Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:specification & testing (Score 1) 49

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

Comment Book Scanner Recommendations? (Score 3, Insightful) 20

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

Comment Re:Replacing cast-iron bicycle with a titanium one (Score 1) 51

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

Comment Re:Solid electrolyte, but not metal anode ... (Score 1) 71

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

Comment Re:Cue the hate... (Score 5, Interesting) 59

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

Comment nope (Score 1) 123

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

Comment Re: "aims for functional parity" (Score 2) 83

Reportedly that bug would have been caught if they passed the preexisting date test suite, but their attitude was 'meh'.

I'm not advocating for C but I am advocating for Level I software engineering. Rust doesn't fix this.

Breaking updates is one of the worst positions to be in. Press coverage is a poor substitute, though it's good that it got some.

Comment My Comfort (Score 2) 35

I want all the comforts of a modern life but I also want to stop all industry because I heard that energy is bad and I want to feel good about that and also I don't know how anything actually works that I believe is essential in my life.

(anybody remember the Greenpeace campaign to ban chlorine?)

Comment Re:What, no outrage over freedumbs? (Score 2) 49

> You're still gonna ego post to YouTube .... amirite?

Is it ego or people trying to make a buck and the other platforms failing to achieve a meaningful monetization mechanism?

Even Rumble, which bills itself as a platform for the deplatformed, only pays out to Paypal accounts, from which the deplatformed have been deplatformed.

It's tough to not have infinite VC money to buy warehouses full of hard drives. But subsidized platforms exist for other reasons - surveillance, now AI training, propaganda, censorship, etc.

It's also tough to say if that's worse than the legacy demon-controlled Hollywood media empires. But they did serve their stuff up with a smile.

Comment marketing (Score 1) 26

Hobby game developer here - same thing applies. It doesn't matter how good the game you make is. If nobody knows that it exists, it won't sell, simple as that. And there are literally a few hundred games published EVERY DAY, so no you can't hope to be somehow discovered by accident or through the Steam (Epic, GOG, etc.) recommendation features. Well, not at scale. Maybe a few people will randomly find you, but without some marketing efforts, it's just that - a few.

Marketing, no matter how much we techies dislike it, is an essential part of any at-scale business. Customers need to know you exist. They need to know your product exists. They need to know your product can do something they would like.

There's a fine line between advertisement as manipulative exploitation and getting information to people interested in it. For a while, I had hopes that the Internet and search engines would solve that problem. Imagine if there were no advertisement. Anywhere. At all. But you had a magic machine on your desk or in your hands that, if you need something, can tell you where to get it. Need new dishes - here's all the shops selling dishes in the vicinity. Need a new computer - here's all the places you can look at computers and here's all the online shops who'll send them to you. Need a blowjob - here... well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, it seems I massively underestimated how much advertisers like to keep their jobs, and the whole shit became even worse online.

Comment Re:Based on the article... (Score 2) 248

THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE LEPTON OF CONSCIOUSNESS,

You utterly misunderstand what consciousness is or, for that matter, what 99% of the universe are.

If you grind the universe to a fine powder and look at the result, you can also claim that trees don't exist. Or planets. Or, really, anything.

It is clear to everyone not a complete idiot or fanatic, that consciousness, whatever it ultimately is, is something where structure, organization, patterns and connectivity matter a whole lot. It's not just matter, it is also how that matter is organized in space and time. The exact same molecules can make a pile of trash or a car.

Comment Re:Lack of imagination (Score 1) 248

You dont need one equation to run a simulation, you can work with many.

More than that. A simulation can do things like introduce randomness, recursion, non-trivial dependencies or emergent behaviour that are not easily expressed in equations. There's a huge area where we use computer simulations because either the equations are not known or a calculation of the equations is computationally impossible but a simulation is possible.

Slashdot Top Deals

"For the man who has everything... Penicillin." -- F. Borquin

Working...