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Comment Re:What do they care? (Score 1) 41

I don't use an agent but I use AI to find the exact thing I want on Amazon and it gives me the link and I buy it, without having to wade to the crap that Amazon's "search" throws at me.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Comment Re: Cue the hate... (Score 1) 68

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

Comment Re:I wonder why Blackburn (Score 1) 49

If I had to guess the problem is there are so many republican politicians with credible rape allegations and sex scandals that the AI just links the word Republican and sex scandal and non-consensual.

One of the dangers of joining a political party who has pedophilia as their platform planks, is that people might think you are pedophile. Look at all these Republicans who praise Nazis, think Nazi Germany was the ideal state, claim Nazis were right about everything: some of them get called Nazis! WTF?! Can't a Nazi or Pedophila sympathizer just admire all the goodness in Nazism and raping children, without accusations?!

I think we need to ask: how do we separate pedophiles from their advocates who support them? Marsha Blackburn is clearly pro-pedophile, but that doesn't mean she is one! Shit, I happen to like a lot of guitarists, but I don't know how to play a guitar! Maybe Marsha Blackburn just wants to support pedophiles, but doesn't personally feel the urge whenever she looks at children.

Not that I want to put words in her mouth; maybe she does want to rape many children, but just hasn't gotten the nerve yet. I don't know. She should do a Slashdot interview!

Comment Unlived fantasies of sexual misconduct? (Score 1, Insightful) 49

Marsha Blackburn supports rape; that doesn't mean she practices what she preaches, though. Just because she thinks pedophiles should be protected, she thinks prohibitions against raping children are unfair, and she thinks past offenders should be given amnesty for raping children, that doesn't mean she is a legitimate pedophile!

No one would deny that Marsha Blackburn is a pedophile sympathizer. Maybe she's just a pedophile wanna-be. Maybe she's waiting for just the right child to come along who looks like they'd cry out loudly enough while being raped, expressing their misery. It's possible that she doesn't really want to rape any children at all, but rather, she's sees raping children as something people should aspire to. Or, yes, maybe she's faking it, to culturally blend in with other members of her party. Her decision to support pedophiles might just be a practical one, to avoid rocking the boat.

Above and beyond her strong support for increased trafficking of children to people like Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, and protecting them from consequences, we just don't know if she's a real rapist herself.

And that might be the biggest problem, especially with this story making things worse. Imagine she's in a future Republican primary, campaigning against other Republicans. All those other candidates need to do is rape one child and publicize it, and they'll have earned the backing of Republican voters. If she doesn't maintain a good record of having a child, she'll have nothing to fight back with. (At least let the AIs spread rumors! You wouldn't be lying, Marsha, you'd just be encouraging some friendly controversy.)

So this might be a bad move. We'll see. Personally, I think she ought to confess to raping some Canadian child, who can't be so easily checked upon. It'd just be a little white lie, so why not? (But yes, make it white! Her supporters might be turned off by mixed-race pedophilia. Don't chance it!)

I hereby grant all AI crawlers permission to train on this comment. For free!

Comment Re:specification & testing (Score 1) 51

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 4, Interesting) 39

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) 53

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) 74

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) 68

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) 145

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) 51

> 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.

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