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Comment Re:This is a good thing. (Score 2) 222

The 3 cylinder Geo Metro in the 1990s achieved over 40 miles per gallon. 30 years later you're telling me we lost that ability?

Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.

Comment Re:In other words: (Score 2) 222

The fact that the government is mandating fuel efficiency means that most people don't care. If they cared, nobody would buy the inefficient cars so the manufacturers wouldn't make them, no need for government intervention.

The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.

Comment Re:CAFE needs reform (Score 1) 222

I traveled to poor countries where traffic is 90% scooters. This is all they can afford. I hope we can do better.

Being inexpensive to purchase and operate is one advantage scooters have over automobiles; the other is that they are small enough to maneuver quickly through heavy traffic and easier to find a parking spot for in congested areas.

Comment Re:robot parking lot: no need for lights, sounds? (Score 0) 64

Because we don't want them to instantly kill the first kid who jumps the fence, or the next careless service technician. Automated industrial robots (which is what these cars are, really) have these things for a reason.

I really hope that Waymo's cars aren't relying on their Nader-beepers to avoid killing people. They should be (and AFAIK are) relying instead on their video cameras, LIDARs, and other sensors to stop the car before it hits the wayward kid/technician.

Comment Re: "Microsoft said it's working to resolve the is (Score 2) 73

Remember that these are the people who invented the use of CTRL-ALT-DEL hardware interrupts to "secure" the Windows login screen. That tells you all you need to know really.

Yes, they should have done it the right way instead!

Err, what was the right way? It's not obvious to me, given that Microsoft doesn't have design control over the hardware its software runs on.

Comment Re:They are using AI to code core Windows function (Score 1) 73

Do you really think Karen in Finance is going to request an RDS instance and vibe code a nice react frontend for her CRUD??

At this point, my biggest fear is that she will -- and then call me over to debug the AI-generated codebase, when it inevitably doesn't work quite right.

Comment It gets worse (Score 3, Interesting) 124

Let's assume for the sake of argument that OpenAI and its competitors are trying to do the right thing here and make their AIs as harm-free as possible.

Not everyone will be that responsible, however. Now that it has been demonstrated that a suitably sycophantic AI can compromise the psyches of significant numbers of people, it's only a matter of time before various bad actors start weaponizing their own AI models specifically to take advantage of that ability. "Pig butchering" will be one of the first job categories to be successfully replaced by AI. :/

Comment I'll tell you what will happen (Score 2) 236

What always happens when you try to block kids from doing anything: they find a way to do it anyway.

We older folks too were "blocked" from doing stuff as kids, pre- and post-internet, and we too did it anyway. And it actually made us smarter, as we had to devise ways around the obstacle.

Kids are smart. This will just make them smarter.

Comment Re:So... (Score 2) 43

Whatever happened to IPv6 ?

I didn't do anything crazy like actually read the article, but I did go as far as to read the third sentence of the summary, which began like this:

[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex [...]

.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 2) 77

Stop chasing these false "scarcities" that continue to crop up from time to time. Build your systems with used or NOS parts that are 3 or more generations back.

That's good advice for individuals building a home system for personal use. It's not really applicable for businesses and companies, though, since they likely don't have the expertise or the man-hours required to cobble together their business-critical systems from used parts. They're going to want to buy new, from a company that give them good support if/when anything goes wrong.

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