Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).

If you have access to a God-tier LLM that you can rely on to find every bug, I think that could work.

However, I don't think anyone in the Linux community is ready to trust LLMs to that extent just yet. Not only are they quite fallible, they are also non-deterministic -- so if you ask your favorite LLM to find the bugs in the code, and it doesn't find any, and then you feed it the exact same prompt again, it might find some on its second attempt. So how do you know when to stop re-asking?

LLMs are currently constituted are very useful for finding bugs, but not so useful for guaranteeing that no bugs remain.

You know what improves code quality? Process improvements.

You know what doesn't improve code quality? Telling people that they suck. It's pointless and immature.

They might get a better responsie by requesting $4.99/month to remove the Meta AI slop from their Facebook interface.

Agreed. Deliberate adding of surface roughness (and even multiple surfaces) have been used in racing yachts for many decades. I think they started doing this in the 90s.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?

I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).

Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won't have a viable product to sell.

Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?

Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -- it's unlikely that our tech-bro overlords are going to hire people simply on humanitarian grounds, if they can get an unquestioning machine to do the same work cheaper.

I agree that UBI is unlikely, but only because the billionaires don't like sharing and therefore won't support it. The money does "just appear" when you have mass automation doing the work to make it appear, but it will go into Bezos' checking account, not to the general public.

Well, technically that is the entire point of some of the major sports in the world, and it would be problematic to say that deliberately causing brain damage for competition is ok in one sport but not in another.

On the other hand, I am not altogether convinced it should be openly encouraged in any sport.

This is a tricky one, because I would also argue that I should have no say in what a person does to their own body for their own reasons, that my firm belief that people should have bodily autonomy when it causes no actual harm to others does not permit me to condemn others for doing stuff to their own body for their own reasons when it does no actual harm to others even if it's a context I don't agree with.

Given that (ethically) I cannot condone wilful irreversable damage but (ethically) cannot condemn personal choises that harm nobody else, the obvious conclusion is that I don't believe such sports should be actively promoted or encouraged, but that what individuals do in the privacy of a private sporting event should not concern those outside until or unless actual harm outside of those events occurs.

Most likely they meant that unemployment (or something similar) increased by 20%