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Comment Re:Obvious answer (Score 1) 209

Compared to what was available before, it is quite impressive.

The negative feedback is prompted by the fact that AI is constantly being shoved into every one of our orifices 24/7 by every vaguely tech-related company as if it was the second coming of Jesus. To justify that amount of social pressure, it would indeed have to be quite a bit better than it actually is, and that's why people aren't impressed.

Comment Re:jury nullification is part of the power that an (Score 1) 77

A supreme court order will get ignored sooner or later. This will trigger a constitutional crisis. Those currently in power will try to do anything they can to keep ignoring the ruling up to and including interring the supreme court justices.

jury nullification is part of the power that an jury has!

I don't know why you think this is relevant to the discussion. If we get to a point where the Supreme Court is ignored, do you think the decision of some jury made of regular people would matter a damn? The nullification will be ignored, and the jury members would be lucky if they only get deported.

Comment Re:News at 11: Blowhard bloviates obvious bias (Score 1) 31

Why does he keep doing this?

You mean, why does Linus keep agreeing to be interviewed, and then reply to straightforward questions with the obvious answers?

What would you rather he do? Refuse to be interviewed, or maybe make up unexpected answers just to be edgy?

Comment Re:Welcome back Do Not Track header (Score 3, Interesting) 126

Microsoft famously poisoned-pilled their implementation to kill it by making it the default, which gave advertisers an excuse to claim people didn't really mean to set it, and ignore it.

This is bullshit.

First, do you realize what a ridiculous kind of "standard" DNT is? Advertisers promise to honor it, as long as users promise not to use it. This is a real life Catch 22, and nobody should defend it.

The issue is worse though: the DNT "standard" wasn't ever intended to stop tracking. It was intended to sabotage other proposals submitted to the W3C who would have had an impact on Google's bottom line. From this point of view it succeeded brilliantly.

At the time tracking was considered an important issue and some reasonably effective solutions were submitted for standardization. One of them, for example, boiled down to embedding functionality equivalent to AdBlock directly in browsers. That was a customer-facing design, because it would have left the choice to customers, and stopped browsers from contacting malicious tracing sites completely.

Google realized the danger and invented DNT. DNT is a terrible technical solution, and its problems were well understood at the time. Here are some issues:
  - there is no way to enforce DNT against a non-cooperating site
  - there is no way to find out in advance whether some site honors DNT or not
  - there is no way to even find out whether some particular request resulted in your being tracked
  - the feature is opt-out for tracking - an underhanded ploy to take advantage of less knowledgeable users, thus favoring the ad sellers. A standard intended to protect customers should default to more protection, not less.

Google bulldozed the alleged standard through the W3C with great fanfare, leveraging its membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and requesting Mozilla to support the proposal (Mozilla was getting good money from Google at the time, so they embraced the DNT scam, principles be damned). Of course, DNT was a failure in the market place, as expected. But it did succeed at its real goal, which was to bury all competing standard proposals which would have benefited customers.

As a proof of the deep duplicity of Google in regards to DNT, consider that Google never honored it, even though it was their own proposal.

Comment Re:C/C++ code covers more complex legacy code (Score 1) 37

Rust [...] makes it harder for you to work around the compiler when it comes to memory.

... which, to be clear, is a good thing. Working around the compiler is dangerous and a code smell, so it shouldn't be something that is easy to do. It usually indicates that either the compiler's capabilities aren't sufficient to meet your needs (in which case, a better solution would be either a better compiler, or to re-evaluate the wisdom of your approach), or that you are doing something the wrong way and should find a way to do it that works with the compiler, rather than around it, so that you get the benefits of the compiler's co-operation.

Comment Re:Are people this ignorant of basic online securi (Score 1) 79

Fortunately there is an easy fix. Education.

If education was an easy fix, we'd have an educated populace and ClickFix wouldn't be a problem.

The fact is, we live in eternal September. No matter how many people we educate, there's a unending firehose of exploitable n00bs arriving to replace them.

Comment Re:Go for it (Score 1) 95

I come down on the side of Tsiolkovsky: âoeEarth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.â

A baby in a cradle is the wrong analogy -- a better analogy is an internal organ inside a body. Yes, you can (with advanced technology and at great expense) remove the internal organ from the body and keep it alive externally for some time, but it's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, and sooner or later the disembodied organ will wither and die, unless it is returned to the environment it was specifically evolved to live within.

Comment Re:Say hello to Wirth's law (Score 1) 79

OTOH the nice thing about software is that it's easy to update, so anyone is free to replace their slow/inefficient software with a faster/efficient version as soon as they obtain it, at which point their fast hardware should run the efficient software very quickly. Nothing (except possibly bad management decisions?) is preventing anyone from creating efficient software, either.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of human culture for thousands of years, appearing in ancient myths and legends.

Perhaps it was referring to golems? That idea dates back to 400-500 BC, although really they behave more like traditional computer programs than anything we'd currently consider intelligent.

Comment Re:Yo Dawg (Score 3, Insightful) 9

I don't need an AI to write my code, since I can write code myself. That said, it could be nice to have an AI inspect my code and point out anything it suspects might be a bug... there are already lots of static analysis tools that do this sort of thing and they are great, but I think AI might be able to find different classes of bug that are beyond the capabilities of static analysis.

Going a bit further, what would be even more useful is an AI that can run my program and exercise its GUI (or fuzz its inputs) and monitor the resulting behavior the way a human would, to look for faults during execution. Human-driven SQA is always a lot of tedious work, and a production bottleneck.

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