OK, many people don't know how to use it yet.

AI is such a versatile tool that people keep trying to use it in inappropriate ways/places. Again, like computers in the 1960's & 1970's. I suspect that we're still at the point where most attempts will fail (some horribly), but some will be REALLY successful.

N.B.: Computers didn't become largely successful until structured programming and commodity software took over large parts of the market. That greatly reduced the errors. What's the equivalent for AI? We won't know until after robots become common. (LLMs are just touching the edge of what AIs can do.)

It is (or at least can be), among other things, a good search engine.

The problem is that people don't know how to use it yet. EXPECT most attempts to fail. Most early attempts to use computers failed.

Of course, with AI the problem's a bit worse because it keeps changing so rapidly. Currently the rule of thumb is "You can train an AI do do a good job if it's easy to verify that a proposed solution is correct.",

You already acknowledged the catch when you said "Or, at least, any new ones.". Small groups are really much more interested in the kind that were useful in WW I, because those are easier to make. Doing development for new weapons is dangerous to the developer.

If IQ were valid, it wouldn't be particularly low. Unfortunately, it's sensitive to culture and education, so you are probably right. But don't confuse it with potential intelligence. IQ is basically a measure of how well you could do in school with reasonable effort, so if you didn't pay attention last year, your IQ is lower.

That said, intelligence *is* real. It's just that IQ is a really bad measure of it.

Called standard by who? I guess we shouldn't call the Imperial units, though. But I've *never* heard them called "standard" before.

I really doubt that it's the largest single market. I suspect that's China. The US and India are probably up there in the running too.

I'm not sure. I can imagine software displaying ads that I would not consider malware. E,g, Firefox displays many ads on Slashdot, and only the ones that hide parts that I'm trying to read to I really consider malware.

Define "malware". This would seem to fit my definition. Yeah, it's an edge case, but it seems on the "malware" side of the line.

I learned assembly on the Z80, it is super accessible and fun to use. So glad future generations will get to experience the push and pop of a memory stack firsthand.

Zilog still makes Z80 based things. They only ended production of the DIP40 package for the Z80. They have various SoCs and microcontrollers using the Z80 processor core. It's a little less convenient if you want to build a Z80 based computer.

The other alternative is the 6502 which is still available in DIP package as WDC (western design corporation) still makes them. They also have a synthesizable core for FPGAs as well.

And they are used - the Z80, 6502 and 8051 are still used in many things that need a tiny bit of intelligence (may USB hubs, for example, contain an 8051 core to manage it).

Though I suspect a lot of that is simply being around for the sake of being around because ARM is slowly taking over the intelligent device market. I don't know why RISC-V isn't appearing more in low end microcontrollers, but ARM certainly is. Which is fine, even though ARM isn't designed to be manually programmed by humans (they designed it more for compilers), it's instruction set is relatively simple and orthogonal so it's relatively easy to learn.

The problem is the energy produced by a solar panel on a car is really low. It's likely not even worth the added cost. Sure, solar cells are cheap, but boxy cars are something we left behind in the 70s. You could go all fancy with flexible cells, but their efficiency is even worse.

In the end, the energy collected from this is even less than a level 1 charger. And many people can't fathom that an EV on a level 1 charger is even practical (for a lot of use cases, it is).

A level 1 charger can charge 3-5 miles in an hour, and if you leave your car overnight for 10 hours charging that's 30-50 miles of range. Even the best solar panels are only 400W in full direct sunlight making the 1.5kW from a level 1 twice as fast. And not having to come to blazing hot car because you had to park in the sunny spot in the parking lot.

You want solar powered cars? Start putting roofs on parking lots and then putting solar panels on those. Cars are parked under shade, and you have plenty of electricity to charge EVs coming from the solar panels.

Solar panels on cars is about as good an idea as solar panels on roads. There's just so many random surfaces that very few cells will be positioned optimally. And anyone who's done solar knows if you do not plan out your strings right, a single branch casting a shadow hurts the entire string.

I think you're quite optimistic. I'd go with "Security can be vastly strengthened", but even BSD has had bugs.

Flash memory is dirt cheap. Optical media are more expensive

Flash media is cheap if bought blank. It's expensive if you have to program it.

Optical media is expensive individually, but dirt cheap when you can press them by the thousands per hour.

That's why optical media hangs around - a CD can be stamped in about a second - it's basically just a more precise form of injection molding. The same applies for DVDs and Blu-Rays - they can stamped out in seconds.

But flash memory cannot. If you go with the cheap flash memory devices, programming 1GB will take about a minute. You can make it go faster by parallelizing the operation but approaching the speed of a single CD stamper is very expensive. The more expensive flash memory that's faster can probably do it in a few seconds, but then the media costs jump dramatically - it's why you can buy 128GB thumbdrives for a couple of bucks, but a 1TB SSD costs hundreds.

Plus, flash memory has power off lifetimes - if you don't use it, it gradually forgets over a period of a few years. CDs generally last as long as the coating doesn't rot.

Honestly, AI is useful here for a lot of the mechanical bits.

Darwin is BSD userland so most of the porting for the NetBSD would be just mechanical bits of changing Makefiles and other things. And AI is really, really, really good at that. Anything that really is just a mechanical transformation is a good candidate for AI assistance. It can mean you can easily port most of the Darwin userspace over with very little effort.

And the parts that aren't so easy can be assisted or done by humans. If you have 1000 packages that need to be ported over, AI can probably help you doing 950 of them in a few hours. The remaining 50 are ones a human probably can do in a few days, so you can have something up and running quick.

Or you can force a human to do 1000 packages, and they can probably do it in a couple of weeks but likely will run out of steam by the first week because it's boring work.

I'm no AI promoter, but I can see when tools are well, tools. Let AI do the boring stuff while you work on the stuff that scratches your itch. Isn't that what open-source was supposed to be about?

It sounds a lot like putting speakers in EVs to make vroom vroom noises. Whatever affection people have to it, the manual gearbox worked around a technical problem with engines and isn't in any way superior for driving. Yes having control over the engine is important, but the best option for that is pedal shifters. This seems like Ferrari chasing a nostalgia market rather than developing a performance car.

But then this is the same Ferrari that just released the Luce so that would track.

No, it makes complete sense.

You can't have your traditional H shifter anymore - it's just too impractical because honestly the modern engine and gearbox has 8+ gears to deal with. Sure truckers have dealt with it with their 10 to 18 speed gearboxes, though usually the 10 speed is a 5 speed with a high and low lever, while the 18 speed is a 6 speed with a 3 speed tied together so you have multiple shifters. It's just a lot of manual hand flailing.

Modern race vehicles know shift speeds are basically it, and the manual gearbox is no more for them - it's all computer controlled shifting and the driver paddle shifts because that's really the only way you can go between gears in sub-100ms.

For today's cars, automatics have basically taken over because 6 speed autos are basically standard, and many now coming with 8, 10 or 12 gears. Some can still be bought with a manual option, but compressing 10 gears down to 6 means very tall gears and basically lousier gas mileage because your gears are not ideal.

So basically getting it to an automatic gearbox - be it a standard automatic, or a dual clutch standard box with a computer controlled shifting that can be controlled from paddles is basically the way to go.

Ferrari is not doing it for nostalgia - they have to do paddle shifters because a 12 speed gearbox cannot be shifted traditionally with an H shifter. Meanwhile having the control paddles affords can avoid a lot of the guessing. While modern computer controlled transmissions are very good at picking the right gear, there are still some circumstances that it's not as ideal so a way to manually control the transmission can help (usually during extreme weather - snow, heavy rain, etc).

That is the way the industry has to go - Ferrari is showing you cannot take advantage of their cars unless you let the computer do the shift, while the logic of when to shift remains with you the driver. And that's perfectly fine, though purists probably won't call it a "manual transmission". But it's what the industry recognizes is happening.

Heck, even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear. More gears makes the engine more efficient and fast computer shifts mean very smooth rides. In a modern luxury vehicle you cannot feel it shifting - it's so silky smooth the only thing you notice is the tachometer needle moved.