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Comment Re:AI will rot our brains (Score 1) 49

"Debian is made by humans" makes as much sense as "holes dug by humans with shovels" when you have an excavator on site. AI is a force amplifier, an insanely fast and good one at that. It can not only write software, it can package it, port it, reverse engineer drivers for your favorite hardware and everything else a human might be able to do with a computer, but can't find the time, knowledge or motivation to do. AI is what basically turns all software into Open Source software, since AI isn't stopped by binaries and raw assembler code, unlike most humans.

Refusing to use AI just makes it look like somebody is more concerned with refusing to change their little hobby than the quality of their software.

> Loss of (human) cognitive function through its overuse.

If the whole anti-AI discussion has shown us anything, it's that most humans weren't very good with the whole "cognitive function" thing in the first place. Tons of parroting of long debunked arguments, complete lack of reflection, complete lack of forward thinking (spoiler: AI isn't stuck at ChatGPT3.5 from 2022) and other nonsense.

About the only valid concern against AI for Debian should be copyright, which is still a bit fishy, but since the rest of the industry doesn't seem to care, they might as well just role with it. Everything else just boils down to QA, you obviously shouldn't accept any AI change blindly, but you shouldn't do that with humans made ones either. If somebody spams your bug tracker with low quality AI slop, feel free to block them. Use AI for what it works for right now, and everything where it still fails at, check again in a year or two.

AI is the most powerful software since the invention of software, it's the stuff that was sci-fi just five years ago. Refusing to make is of it just makes people look inept.

Comment Motorola owns the patent (Score 2) 54

A colleague of mine working for Motorola patented encrypted memory sometime in the 2006-2010 timeframe. Maybe Motorola figured out that AMD was violating their patent and negotiated royalties privately with AMD. I don't know; I don't work at Motorola, but if AMD had to suddenly start paying royalties, it makes sense that they'd remove the feature from lower end, lower margin processors.

Comment Re: It's all about definitions. (Score 1) 177

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

Comment Re: Well "just" vibe code you a new API, then eh? (Score 3, Informative) 46

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

Comment It's simpler than that. (Score 1) 114

In the military, the mission - and only the mission - matters.

Most of the officers in the position to observe a UFO are not in the position to order an investigation. Even if they were, they'd have to justify the use of taxpayer dollars to support what could easily be characterized as a "curiosity" rather than the fundamental mission of air power. The best most of them can do is record their experience in the debrief, and rely on civilian scientists to investigate it further.

Comment Re:diverse? a woman? a person of color? a canuck? (Score 1) 203

Can we stop pretending that America is still stuck in the 1960's? The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a Jim Crow mindset, and no longer regard as remarkable when a woman or "person of color" (i.e., an ordinary person) does something that white people have been doing for years. Diversity is ordinary now, and has been for the past few decades.

Diversity is like a religion with some people - no matter how much you (Americans) repent, you are still a sinner and in need of grace and forgiveness from TPB.

Comment Re:Seems like this mostly hurts rural/minority are (Score 1, Funny) 171

Or perhaps they instead voted for a better economy, and this was a part of the package deal, whether they wanted it or not.

We have a republic, not a democracy. We didn't vote for this, but for the person who would occupy the office of the President. How much different would our country be if legislation proposed by congress had to be passed by national referendum? It's not the 18th century anymore. The bills are published on the Internet. We could create an electronic voting system which would allow the public to vote every spring and fall for proposed legislation, except for the fact that such a system would take power out of the hands of the politicians and return it to the people.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 0) 151

I don't get the Rust hatred. C has implicitly had an "unsafe" mode for much longer than Rust.

If you're a C kernel developer, you can jump on the Rust bandwagon very easily: just put the keyword unsafe in your comments and you can write code just like Rust developers.

Maybe, just maybe, this mistake was caused by the fact that the same sort of people who are likely to write bugs into their code are the same types of people who prefer "safe" languages because understanding the subtle nuances of how computers work is difficult. They would prefer a system where they couldn't make mistakes, rather than a system where they had to understand the code and the machine to a high level. There's a place in the world for these sorts of people, but it's not in OS/kernel development. The sort of I-can't-make-mistakes-with-Rust mindset probably lulled the coder into a false sense of security, with the predictable outcome.

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