The government's changing guidance into law to ban mobile phones during the school day. They're not sewing the kids mouths shut, nor are they giving kids kung fu lessons. Kids are just as free to report violence as they ever were.

To be clear - this meat of this was already "guidance", and nearly all schools had some *something* in place already. This now makes it law that they *have* to do something, but that something can be as little as "keep your phone in your bag, on silent or switched off", although most tend to encourage phones kept in lockers or in reception or whatever during the school day (some offer exceptions at breaks, some don't).

Not one kid will be harmed by this. Not one emergency call won't be made, not one fight in the playground won't be reported. We don't really have mass shootings in schools, and those that we have had have not been solved by the easy access to mobile phones, so whenever the next one is, I wouldn't imagine there'll be much "of only the kids had had phones" coming out as a result.

I'm learning French, and I have to say, it's a generally good experience, and it seems to actually be teaching me something. I've also noticed a few problems with the app, no idea if they're new problems or old, or just 'load' or whatever. I've noticed that sometimes, no matter how I say I word, it'll just never accept it. It asks again a couple more times, so I try some variations, but it just refuses (whereas you can stammer your way through some of the sentences and it says it's okay!?). I've also found some of the listening exercises don't make any sound - which makes them pretty tricky. My also wife tells me it turns a bit nasty if you stop doing it every day - to the point that she's not gone back to it for weeks (where ironically, it's starting to be nicer to her again).

However, as for the leaderboards, I sort of assume that they're made up. I mean, I'm always 2-3 away from the top, even though I don't think I'm trying that hard. I'm only on the free tier, so my earning ability is very limited, and yet somehow I can be position 2-3 most of the time? Seems unlikely to me. I'm not especially motivated by the leader boards though, so it doesn't really matter if it's made up or not. I'm just running at my own pace, and I'm doing just fine, thanks very much.

You have to think that they must be pretty damn confident in Avengers: Doomsday. I mean, my first thought was "nope, never gonna see it", but I'm probably not a big concern for them.

Next up, they're launching a whole new type of cinema? IMAX hasn't exactly been making it super well over the years, which sort of suggests there's not that much market for such a thing. Disney can, I suppose, order all their film makers to shoot in this new format, which gives them a chance at some content which IMAX won't have, but still, it's gotta be a big gamble. They're also deliberately going up against Dune 3 too - I don't know what crossover there is in viewership, but I doubt many will watch both at launch.

Then of course there's Disney+ - not exactly taking the world by storm either. I don't know if it's actually making any money yet, but it can't be much if it is. One wonders if the "walled garden" of content model that Disney seems to favour is such a bright one to be doubling-down on.

We'll see I guess... it's gonna go one of two ways, and will probably take about 2 years to decide ;-)

I'm gonna put my faith in the Scandinavians. Firstly, they live quite far North, and whilst close to (say) Russia, aren't a direct target of very much. As such, I'd say their odds of getting directly hit are small, and even smaller if you consider the sizes of their countries and population centres etc.

Also, the Scandinavian nations are generally pretty quiet on the world stage. They don't go picking fights, but they do what they need to when the time comes. This all keeps on reducing the likelihood of being directly destroyed.

Next, they're all beautiful. If any aesthetics were gonna make it, you'd hope it would the theirs. They're often counted as some of the happiest in the world too. Their systems of government tend to be "for the people" more than most, and whilst they might tax highly, people seem to get good rewards for paying those taxes.

They're also really lovely people, very community minded, very social and welcoming. It seems unlikely they'll be putting up walls and whatnot to protect their little lot when refugees come knocking.

Lastly, because they've already figured out how to endure long dark winters, it seems likely they'll find nifty ways to live through a nuclear winter. Sure, they're not used to some of the 'old ways', and I'm sure for a long time food is going to seem very boring, but they'll survive. They'll naturally try to keep their societal norms going as much as they can, which likely would have to change here and there, but it feels like their core values would persist.

So yes, a lot of societies around the world would be lost, but I'd like to think at least a few of the better ones will survive. Cut-throat capitalism...? Yeah, not so much, I don't imagine.

Saying your pipeline for chips is full, when all you have is an internal market is pretty easy. You go around asking how many people would like, then produce that many, and poof! Your pipeline is 100% full.

Having a full pipeline with external customers is harder - you can't ask them all before you start and those you do ask may change their order quantities before you start production. You don't want to under-produce because you want to meet the demand, but you don't want unsold inventory either. As a result, you either have to keep people waiting, or else you have to take a hit on over-production. Either results in a pipeline which is not 100% full.

That aside, anyone selling "AI chips" that isn't nvidia strikes me as a good thing. There's a slim chance that if a few start doing this, the price of ordinary computing might come down to a sensible level again.

Joke's on you, America - it can't possibly have been Russia, big bad Don said so: https://www.theguardian.com/us...

You couldn't make this stuff up :-(

The question is... can you build a body without a brain? I'll bet you actually can't, but our victorian way of thinking about the body doesn't yet know that. What I'm getting at is that our bodies are far more interconnected than we really give them credit. Things that happen in our guts, for example, can have a profound effect on our brains - and quite likely the opposite too. I'll bet that from your head to your toes, your brain is involved in the development, maintenance and operation of all those body parts.

As you point out, our bodies aren't static either - they need to move and work in order to grow or maintain themselves. It's unclear, for example, if you could artificially grow bone that has the requisite density in all the right places to actually be usable. Our bones are subjected to vibrations from all of our movements, and that is the mechanism through which they develop. I'll bet you can't synthesise that sufficiently well (or at least, not easily). Likewise muscle growth - we'd all like to think you could just stick a few needles in and electric-shock them all the grow nicely, but attempts to do that so far have been rather lack lustre to say the least. After that, there are a whole load of things I can't even name which will need doing too. One wonders if it's ever likely to be possible?

FWIW, I suspect more likely would be to rapidly create some of the required tissue for a repair. If you get liver cancer, then they go off and make a load of your liver cells, presumably wash out the cancer and then graft them in place of the old cancerous liver cells. Once they get that working, they might be able to make an entire liver - maybe. But I suspect by the time they want to get that far, they'll either be growing the replacement liver inside another living thing, or else will have worked out if it is ever possible to build body parts without a brain being present.

I saw this come by today... I can't vouch for its absolute correctness as I haven't checked the data they claim to have scraped, but it's a pretty damning indictment on MS's stewardship of Github. From near 100% uptime to quite a lot less than that - I mean, probably not bad enough that you can't rely on it, but you definitely don't want to be in a "I need it back up right now or else I'm screwed" type situation (so don't engineer yourself into such a position).

https://damrnelson.github.io/g...

Microsoft Windows (just Windows, not all the other stuff) is a massive bloat-fest. It's a whole load of interconnected mess, so it's likely impossible to fully test one bit without also testing a load of other stuff too. Then Microsoft also has to test their stuff on a whole room full of different hardware, just to cover their partners, never mind all the other vendors that matter.

There's no way Microsoft can test everything, all the time. It's likely just too big a problem for anything other than maybe a big launch or service pack or something. As such, they likely have to cut down from "fully test everything" to "quick test everything", to "quick test the main bits and call it good".

If there'a any similarity between MS and Oracle here, it's that they've spent decades lumping ever more features into places they don't belong. If (for example), MS had taken a far more modular approach to Windows, then right now, a whole raft of people would be unaffected by this bug because they didn't adopt some lump of services that contains the issue. What's more, MS would be able to internally segregate the problem and so likely would be able to get closer to "test everything, every time" than they can currently, so the likelihood of the bug even getting out would be reduced.

So yeah, there's a wider issue: Far too much legacy software is just too bloated and poorly architected. That poor engineering leads to problem after problem.

(As an aside, I'm reminded of Qnap NASes, as something of an example of "microsoftism". Bear in mind a NAS is supposed to be a "hands off" sort of device - it's an "appliance", so shouldn't demand much of your time.

I now use OpenMediaVault on my Qnap nas because I got fed up of Qnap having severe issues with some bullshit service they'd shoe-horned into their Nas product, which didn't need to be there. Now I have a NAS, and that part of it works really well and doesn't need update after update. I also run some of the "higher level" stuff Qnap offer, like my home CCTV runs on it - but that's entirely separate and so has a completely different update schedule and can be updated without affecting the NAS. I've gone from "shove everything you can possibly fit into it" to "lean, modular and well architected", and have a lot less hassle as a result)

Then again, there are sites where you get Stockholm Syndrome by viewing them. Eg. slashdot ;-)

Yeah, we Brits have to show photo ID to vote now - but you can hand over just about anything for ID, there's a long list of acceptable things here: https://www.electoralcommissio...

If you don't have any of them, you can get a free voter ID card - but of course you'd have to remember to do that some weeks in advance of an election.

If I'm honest, I wasn't convinced of the voter fraud problem when they introduced ID a couple of years back. They at least made is as easy to comply as possible though.

Why? What have they done that's so terrible?

- Total paid some money to lease an area for wind turbines. They started to build there (ie. spent some more money).
- Trump doesn't like that any more, so told them to stop (bun fight in the courts, etc)
- Trump says "we'll refund $1bn of the money you paid to lease and build, on condition you build some oil/gas stuff on land instead"
- Total says "okay then"

I dislike the oil companies as much as the next guy, but I'm struggling to see how they're the bad guy here. What did I miss?

It's been over 20 years since I was last in a fab, but...

The actual making of wafers is pretty much automated. Apart from loading up materials and such like, it's pretty much hands-off.

However, let's say you've got a brand new production line available. You've got a room full of designers who make up a silicon design. Once that's done (and simulated, etc), it starts being a bit of a dark art. It's not like just sending it off to a laser printer and waiting for it to come out. What tends to happen if you get various 'artefacts' in the wafer, which are a symptom of the specific design you chose and the finer details of the manufacturing process, the input materials, etc. Some of those things are fixable in the manufacture, some of them need to be designed out. Then you get a few wafers which look good, so you go to full manufacture. Then you find weird problems where the yield of the devices you're making drops off a bit, so you're back to tweaking the manufacture (because by then, tweaking the design means a whole load of development/testing etc)... and so on.

So in answer to your question... the clean room isn't exactly packed with semiconductor engineers and machine experts, but there do have to be quite a few of them to work out how to make the technology make the thing you want to the level of quality you can accept. They'll be predominantly doing that at the start of a new product line, or a new machine/process, but they're still going to be doing some amount of work throughout the entire time you're manufacturing that same old chip you've been doing for the last 20 years.

You need to get some better laws. In my country, you'd pay the 3.99 - and the retailer really has no basis to say different. Sure, they'd scurry off and go change the label on the shelf, but *your* purchase has to be honoured. Things get a little less clear for the person behind you in the queue - for them, they'd likely end up paying 4.99 because (now) that's what the shelf says, although they could reasonably argue their purchase also needs to be honoured because it had the lower price when they picked up the item - most retailers would probably do it rather than try to argue the toss.

Surge pricing, or even price changes during the retail hours are going to be tricky here. Some of the marvels of consumer-friendly legislation, I guess. Some would argue it's "anti progress", and that we actually all end up paying higher prices - I'm not sure who is right about all of that.

To play devils advocate here, let's say you're using an LLM to generate some Python. You already have no idea what the underlying machine code will be, let alone some representative C of that machine code. The thinking here being that soon you won't know what the Python is either, yet somehow you end up with a working solution.

In some senses you can see this being a logical conclusion. However, as others note, LLMs don't actually "program" - they just regurgitate code they've seen elsewhere. It's unlikely there's going to be much StackOverflow asking if one AI-chunk-o-code is better than another, or how to make it do something different, so there's really no code for the AI to learn from - as such, it'll never write in this new language.

Getting away from LLMs for a moment, a genetic algorithm is a form of AI, and could be used to create a working program. Programming languages as we know them make the chances of a genetic algorithm writing even a simple 'hello world' a bit like an infinite number of monkeys generating Shakespeare. If there was some sort of intermediate language that was perhaps more like a wallboard of switches and connections, then you could imagine 'evolving' something that works though. The question then becomes... could you construct such a language? Personally, I'm not so sure, give that eventually a CPU has to run it, and those are a sort of 'pipeline', where one instruction depends on the previous one, and so on. Someone brighter than me might think differently though...?