom's of the world will prevent it. (Score 1) 11

Antibacterial soap doesn't use antibiotics, it uses chemicals known to destroy antibiotics directly and physically. It's usually done with compounds they can't reasonably develop resistance to. This is easier than in antibiotics because they don't have to be safe to put in your body.

Comment Re:Very quick code reviews (Score 1) 36

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 186

3) The outbreak is all along the southwest border with large populations of people who lack access to regular health care.

With the republicans holding a majority in 3/3 branches of the government, what are they doing to to combat this problem?

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1) 186

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 186

Is it more likely that the Mennonite population found some measles lying around, or that the immigrant/refugee population of Alberta might have brought it from somewhere else?

It does not matter even slightly where it comes from. It's coming in all the time. What matters is what percentage are vaccinated, which determines whether a population has effective herd immunity. The immigrants aren't moving the needle on that, but the religious are.

Comment Re:Applause please (Score 3, Interesting) 186

It is not the same to say a brand-new vaccine for a never seen disease that affects the entire planet has the same safety.

So what? Is there a point here or are you just wildly offtopic? Because that brand-new vaccine DID go through some testing, albeit much abbreviated from the usual, and it was already clear that it was safer than the disease. There was also less need for testing because due to its nature it was LESS hazardous than traditional vaccines. We already knew this because we had been doing mRNA vaccine research for years.

Comment Re: Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1) 186

All these mayors and governors telling their local law enforcement (you know actual men with guns) to thwart the efforts of federal law enforcement

There are zero of those.

There are mayors and governors instructing local LE not to assist the crimes of federal human traffickers, but they're NOT instructing them to thwart anything, even though the things they're doing are illegal at all levels.

Comment Vibe coding is an intermediate step that will die (Score 1) 22

I don't think vibe coding is going to last long as a thing, because it's just a sort of intermediate step to telling the AI to do what you want and having it do that. Right now, people are telling the LLM to write code to accomplish a thing and then running the code to see how it works, then telling the LLM to refine it, but that's a lot of unnecessary extra steps. I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future people will just tell the LLM what they want to do, which may require creating a custom user interface to make user interaction convenient, and may require creating databases or performing network queries or whatever, and the LLM will understand what they want, and do it.

In that future, it's possible that the LLM may generate code to implement the requested functionality, but if it does so that will be a compute-saving shortcut, essentially a way to cache the LLM's work and be able to repeat it with less effort. There won't be any need to show any of the code to the user, or even tell the user that the LLM chose to generate some code.

As an aside, the whole notion of leaning "prompt engineering" is another intermediate step that will die. The whole point of natural language-capable AI is that it will be able to understand what humans want when we express ourselves as we would to other humans. As the LLMs get more capable, it will become less necessary to treat them as something different from an entity that is fully capable of understanding and acting on human communication.

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