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Comment Re:One Way Trips (Score 1) 73

Sorry to hear you have a terminal prognosis.

I'm not sure there are enough terminally ill but still fairly healthy people who also have the right skills and mindset though. When you think how few people manage to become astronauts... And they would want to be extremely sure that your condition is stable and you won't deteriorate during launch g-forces, in zero-g, en-route, or shortly after arriving. A lot of the work is quite physical. Even in Mars' lower gravity, those suits are heavy and bulky and stiffer than normal clothing.

Then there are the legal aspects of it. Countries that allow assisted dying only tend to do so in fairly narrow circumstances, so the legal landscape for suicide missions is, at best, unclear.

Submission + - Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa (substack.com)

schwit1 writes: You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said ‘between 8am and 6pm, and you waste your entire day, and they never show up?

Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.

And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.

Comment Re:Jira tickets and long texts are too much (Score 1) 30

While AI is unreliable, I have to point out that human summaries aren't all that reliable either. I've read more than a few textbooks that were full of obvious nonsense and terrible advice.

I tried AI for a web app I made for personal use. It couldn't build a working app, but it did at least get me the keywords I needed to google to build my own. Some of the tech it suggested was outdated and deprecated, so basically about as reliable as the Reddit posts it was trained on.

Comment Re:And this will go on and on. Until? (Score 1) 123

Typically we don't destroy an entire firm for the misconduct of one employee, unless it's so extreme that it justifies screwing all their other clients. Imagine if your case was headed to court and your lawyer said their firm had been wiped out by another employee using AI, so you need to find another lawyer and hope the court is willing to accommodate the delay. Even if the court is, re-doing much of the process, document exchange, and so on will take a lot of time and create more expense, that you might end up being liable for if you lose.

Comment Re: Make it stop quickly (Score 1) 123

To be fair, lawyers do use external services that in theory leak a lot of information about their cases all the time, and have done for decades. Databases of case law are the obvious example. The searches give an insight into what the lawyer is thinking, what their likely arguments will be, things they may have overlooked.

Naturally those services offer confidentiality, the same as the phone company promises not to listen to the lawyer's call to their client, unless legally compelled to.

The question is, are there any AI legal research services offering that?

Comment Reflections on Rusting Trust (Score 1) 69

The main reason that people worried about a spec in the past was to avoid vendor lock-in. An implementation which is available under a public license is a good solution to that problem also.

Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.

See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar

Comment GCC vs. LLVM (Score 2) 69

GCC has tended to support more historic instruction sets than LLVM. If a device's instruction set is supported by GCC and not by LLVM, it can run programs written in C, C++, Fortran, and other languages supported by GCC. It can also run programs in an interpreted language whose interpreter is implemented in a language supported by GCC, such as Python and PHP last I checked. It cannot build programs written in languages supported only by LLVM and not by GCC, such as latest stable Rust. What keeps gccrs (the Rust front end of GCC) from entering production is that the Rust language is still a rapidly moving target, with popular programs routinely requiring features added to the language or the standard library less than six months ago.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 76

I would venture the #1 reason PWAs are not used is they require a constant internet connection.

The service worker API is explicitly designed to avoid downasaurs in "offline-first" use cases. It acts as a proxy to serve the shell document, style sheet, scripts, and stale data, even without an Internet connection. That's why I asked what obstacles there are other than a downasaur.

Again, have you presented your ideas to Grab?

I have not presented my ideas to Grab because I am not a user of Grab. I would imagine that most readers of Slashdot are likewise not users of Grab.

Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 76

I was expecting someone who has used the product to help others in this discussion understand why Grab probably chose and continues to choose to develop iOS apps instead of PWAs. The answers might have taken the form:

A. PWAs weren't capable enough 12 years ago for X, Y, and Z reasons, are now, and the engineering resources to port the native app to a web app would exceed the cost of acquiring and maintaining Macs capable of running the latest macOS
B. PWAs still aren't capable for X, Y, and Z reasons

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