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Comment Re:Roads cost $18.5 billion a year (Score 1) 174

Everyone wants roads near their house. If you don't have a road going to your house then your house is worthless. Once the government has a right of way for a road, expanding the road might be expensive, but it doesn't get the whole community involved in a series of lawsuits.

The only people that want to live near the train tracks, on the other hand, are the people out in the middle of the California desert that would love to have a way to easily get to the parts of California that aren't a wasteland. In the nice parts of California, every home owner within visual distance of the proposed route has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the tracks to the death.

This means that California has built a tiny bit of tracks out in the middle of nowhere (near Bakersfield but not in Bakersfield). It also means that every single foot from this point on is likely to get even more astronomically expensive. The homeowners involved know that houses that are far enough away from the tracks so that their home value doesn't plummet are going to get a windfall as their prime real estate will become even more valuable with decent public transit. The rail system is going to be a serious amenity eventually. The homeowners near the tracks, on the other hand, are going to see a serious drop to their net worth. Everyone in California wants more light rail, but only if it doesn't go through their neighborhood.

It could easily be that California real estate is simply too expensive in this day and age for something like this to be built.

Comment What's the problem? (Score 1) 70

With all of GitHub's great new AI features, it writes all your code for you! It doesn't matter whether the site is up at any given moment; just download your newly completed app at some point then the site is online. You're free to kick back, relax and scroll your social feeds because you don't actually have to do anything anymore. This is truly a golden era!

Comment Re:We need humility, not arrogance (Score 1) 171

Formal verification mathematically proves code implements a specification. It does not catch bugs that are specified.
There are entire classes of bugs (logic bugs) that LLMs can find that formal verification literally doesn't even try to.

So you prompt the LLM to "find all the bugs".

Even if the LLM can find every last bug (which in turn assumes that this type of problem isn't NP-hard or has some issue that Godel would point out), just defining to the LLM exactly what a "bug" is seems to be pretty much the same thing as those formal specifications that you just convincingly dismissed as inadequate.

I don't think that there's anything magical about LLMs that would let them get around fundamental mathematical roadblocks.

Comment Re:How about? (Score 3) 95

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

Comment Re:Intel's political marketing has always been bad (Score 4, Insightful) 23

If you read this post it shows that AMD stole Intel's design and reverse engineered it.

If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

Comment Re:Clean room? (Score 5, Interesting) 125

Even if you use an AI to extract an extremely condensed specification out of the source code, it's hardly clean room if the LLM was pre-trained on the source code any way.

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.

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