Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Win the battle, lose the war (Score 1) 38

As you can imagine I am 100% against communism and any form of socialism. Bezos and everyone else must have property rights not hindered by government, it is his business to run (or his board) and government must not be in position to dictate how any company hires and fires people, who they hire and fire, why, etc.

Comment Re:Win the battle, lose the war (Score 1) 38

I fully expect Amazon to close this warehouse, maybe it will be contaminated with something radioactive for example, to make things easier and then it will shut down. Personally I root for the anarcho capitalist solution and wish Amazon to win this battle for its private property rights.

Comment Re:Bad for us, but not "our fault" (Score 1) 106

The real reason we will never be able to "fix" the drought is because the American West is not in a drought right now.

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

The West's rapid aridification isn't being caused by a "once-in-a-century" weather event

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

What we're dealing with in the West is not a drought because the current lack of rainfall isn't "abnormal" for a desert. Dry is the default setting. And you can't call it a "drought" because you wish deserts were wetter.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

Comment Re:Works pretty well. (Score 1) 49

Can confirm Bazzite. 85/90% there I'd say, which means there's still a bit of "tread carefully" for people. I'm very happy with the running, but I'd be less than truthful if I said it was completely frictionless.

For example, 90% of my gaming is on Elder Scrolls Online, the 'play' button on Steam runs the Zenimax launcher not the game itself and there's also an annoying recent'ish (few months) bug where it seems games launched from a 3rd party launcher don't know they've got the foreground focus. Steam thinks the launcher has the foreground., andn ESO this manifests as not autoswitching to the main game window after you've gone through the Zenimax launcher, no sound and sometimes stuttering frames because the ESO game window still thinks its in the background somehow. Random'ish alt-tabbing and clicking will bring it back, but it means there's a a) a small bit of friction where there was previously none and b) some change or regression because all this used to run fine without that issue.

I played Rez:Infinite. Great game, but it has an "Attack" mode which will crash after the third level or so. Again, friction.

I play Skyrim. Setting both Skyrim and ESO up for modding, including running some Windows binaries required by the mods, was a relatively painful learning experience.

I have a friend who wanted to switch but didn't because of kernel DRM in some of the Windows games. Once again, friction.

I'm very happy with the switch and wouldn't go back, but I'm experienced with Linux (Slackware 0.9 alpha being my first distro, and I'd installed before distros like that existed as well - anyone for Minix on an Atari ST?). I can see people not quite as annoyed with Windows as me not really seeing the benefit. For me, it was one giant Co-pilot advert too far that made me say "right then, done". After I'd told it no god knows how many flaming times, Windows popped up some "Let's get ready in your new Co-Pilot account!" thing that literally just had me hard power off and wipe the OS away. My PC is purely for gaming, I use a Mac laptop for my desktop work, so I get that luxury.

(as an aside, I do wish Steam would ban using launchers when it itself is the launcher. There's no reason for that Zenimax launcher to exist in the Steam version of the game, and it's annoying as hell because it prevents me from using Big Picture mode and just treating the whole thing like a console. That's true for either Windows or Linux, this is a 3rd party launcher thing and not an OS thing).

Comment Re:Watch, Nerds! (Score 2) 101

Each time some nerd says "Let them censor I have a VPN" he forgets that the next step is to crackdown on VPNs. Technical defenses against political problems only give you a bit of time, but will eventually fail.

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

Submission + - Fusion Energy: Definition, Links to articles, and Quotes

Futurepower(R) writes: Amazing! Fusion Energy would change our lives in many very positive ways.

Food would be much cheaper. All cars and trucks would eventually be electric, no pollution.

> Definition
Fusion energy is the process of combining light atomic nuclei (typically deuterium and tritium) to form heavier ones, releasing massive amounts of energy, mimicking the sun's power.

> World Economic Forum
5 ways fusion energy can change the world for the better
Feb 16, 2023, more than 3 years ago.
https://www.weforum.org/storie...

"Fusion energy is arguably the most exciting human discovery since fire. From the way we heat our homes to more water in times of drought, here’s just a glimpse of how fusion power could help change the world."

"Under the fusion-powered grow lights, hydroponically grown strawberries or lettuce or other crops can be grown to maturity without the use of pesticides and other harsh chemicals."

> U.S. Department of Energy
DOE Explains...Fusion Energy Science
https://www.energy.gov/science...

"A pickup truck filled with fusion fuel has the equivalent energy of 2 million metric tons of coal, or 10 million barrels of oil."

> ITER ("The Way" in Latin) is one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world today.
https://www.iter.org/fusion-en...

"Some of the advantages of fusion:"

"Abundant energy: Fusing atoms together in a controlled way releases nearly four million times more energy than a chemical reaction such as the burning of coal, oil or gas..."

"No CO. No long-lived radioactive waste. No risk of meltdown."

> Fusion developers go public as AI boom widens funding sources
March 23, 2026 Investment in Fusion stocks
https://www.reuters.com/busine...

> Fusion Industry Association
https://www.fusionindustryasso...

> Fusion news from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://news.mit.edu/topic/fus...

> Dallas Teen Builds Groundbreaking Nuclear Fusion Reactor
Mar. 29, 2026
https://nationaltoday.com/us/t...

"12-year-old Aidan McMillan achieves fusion, becoming the youngest person to replicate the sun's energy source".

> Best Fusion Energy Stocks of 2026 and How to Invest in Them
Jan 30, 2026
https://www.fool.com/investing...

Comment Re:The God-fearing and the Accountants (Score 1) 162

This is one case where the sky daddy freaks could be useful to stop an extremely dangerously stupid move "forward." Because we live in this world, in this time, if this goes forward, it will 100% be used to extend the lives of the ultra-rich, while the rest of us remain fodder for their machinations.

Meh.

It would undoubtedly be very expensive at first, and therefore only available to the very wealth (probably not ultra-wealthy -- even without automation, caring for such a clone wouldn't be a full-time job, so call it maybe $30k/year -- within the reach of the upper middle class). But competition would drive automation, and we already have most of the techniques required, having developed them to deal with coma patients and the like, but at lower cost because this case would be dealing with a fundamentally healthy body. My guess based on some napkin math is that cost could be driven down as low as $10k per year. Maybe lower.

$10k per year is expensive, sure, but having an immunologically-perfect organ donor could absolutely be worth it for someone making as little as $200k per year.

If the cost could be driven down to $5k per year... then it's in the range where most middle-class Americans could afford it, even if it meant that they'd have to cut back a little somewhere else; maybe drive an older car rather than leasing a new one, or similar.

Submission + - AMD says it will buy Intel (techspot.com)

ZipNada writes: In a move that feels less like a corporate transaction and more like the final punchline to a 40-year industry rivalry, AMD announced Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire Intel, the company it has spent decades chasing, imitating, undercutting, suing, licensing from, and lately outperforming.

The all-stock transaction, which AMD described as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to unify x86 innovation," would combine the two companies under a single umbrella just a few years after such an outcome would have sounded ridiculous.

For most of modern computing history, Intel was the empire and AMD the scrappy survivor, the perpetual second source that somehow kept finding ways to stay alive. Now, after a bruising run of manufacturing delays, product stumbles, strategic resets, and a historic reversal in investor confidence, Intel is poised to be absorbed by the smaller company it long treated as a footnote.

Comment Re:Apply Betteridge's Law (Score 1) 49

So, no, this cluster of patches doesn't tell us anything in particular beyond what we already knew: That emergency patches are relatively common.

Considering that Microsoft has been promising this exact same type of improvement since the release of XP Service Pack 3, the words spoken now are worthless platitudes provided to ensure the smoothness of the theft of your money. There is zero reality behind any of their promises.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1) 78

The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right.

Maybe in about 90% if you are lucky. That still leaves about 10% error rate which is way too much.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases,

Depends on the definition of "bases". Passing test suite does not show your program correct. And if your test suite is also AI generated then you are again at the problem whether the tests themselves are correct.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch,

Vibe error detection goes nicely with vibe programming. That being said, experienced programmers have a talent to detect errors. But detecting some errors here and there is far from full code review. Well, you can ask LLM to do it as well and many proposals it provides are good. Greg Kroah-Hartman estimates about 2/3 are good and the rest is marginally somewhat usable.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

Nothing goes as nicely as discussing with LLM. The longer you are at it the more askew it goes.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

My point is that 25k LOC a month (god forbid a week) is a lot. It may look working on the outside but it is likely full of hopefully only small errors. Especially when you decide that you do not need to human-review all the LLM generated code. But if you consider e.g. lines of an XML file defining your UI (which you have drawn in some GUI designer) to be valid LOC then yeah. 25k is not a big deal. Not all LOCs are equal.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1) 78

its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later

yeah, all of us write (or copy/paste) great boilerplate code. that's not really something to be proud of.

we all make mistakes when writing business functions which are never 25k LOC in a week.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

Slashdot Top Deals

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. -- Edmund Burke

Working...