That's what the sidewalks will look like in two years as overweight people swerve around abandoned Peletons with 'Free' signs tacked on them.

Do you have kids? That's enough for two weeks of sustained partying, plus bail.

It's not for you, human. It's for Skynet.

It's bound to happen eventually--some sort of GPG-like public-private key verification of video authenticity will need to be used to guard against deepfake videos. To do it in real time will require codec support.

I had the same thought, which can only mean one thing. We're both old.

Just like the Old Media Award shows. In years past you didn't expect heathen viewers to nominate the Glitterati for Acadamy Awards, did you? Of course not. So obviously the Anointed are going to award their fellow Anointed online as well, because otherwise it's all heathens.

Marian, Sehlat, and Hogwart's. That's just for Geico, of course. Curiously enough, my mother had many maiden names, I had lots of childhood pets, and I went to dozens of middle schools, so every website has unique information. No one except the government is really sure when I was born either. Thanks for asking.

Exactly. Mr. Schrems is on the wrong side of the equation. Google won't care until those paying for the ads decide there has to be a better way. Sadly, if some company does come along with that better way (say consumer-choice targeted ads like I described above) Google is likely to buy them and that company will "disappear" as fast as an FBI informant at a Mob convention.

It's a social credit system managed by gamers, and Twitch staff will only have to intervene in cases of egregious abuse.

What irritates me the most is that I cannot target advertising to my current needs. Google, you don't allow me to explicitily and expressly tell you what I want to buy.

Look, I'm on /., so naturally I'm into woodworking, metalworking, 3-D printers, that kind of stuff. Show me those ads. Electronic parts? Let me see what's new. Maybe I intend to build a new deck next month. Show me ads for decking materials, special offers on the requisite tools, that sort of stuff. No problemo viewing those, if you give me some way of telling you what I want to see. Preferably in advance. Why inundate me with building material ads that aren't pertinent to decks after I've already built the thing? You're just annoying me and scamming the advertisers. The latter is what this is really about, isn't it Google?

I almost never see ads for stuff I'd actually consider buying, or at least find interesting to view. If I buy the same brand of toothpaste I've been using for decades off Amazon, I get a thousand ads for different brands of toothpaste. Sorry, not interested, not switching. If I buy my niece a pair of Ugg boots she wanted for her birthday (what the hell are those anyway--thank god she gave me a direct link), suddenly Google decides my house is full of young women wanting fashion items (if only) and I'm inundated with female clothing ads for the next month. Just stop it, Google--you know I'm not female, and you should know I'm not interested. You've invested billions in machine learning. Why not teach your machines to learn something? If I just bought laser toner, guess what Google...I don't need any more right now, so I don't need to see ads for it now. It's too late. Just stop it.

If you want to target ads at me, Google, I'll be happy to tell you exactly what ads I want to see. No need to track me. Just ask me. I'll be happier to view the ads, and the advertisers will get a higher rate of return. What about it, Google?

Indeed, I'm referring to Modern C++ and best practices. Your insight is interesting because of your experience on a Rust team. It's my opinion that is where we'll really find out in a few years if Rust lives up to its billing, as it's on large teams with large codebases and long lifetimes that a language truly gets "tested". If Rust prevents Sally from causing a breaking change in the code base because she just modified something long-gone Sam did two years ago in a subtle way that tests "undefined behaviour", and the Rust compiler consistently catches those breaking changes more often than an equivalent C++ compile/codebase would, Rust will have proven itself. On the other hand, if like many human programmers Sally is clever enough to find some obscure corner of Rust that breaks just like C++ would, only different, than it simply means that some problems are NP-hard and are going to remain that way.

I find that modern C++ compilers do a good job of warning you when you use non "properly written" C++ if you use the appropriate '-Wall -Werror' sort of flags, and the current standard implements items like the [[fallthrough]] attribute to fix items like your number 4.

I do agree with you and your point 2 that the "undefined behaviour" in C++ (and C) called out explicitly in the C/C++ standard is what gets a lot of programmers into trouble. I have over three decades of C/C++ experience, and undefined behaviour (aka unexpected behaviour) is still what trips me up the most. However, that undefined behaviour is also what allows C/C++ to be so portable and so performant. Most new languages that try to define undefined behaviour away while still allowing real system programming usually end up just putting it back into their equivalent of an "unsafe" practice or force you to write certain sections of code in C anyway. Perhaps you're right that Rust actually specifying an easily-searched for "unsafe" section to dump all that ugly but necessary code is its real "new idea".

I'm certain Rust is safer than C. But it will be interesting to see in a few years if Rust is really safer than properly-written C++ (ie using unique_ptr and shared_ptr et al whenever possible). If the code is doing something that still requires raw pointers in C++, it's probably going to require an unsafe section in Rust. Same difference.

‘There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.’

It's a sure bet California auto dealers will still be selling gas-powered cars in 10 years, because no California government will survive the wrath of the voters whose cars have suddenly gone away while the power grid is still better at burning carbon-sink forests than delivering sufficient clean energy. This is a state that has so far spent billions of dollars and decades of time on a high-speed rail system that has yet to run a single train between its two scaled-down endpoint cities (where no one wants to go to or from anyway). This is the power grid where the part that burned an entire town to the ground was--as you note--one of those 100 year old parts from the original build-out (and there are lots of those parts still out there) because no one wants to spend the money to replace them. In nine years the California EDD might--just might--be able to recover half of the billions it has paid out in unemployment checks to crooks and swindlers through fraud and incompetence. How a government with this track record will handle the unfunded pension crisis that will hit at about the same time with no one able to get to work, go shopping, deliver packages and hence pay taxes because there's no transportation will be interesting to watch. I hope by then to be watching from another state.