Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Yin and Yang. (Score 1) 30

It doesn't change climate, it's a local thing. A tiny change in weather isn't climate and this often doesn't make rain it's such a weak forcer. Been done off and on since the 1940s, old thing. And the AgI doesn't even dissolve in water so it's not bioavailable to any organisms, no salts!

It is utterly harmless to living things.

Comment Re: Centralized Energy Industry (Score 1) 120

and how are you going to move and distribute food across the nation? or for that matter grow enough food to feed it? Modern tech is the only way now, unless you're advocating mass death. I'm fine with ultra-greenies advocating for population reduction, if they take on for the team and give themselves the first bullet. Otherwise, it's hypocrisy.

Comment Re:Dumping (Score 2) 64

Trump propagandist spotted.

Yeah let's war on those places because they're such a threat and so bad.

You know who has the worst cartels and smuggles the most drugs into USA? our best buds the Colombians. But Venezuela is EVIL and needs regime change eh? Nothing to do with their having the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, nope.

Comment Re:Huh? Where? (Score 2) 54

Literally every hotel I've booked in both Marriott or Hilton chains has a cancellation policy including night before. Literally. Every. Single. One. I only have about 500 nights in a hotel since 2018 including plenty in several states in America. Is this some hyper localised trend where the writer lives or something?

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.

Comment Re:Dumb managers manage dumbly (Score 1) 54

The current model pushes consumers to become last-minute bookers who ONLY pay the lowest minimum price that the hotel will accept.

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.

Comment Re:I hate to say it.. (Score 1) 65

AI is going to look really dot com hype shark jumping in 2-3 years after the bubble bursts

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.

Comment Re: You've missed the elephant (Score 1) 59

Your view is a bit naive. Google/Alphabet with its Maps app never had to take responsibility for "death by GPS" which is a thing.

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.

But who is taking OpenAI to court for making users committ suicide? Sure, if you take my comment literally, there will be someone sueing. But they get out of it 99% of the time.

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.

Comment Re:Very quick code reviews (Score 1) 32

In part because nobody wants to reveal that they don't actually know much about Rust.

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.

Comment Re:C/C++ code covers more complex legacy code (Score 1) 32

I suspect that there is likely a team selection bias as well - what profile is going to be recruited for doing the Rust project? Is it randomly assigning developers or is it something developers seek out ("to be on the Rust team")?

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.

Slashdot Top Deals

When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him--that's where the money is. -- Robespierre

Working...