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

They knew this and decided to maintain Perl 5 alongside Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) for what is looking to be noticeably longer than the 11-year transition from Python 2 to Python 3.

That's an exaggeration. You can give a LLM access to real things and they can use those real things to verify. I just flatly do not understand why they are not. It wouldn't make them infallible, but it would go a huge way towards improving the situation, and they are clearly not doing it. They could also use non-AI software tools to check up on the AI output. I'd bet that you could even use a plagiarism detection tool for this purpose with little to no modification, but I'd also bet this kind of tool already exists anyway.

It also shows that if the penalty is insufficient then they have no positive effect. A fine that people with a lot of money can easily afford is just a prohibition which only applies to the poor, with a license fee. Look to speeding tickets which scale with income for a fair model.

Yes

I'm not against a human doing it, I just don't get why they're not having the software do it, when it's feasible for it to do it.

What you're saying here is that no one should ever try to remedy the evils of the past.

That's stupid shit.

Fuck that stupid shit.

Debian used to just require old school Unix stuff plus Perl, which is pretty old school really.

Then they started requiring Python for some tools.

They just keep adding more requirements which bloat the base install. This is the opposite of the right direction.

The source code is the most important documentation about the source code.

Clearly this not even even being done by an automated tool, let alone a human. An LLM which is given access to a database of actual cases could reasonably be successful at checking whether the cased cited even exist which isn't being checked now!

Using non-local AI in any way in court filings which are supposed to be confidential until filed is glaring lack of professional conduct right up front. Allowing AI hallucinations to get in to your court paperwork even once is the same. They should lose their license for one year the first time, five years the second time, and permanently the third.

Slashdot is such a shithole

Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

The most prolific poster on my Mastodon feed is a retrocomputing enthusiast who uses a decades-old (pre-Intel) Macintosh PowerBook G4 as their daily driver.

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.