The only one or two power outages I had my entire life in Germany: were planned weeks ahead.

You've been lucky, then. I live now in southeastern Colorado, where it's currently monsoon season. That means lots and lots of thunderstorms, hail and flash floods. (The standard advice for dealing with flash floods is "head for the high ground." We never bother, because we are the high ground.) Lightning and flash floods cause power outages, so they're common this time of year, but generally only for a few minutes.

The biggest outage I ever lived through, however, came before moving up here, when I lived in Los Angeles. That was caused by the Northridge Earthquake, back in '94, a real E-Ticket ride! One of the side effects was a better look at the night-time sky than I'd had since I left the Navy.

I'm retired, and it's long been my habit to update my Fedora box every morning while making breakfast. I agree with you that the kernel's getting updated far more often than it used to be. Recently, it was updated at least three times in one week (maybe four, I'm not sure) which seems excessive. I think that was while they were getting rid of the insecure forms of string manipulation, but I wasn't involved in that and could be wrong.

As a long-time Linux user, I have two questions. First, why does Microsoft insist on holding on to all of these bug patches and security fixes so that they can be released all together on Patch Tuesday instead of being made available right away as Linux does? Second, why do so many people insist on paying money for such a flawed system and putting up with such a slow update pace?

Merit should always consider strictly value.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

I didn't see a 5.6 option on the Windows client last night.

Haa anyone else observed 5.6 in the wild?

Trump doesn't need to have power, he only needs to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Companies are risk-averse, which is why Anthropic pulled their AI model for a while.

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

There's no known client, but there is a very good unknown client:
(For those familiar with Kenny Everett...)

https://dev.to/jfscoertzen/cha...
https://snapcraft.io/chatgpt-d...

Whether it has all the official features, I don't know. But that's your best bet.

I mean it's roughly 30 years past the "Year of the Linux desktop".

And that's because Windows fanbois moved the goalposts and people either didn't notice or didn't realize what was going on. Back then, "the year of Linux on the desktop" meant the year when Linux was good enough to be used on a desktop as your daily driver, something that's been achieved decades ago. However the Windows lusers started using the term to mean the year that Linux was on the majority of desktops, something that clearly hasn't happened yet and Linux users let them get away with it.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

Actually I do want to memorize. But not random idiotic key strokes that have nothing to do with the action/command they execute. EMACS is a prime example for that. ^G for example, what has that to do with "help"? Good, ^H is backspace, so during normal editing not available ...

If you want to memorize the commands, knock yourself out; nobody's stopping you. And go right ahead and use ^H as backspace, as that's what it does in nano. I'm not saying that you must, or even should be using it, I'm explaining why I've been using it for the last quarter of a century.