You can see this process at work right now in Moldova or Georgia. And of course, the Crimean operation was such a success, with such a feeble response from the west, that Putin just decided to take the whole country.

Utter nonsense. When the Soviet Union broke up, the west gave Russia a complete do-over, wiping the slate clean, with an invitation to join the community of nations as a full partner. But they went with corrupt oligarchs and decided to appoint a new Czar for life, who then apparently decided he wanted their old territories back. No one wanted Russia as an enemy, until they started down the path of rebuilding their old Russian empire again by violent means.

They had a chance at redemption, and they decided to throw away their future on an old man's dream of reforming a long-dead empire. NATO is a absolutely a defensive alliance, however much Russian shills want to deny it. There is zero danger to Russia from NATO member states, and they damn well know it too, or their wouldn't have stripped their defenses along their borders to toss still more troops into the fires of the Ukraine war.

All Russia has done recently is to convince the world that they will never change their imperialistic spots. They're still stuck in an 18th century mindset of believing they deserve their old empire back - that "Russia has no borders."

Obviously, I haven't seen under the hood of Civ's source code, so some of this is conjecture, but I would bet it's exploring lots of decision trees as deep as it can. A videogame's "AI" often doesn't mean AI in the sense of classical computer science. For example, agent pathfinding is typically considered part of AI. Even simple state-based decision making is considered "AI". It's not surprising at all that Civ would require a pretty good chunk of CPU times per turn searching for optimal moves as far ahead as it can. Most videogame AI consists of very simple decision-making rules supplemented with brute-force search algorithms. "True" AIs are too unpredictable, too hard to train and adapt for new rule changes, too hard to tweak, etc, so game designers tend not to prefer them.

Source: me, having worked on computer games for over a quarter century, including "AI" programming for videogames.

And you'd explain all the self-driving cars currently on the roads... how exactly? Or are you arguing it doesn't "work" until and unless every single edge case is handled perfectly? Like, navigating in a parking garage, etc. It's true companies are starting with the lowest-hanging fruit, which is driving on well-mapped public roads in decent weather, but that's how all tech starts out.

Sort of. C++ best practices are opt-in, but do eliminate a lot of the most egregious gotchas found in C, especially in "modern" C++, which eliminates most manual memory management. The difference is that when C++ classes or interfaces are well designed, it's more difficult to misuse them subsewuently. In C, you need to be careful all the time because those compile-time assurances are not there. Of course, in compensation, C is a much simpler language overall.

I'd agree that neither C nor C++ would be at the top of my list for real-time safety-critical apps either. If performance isn't critical, there are a lot of options available. If performance IS critical, we have things like Rust now.

C++ is a pretty good compromise when you want to work within a larger C and C++ based ecosystem, and need top performance. Videogames are a pretty good example of this.

It's not worth stealing, because it's a terrible analogy. I'll just point out that horses were equipment, not the job, nor the employee. It's like worrying whether your old fax machine can be repurposed. Even aside from all that, horses didn't exactly go extinct either.

I came for this comment. Was not disappointed.

Boeing needs to focus on it's core business right now, instead of dreaming up flights of fancy. As a company, they appear to be falling into the shitter (likely a long process, and we're finally seeing the end results). Do they need a more serious wake-up call than what they've had?

I don't doubt the trend. Just the headline.

I'll give 10:1 odds that a few years from now, we'll get accusations that SF's chosen AI systems are biased against people of color. This feels like the mayor is just shifting responsibility to some hand-wavy magic technology, which will conveniently get blamed when it fails to produce results.

Well, maybe. The car was accelerating from a full stop, so most drivers / cars wouldn't be going all that fast. But your point is well taken that if the cyclist only had minor scratches, the car came pretty close to avoiding the accident. I still believe we're going to see a massive reduction in road deaths once most cars are driving autonomously.

It also is multi-channel, and can loop seamlessly.

There's a pretty simple way for this to shake out. If it ends up being highly unpopular, people will stop going to restaurants that don't offer a more traditional option. It's not like there are no competing restaurants you can choose among. The one point I'd raise as a sticking point is the issue of privacy and security. Customers should not be put at unnecessary risk if they don't wish to use a third party app that requires too much personal information. You should be able to pay as easily as with any other digital transaction.

In China, WeChat has such a monopoly on the market that pretty much everyone pays using it, or so I've heard. Maybe at some point we'll see one or more digital payment apps rise to the top here in the west, which will in turn make this sort of thing feel a more friction-free. But until that happens, many people are going to respond to having to use some unknown app with less than enthusiasm. I know I'd probably nope out of that.

Cable companies used to believe they could increase prices with impunity as well. You can do that for a while, but eventually, a competitor comes along and steals your unhappy customers.

I see a number of Dunning-Kruger drivers in this thread. This was apparently at night, in the rain, in an unlit area, and on a route the driver was unfamiliar with. There was no barricade or warning that anything was wrong. In those conditions, I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame this on the driver in any way. That bridge was a deathtrap waiting to happen.

As a side-note, I also know from personal experience how !@#$ hard it is to get a change through to Google Maps. The name of the park across my house was listed incorrectly. I tried for many years to get Google to update the name. Finally, the city took over management, and had an official website with photos showing the name of the park. So after well over a decade of trying (once every few years), I got the name of the park changed appropriately. I can only imagine the request to mark this bridge as broken was met with the same responsiveness.

Are you serious? Anyone roughly fifty years old was born before the internet, cell phones, smart phones, commercial rockets, electric cars, self-driving cars, home computers, videogames (mostly), flat panel TVs, AI chatbots (well, good ones). 4K or 8K resolution is now standard. VR and augmented reality glasses are here. These days many people never have to step foot in most any store unless they want to. Working remotely from home with video conferencing is a thing. Cable TV is dying, and on-demand internet streaming is here. Car reliability has doubled or maybe even tripled. If you don't see any technological progress, you're not even trying. None of that stuff was around fifty years ago.