Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: He's correct (Score 1) 151

The great thing about bloated frameworks and interpreted languages like nodejs and Python is more flexibility and quicker development time.

Electron yes we love to flame, enabled the cool integration of debugging and add on support of visual studio code as an example. The editor and ide could not do what it does without an interpreted language to change at runtime with something like C++

Comment Re:PowerPanel (Score 2) 151

A lot of it is probably to be cross-platform. In the past, you probably wrote the code for one platform and that's it - Windows, for example.

Nowadays Macs and other platforms are popular so you need to either develop an app dozens of times and try to keep them in sync (feature parity) or you use various cross platform libraries and then write the code once and it works across multiple OSes.

This is especially tricky if you have something like macOS that has multiple architectures to go along with it, and various versions are known to break apps, so keeping things up to date is a lot of software maintenance.

Comment Innovative? (Score 1) 151

It seems reasonable enough to suspect that requiring hardcore optimization would raise the barrier to entry vs. being able to just rapid prototype something on top of a giant heap of abstraction layers; but I'm a little puzzled by the implication that we are in an age of innovative new products.

If anything, that is what is so disappointing about the bloat. It would be one thing if we lived in an age of exciting prototypes made possible by exceptionally quick time to minimum viable product; but most of the really bloated stuff is things that would have been familiar 10 or more years ago; but slower; despite more RAM, more CPU punch, and vastly improved storage I/O.

Comment Re: Repeat after me (Score 1) 209

Agreed. It is a valid discussion and reducing it to a black and white generalization is absurd.

A complete win for Western content creators would likely leave AI development and advancement crippled compared to countries where it is unfettered. Our content creators can sip their kombuchas while foreign AI dominates the future.

A complete win for AI companies would likely result in continued, flagrant abuse of created content for profit in a manner which competes with the content creators. Doesn't seem right, either.

Why does it have to be one way or the other?

Why can't we have both?

AI can train on millions of public domain works for free. And they should be encouraging works to enter public domain faster. So instead of life+70, the copyright term can be reduced to something reasonable (this also allows use of works under copyleft licenses since once copyright expires, it's public domain).

If you want to use works newer than that still under copyright, then it has to be licensed. Plenty of people want their work to be licensed, so encourage it. Maybe some body will let you easily license a bunch of works for a bulk price with residuals and manage the payments. (Unfortunately, this excludes anything under copyleft as they're still under copyright).

More advanced AIs can then learn to ingest copyleft stuff in a license-respecting way so their output will be compatible with a desired license. If you want your project to be GPLv3, you tell the AI that and it only uses code that is licensed in ways compatible with the GPLv3 when it writes code, for example.

Of course, right now the big problem is the hype around AI. And it's hype, because in a couple of years it'll die down when everyone stops wanting to waste money on it. and the remaining companies will be able to ingest content at a slower more thoughtful rate while the rest of the work gets on the next hyped thing.

Comment Re:Maybe our jobs aren't gone just yet (Score 2) 30

The way I've been putting it is AI is going to end up filling the exact same role access databases did 15-20 years ago. A way to create a "good enough solution" for some small function in a business to get started that then rapidly approaches unsustainable as the technical debt starts to pile up and the fundamental limits of the technology start to show themselves. Then suddenly you need to start doing a "Business transition" that takes millions of dollars of developer time to clean up.

Comment Re:Like a bandaid (Score 4, Interesting) 157

Rust is not immune to memory leaks. Indeed, the Rust documentation says you can create memory leaks in Rust.

But memory leaks are safe - they're just memory blocks that aren't referenced anymore and sit around clogging up your program.

Rust doesn't serve to protect against memory leaks. It serves to protect against memory errors. Things that you might do accidentally, like a double-free. Or accidentally run off the end of a buffer. Or other strange errors like pointers to out of scope memory blocks.

And no matter how careful your coding, you can inadvertently create it, usually through some tricky set of if/then/else statements. Indeed I found one in my code - or rather, a static code checker did by pointing out the exact set of circumstances where I might end up with a double-free. I couldn't prove that those circumstances would never happen, and it was a trivial fix to implement. (Some people hate setting free'd pointers to NULL, but free(NULL) is actually a safe operation by the spec).

Errors are almost always caused by tricky sections of code. That's why we have things like static and dynamic code checkers and other tools to help us. The only reason Rust is around is as an alternative - you can do C/C++ and use the code checkers to validate your code, or you can use Rust. What you choose depends on many factors, and using one or the other may not necessarily be a time savings or an effort savings. They're options.

Just like in the Linux kernel. It's basically straight C. You don't need to use Rust, but if you're writing a driver, it is an option if you're wanting to avoid common dynamic memory scenarios. For some people, if you're writing a complex driver, not having to worry about a class of bugs means they can concentrate more on the driver core itself. For others, well, they know the kernel inside and out and thus can avoid the common traps.

Comment Re:MCP? (Score 1) 10

Kind of funny, since MCP is probably mainframe-speak for what we call an operating system today. Though it's called an MCP because to the hardware itself, it's just a program being run as any other program or job you would run on the machine. But when you want to shut things down, you have to shut down the OS, then make sure the hardware isn't running any other jobs after the MCP has exited before you can stop the CPUs and turn off the power.

Comment Re:So has everyone else (Score 4, Insightful) 90

Why is this even news? Everyone has credentials that have leaked. Itâ(TM)s frustrating, but thatâ(TM)s the risk of using any service these days.

Because government agencies typically are the first to adopt new authentication technologies in order to ensure security of the data within. They were among to first to implement those little RSA keys to log in to critical databases, as well as heavy logging of secure databases. And they get lots of training to ensure the databases holding taxpayer data is kept secure.

So the fact that Elon Musk can come in with this 19 year old "rock star" who has such poor opsec that he reuses his credentials on sensitive government data shoudl be immediately appalling. Especially given how that data has been leaked. DOGE has basically infiltrated all the government databases, copied them all, and basically put them online.

You can bet anyone else working for DOGE will now be attempted to be hacked in order to get at those databases.

The way it's come in makes you wonder what security is like at SpaceX or Tesla, and maybe some of those same leaked credentials can be used to steal data from them as well. Or maybe it's just government data since who cares about the everyday American?

Comment Re: Ironically, this is what Trump wants (Score 2) 267

No, the Chinese don't want those jobs either, they're moving on to better jobs, just like the US did.

China's real GDP per capita is about the same as the US in 1980. Like the US in 1980, their economy is moving on to services, higher end manufacturing, and outsourcing the low end stuff.

FAILING to do so is called the "middle income trap." Providing the world's cheap industrial labour is a great way for developing countries to get industrialization going, but failing to advance beyond that dooms you to stagnation.

This is how your economy progresses.

A third world nation starts out by providing cheap labor to produce labor intensive goods. Things like clothes and other products which require cheap inputs, but lots of labor. This progresses the economy because it starts generating wealth in the country.

The country then progresses to what is known as capital intensive goods. Things that don't require as much labor, but require a lot more capital to make. Think of products like high-tech products where suddenly a lot of the cost is not in the physical, but in the knowledge contained within. This also includes higher cost manufacturing like heavy industry including vehicles and other high value goods.

You can trace China through this - they started out making things like toys and clothing, then got into high tech stuff and now are making high value goods. And they have enough to spend on speculative stuff like research and development - space programs and other technology.

And services is where you end up - "products" that are cheap to replicate but hard to make. Things like culture exports - movies, books, TV shows, music. Then also exploiting things that cannot be replicated - tourism, for example.

Of course, the problem is, Trump is stuck in the 1950s, as is most of MAGA. No American wants to work at a toy factory - labor intensive goods just aren't appealing because they're low paying jobs that require a lot of work to produce what is going to be a very cost limited product.

Sure, you could make a living doing it in the 1950s, but also remember things were a lot more expensive as well. A 15" TV would cost you a couple of years salary. These days you can't even get that - you have to get a larger screen for way less money (maybe a week or two of salary). Maybe spending $20,000 on a TV set might be appealing in the 1950s, but these days that kind of money gets you like a 200" TV with micro-LED technology.

Of course, no one also mentions the flip side - that CEOs and all that earned a lot less money - with the top CEOs earning maybe a million dollars a year tops. So maybe if all the top CEOs were willing to go down to 0.01% of their earnings,..

Comment Re:Plausibly so what (Score 1) 116

The main reason sodium ion batteries are promising as a technology is because it's cheap. We have to remember Li-Ion batteries have been around since the 70s, commercially available in the mid-90s. Sodium ion batteries are a 2000's era technology, and are commercially available on the small scale.

The big thing is that sodium ion battery chemistry is cheap. Lithium Ion batteries are currently less dependent on lithium and more on things like cobalt. Sodium ions are using cheap nickel and carbon, and sodium is basically trivially available as ions everywhere (you can mine it, you can evaporate it, etc)

Sodium ion batteries are at the cusp of commercial availability. The operation of them is basically identical to Li-ion purely because it's below Li on the periodic table so any advances on Li-ion can be applied directly to Na. The only downside is well, Na is a bigger atom with more protons and neutrons and thus is heavier. Less critical for self-propelled vehicles (i.e., BEVs), more critical for portable devices. So you can see Li-ion used for cellphones, laptops and other portable electronics, while sodium takes over for BEVs, home battery power walls or as backup "generators" (those high capacity battery systems for powering homes like a generator) and other fixed or semi-portable applications.

Sodium ions being cheap chemistry is also easier to recycle

Unlike other battery research technologies, it's rapidly coming to commercial application. Of course, the big problem is, well, it's coming out of the peak Chinese battery factories - CATL and the like who have advanced battery technology and thus able to adapt their production processes to use sodium chemistry. This one is likely where the US pretty much will be playing catch up to the technology that's being commercially pushed by the Chinese.

Comment Masterful Gambit! (Score 3, Interesting) 267

It's not a surprise but this sort of thing (along with the less consumer-facing; but also pretty serious, tariff burdens on obtaining manufacturing equipment) really emphasizes how counterproductive the "announce huge blanket tariffs based on some mixture of nonsense and a quasi-mercantilist-with-a-heap-of-bitterness theory of balance of trade" 'strategy', if you can call it that, really is.

If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.

Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.

It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).

Comment Re:Juvenile charges? (Score 1) 81

usually also provided instructions on how paper grocery bags could be repurposed into book covers.

We only got the instructions how to make one. But how many grocery store bags are made out of paper these days? You might as well teach them to make them out of newspaper.

Anywhere that's banned plastic bags have seen the return of paper shopping bags alongside the reusable ones.

Comment Re: Backups? (Score 1) 37

More like they didn't have enough paperpushers on hand to guarantee a suitable level of compliance to whatever bullshit FAR and anything else FAA requires.

Sure a lot of regulations are bad, but most of the regulations in flying are written in blood. Those paper trails exist to ensure some idiot does replace a fuse with a piece of pipe causing the whole tower to suddenly go out because something blew up.

Given the DOGE efficiency mandates, perhaps the main problem is the backup link was inefficient - after all, redundancy is by definition inefficient and those DOGE tech bros who know better simply stopped maintaining multiple links and let them fail until there's only one left working.

And nevermind all the fired maintenance personnel who maintain the equipment

Comment Re:Backups? (Score 1) 37

It sounds like job sites were moved/consolidated as a way to address staffing shortages, and that necessitated changes to the network topography.

If they didn't have the means to hire more controllers, I'm guessing IT didn't have the means to establish redundant links either.

Don't forget DOGE took a chunk of people out as well. They didn't fire the ATCs, but they did fire the people who did the equipment maintenance and all the ancillary jobs that help ATC do their job.

You know, efficiency!

Likely stuff just kept degrading and degrading until someone got around to fixing it but there are too few people fixing it.

Slashdot Top Deals

The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.

Working...