Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

I'm trying to look for a high cost card with lots of rewards, actually. I plan on using them at those establishments that refuse to take cash - either ones that are deliberately cashless, or ones that limit cash transactions.

Several times I go to buy something, I present a 20 and they refuse it asking if I have a card. A super-high-fee card would work well in this instance. You want me to use my card and not cash? Then you'll have to make it worth my while.

(I have more "normal" credit cards for regular transactions, I just don't want to be forced to use a credit card - it should be my decision).

The merchants need to consider that if their competitor down the street still accepts rewards cards, the customers might just switch, and then they've just lost the whole sale. All this over a 1% extra cost to the merchant.

In the meantime, they think nothing of offering things like buy-one-get-one-free deals to lure in a few more customers.

The new stuff is under copyright.

There is no excuse for submitting AI slop. When you file a court brief, you sign it indicating that you read it and it is as accurate as you can verify. You may quibble over details but you indicate everything you put in the file is factual.

Putting in fake case citations means you didn't read what you filed which means you violated your duty as a lawyer when you filed it.

Also - checking citations isn't hard. There's this tool called "Google" that you can spend 5 minutes with looking up citations. It doesn't need a law library - since all the case information is online. Takes maybe 5 minutes and something you can have your intern do.

Maybe an hour if you want to do a cursory glance at the case and make sure it's actually saying what you think it's saying. After all, nothing's worse than citing a case to say one thing when the case actually went the opposite way.

And honestly, I think the punishment could be simpler - you lose the case. Whatever it is. If a prosecutor did it and now causes a criminal to go free, well, lucky day for the criminal and the public will have their say at the voting booth for letting criminals go free. If it's a civil case, too bad, so sad, but now you have grounds for suing for inadequate representation.

Lawyers who lose their cases this way build a reputation and it's one where the free market and voters can easily resolve.

That summary at the top of this story is just way too long. I'll have a chatbot break it down and give me the gist.

For an important API, yeah, it is probably a good idea if that API is something that you're told you can rely on, but I don't think this is still the case with the Linux kernel, where rust is more of a playground.

Except there are real drivers being written in Rust. It's being done because it eliminates a class of memory bugs that were tricky and difficult in C, and when you're dealing with complex devices, likely an overhead you don't want to deal with (e.g., GPU drivers).

Sure, if you're a hard core kernel developer, then you probably know the intricacies of the memory management. But if you're a slightly weaker developer trying to get hardware to work, well, you probably want some help so you can work more on driver bits and less on memory management bits.

Asahi Linux, for example relies on Rust on Linux code that's not in mainline yet - they're something like 600 patches that they have but cannot submit because the base dependencies are not in.

There was a brief spot between IE and Chome where Firefox had the market, but Google put that damn button on their search page that took everyone to a Chrome download and "wow"d people with the URL bar search.

I personally love Firefox, and for any minor problem it might have, I think the ability to have a reliable ad blocker without much hassle is well worth it.

Sure, let's ignore all the times during that heyday where Mozilla decided to alienate Firefox users. Sure, maybe they had a good reason to break the UI multiple times going away from XUL - first they get a new UI and then you needed an extension to fix it. Then they break it again and obsolete all the extensions you used. Users gave up and switched because it was a support nightmare where one day you start up Firefox and nothing works the way it used to because the update rolled out. Like what I needed to do that day was fix Firefox again because half my favorite extensions no longer work, or exist.

Firefox was on top and Chrome was the newcomer. Chrome did a lot of things better, but Firefox was still the king until they alienated users with this stuff that caused people to give up and switch. I mean, if I'm going to be burned by Firefox who decided one day I was going to lose basically everything, then I might as well check out the competition.

And now Firefox is where it is because they've refused to do things that users want - instead forcing Pocket and adware down our throats in the shadiest way possible. Like, do we NEED reasons to not use Firefox?

Earlier the entire Japanese localization team decided to quit. And likely taking the whole Japanese userbase with it because of the culture and the nature of the insult. In an era where Firefox should be able to pick up users easily it's still doing its best to shed them.

Crying over lost users while declaring "It's Google's fault! Monopoly!" when much of the damage was self-inflicted is not how it works. It even came back to bite them when the lawsuit threatened to cut Google's funding of Firefox.

Time to admit the damage was done, and then go about trying to attract users back. Maybe bringing back what was lost - why is changing the look still something I need to edit config files for - something we gave up in the 80s? Lots of Firefox customization is locked away in config files when it was a simple extensions to alter them.

There's a reason the Thunderbird team broke off because they didn't want to deal with the baggage Mozilla was bringing.

The 45 minute builds back in the 1990s .....

Obviously someone never tried compiling the Linux kernel back then. An hour to build was considered fast. It also was a good stability test because questionable computers would almost always crash.

These days the Linux kernel takes 5 minutes tops.

Android is also a beast to build - back in the early days, half a day to build it was common. Even on a high end machine you did a clean build in around an hour and a half. If you got a super tricked out Threadripper PC with SSDs you got it down to around 45 minutes. 64 core builds at the time were impressive. Of course these days we have 128 core PCs, but even Android 14 doubled the build time over Android 13.

Windows reportedly took 8 hours to build in the NT days.

In a little over 20 years we went from build times on things like Linux, GCC, Glibc, and other big projects which took the better part of an hour to just a few minutes. Fast enough that OpenEmbedded Linux builds everything from source - you set up a project and build it and it compiles the cross-compilers, the host libraries, and build tools and then spits out an image you can use in about half an hour.

Of course, the real thing is likely more WFH stuff - because if you walked in the door to the office, you were on the clock. At home, I suppose you could go through all that, but most people I know just close their laptops which puts them to sleep, so they just need to log into the VPN the next day. Hell, I'm super lazy, I just lock the PC and leave it running. It's not like the few watts the laptop consumes is going to kill me - I'm saving tons on gas and other things not going to the office so leaving the laptop plugged in and on isn't going to hurt matters.

Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".

And knowing the Japanese, this is basically the kiss of death to them using Firefox.

As if Mozilla really needed ANOTHER reason to see their marketshare go down even more.

It's like they're purposely tanking their numbers so they can blame "Google monopoly!" for their dwindling numbers, when in reality it's because they're pushing users to alternative browsers.

Pushing away the Japanese like this certainly isn't a good move. But watch as they blame Google for destroying Firefox instead of themselves for pushing users away from Firefox.

Do they really need to give people reasons to not use Firefox?

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

The problem was, selling bricks didn't make Lego much money. They fell on hard times because toys went electronic and the 90s were rough as everyone drifted towards computers.

They basically reinvented themselves - no kid is getting a $400 Lego set - but adults do. And adults love to collect. These sets basically brought Lego back. So while they're limited in a way, they also do sell, and licensed sets are one of their bigger revenue streams.

That said, they do make generic sets, and you can buy bulk lots, but they're more oriented towards kids who do take them apart and build more stuff with them. But they also realize there's a growing crowd of builders who want special pieces so you can order them by the brick, and a growing adult segment that wants to do a build with their kids, but have something on display.

The beauty of Lego is it can be all things. You can build this with your kid, you might then buy them a bunch of random sets for them to play with - they can choose to build the desired outcome, or who cares, open all the bags, and build whatever comes to mind. No one's touching my Enterprise, but if I give you a Mona Lisa set and you use it to make a spaceship, more power to you.

And yes, people do buy sets often to collect pieces - there are sites that value the sets on how much you get per dollar.

No one has any qualms if you choose to buy this set and build something else completely different. Or if you buy 10 of these sets to build your collection of pieces and have absolutely no intention on building a USS Millennium Falcon.

Nah, that's been the norm for the past 30 years.

Vibe Coding is the next Visual Basic. You know the tool that basically runs Fortune 50 or so companies because some middle manager saw a demo version, cooked something up with it, then it spread like wildfire. Eventually it started accruing features in an ad-hoc manner and is now this unworkable blob of an application that someone has to keep running on a mysterious Windows XP machine that no one dares touch. It started using the demo version, then someone's kid found a pirated version so you didn't have to take 3 million steps to install it every month. Eventually someone actually bought a legitimate version.

Attempts had been made to bring it to VB# but it's only been a buggy mess since, so no one's actually moved from VB6, but the timeline is "sometime" and everything has to be made both to the app everyone uses and the failed VB# version they can finally retire that Windows XP machine and move onto Windows Server 2008. Because as we all know, VB# is also end of life.

Oh sure, some new middle manager sees this and is currently vibe coding their way to a replacement for both the Windows XP and obsolete VB# version, but it only seems to work half the time, and features that worked yesterday mysteriously broke today, so those vital reports that barely worked on Windows XP, well, if it worked, it would be wrong, despite even the Windows 2008 version having that working for years.

If you're locked inside an ATM, have you tried banging on the case to alert passers by?

Almost nobody uses "untyped languages". Few of those even exist, with Forth and various assembly languages being the main examples. (C, with its type system that is as airtight as a sieve, gets an honorary mention.)

You're probably harping about dynamically typed languages. In such languages, the runtime still knows *exactly* what type every item of data has. These are not weakly typed. But what you obviously prefer are "statically typed" languages.

Static typing might statistically reduce some errors, but it certainly can't "eliminate whole classes". Consider "set_warhead_target(float latitude, float longitude)". Did the type system give you any protection from accidentally swapping the two parameters? That's really the problem that you're so worried about: accidentally using the wrong data value in the wrong place.

However, very few statically typed languages (with Rust being a notable exception) have eliminated the biggest source of type errors in computing: Null, which is a bogus placeholder that matches any pointer type (or reference type, depending on the language's nomenclature). So in many cases you have no less risk with static typing than you do with accidentally feeding a string into a Python sqrt() function. And in the case of C or C++, you can be much worse off, as in segfaults and remote exploits.

In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)