The same people can be right and wrong, because there's a lot of different aspects to most situations.

Hmm... Only "insightful" comment in the FP branch? Maybe the moderators have been replaced with genAIs?

(And no Funny anywhere, as expected.)

As regards the story I'm remembering a recent MIT video. Long section about how to make AI work with the course. On the negative side, it recommended an anthropomorphic approach, basically treating the AI as though it were a human collaborator, but with "usage limits" to keep it in a subordinate status. On the positive side, I forgot. Maybe I should ask an AI for help?

I'm feeling increasingly bleak about the future of humanity. We definitely need to change the reference frames of our thinking, but we humans have never been that quick on our wits. In theory I think we could learn how to think about problems at new levels of abstraction that would make the AI tools useful, but in practice the tools are changing faster and faster all the time and we are already past the point where we humans can keep up with them. They have become almighty black boxes, spewing words that appear meaningful while we have no clear idea how the words are being created.

The YOB just wants to get his own beak wet and Bernie is worried about people getting hurt. The motivations matter.

Sam Altman's use of the same words may be more troublesome. He sometimes sounds like he understands the risks there.

Too bad there's no funny here. And the FP branch was disappointing, too. Didn't lead anywhere interesting before I lost interest in following it... Both par scores for Slashdot these years. Almost enough to make a nerd want to invite comments from a genAI: "What is the best joke for this story?"

Have you ever punctured a lipo cell? I have. Nothing happened. Then I put it in water. There were a few little bubbles. Over the next two years the pack gradually grew until it was about three times its prior size, and hard. At no time did it emit flames. (I kept it in a coffee can.)

I think NCM batteries in particular are fucking terrible and I don't want to downplay that there is a risk of thermal runaway for all lithium cells with liquid (etc) electrolyte, but overstating the case is not a help.

When was their enterprise product solid? When it was Xenix?

I agree we should generally be going EV (I can't, though) but it's convenient to have a gas station in your neighborhood because you might be headed away from wherever else it might be located.

For EVs filling up is more annoying (as it takes longer) so that raises the desire to do it closer to home. And indeed, people do tend to do it there. I don't have anywhere else convenient to do it, and it's not convenient at home, which is why I can't reasonably have one.

He wanted to sell them to business as well. But then Motorola started to choke while Intel and AMD were executing, and they had to port to PC. Then there was no justification for a big price tag.

The BeBox was really a marketing stunt more than anything else. It was built around a Motorola PPC dev board. (sidebad: The "Geekport" a breakout box connector on the original hardware, and was included only because there were other needed ports on the same board that port is on.) With its dual PowerPC 603e processors at either 66 or 133 MHz, it wasn't exactly slow, but it wasn't as fast as any but the slowest Alphastations. What roped people in was the case design. Otherwise it was obvious that you'd be better off running the OS on a PC soon, because they kept getting faster and cheaper and a good one was already faster than a BeBox.

I had a 66MHz BeBox and also ran BeOS on a Pentium Pro 180. The experience was comparable on both machines, with no real leader. All of the same demos that were so impressive on the BeBox were just as smooth on the PC. But no, the BeBox was not way ahead of the NeXT Cube; it was way after it, as in, five years after. That's a long time in computing now, but it was an even longer time (so to speak) back then. The PowerPC didn't exist when they built the cube; the best processor ever in a NeXT machine was a 68040 @ 25 MHz. (another sidebar: That was an extremely respectable processor for its time, but it also represented the last time Motorola would come up with a competitive chip without help from IBM. 68060 had competitive performance, but not competitive cost.)

It seems like a few NeXT machines were in fact sold into higher education. I knew one guy who had a turbo slab as a CS grad student. He really loved Objective C.

Absent his RDF, yes, he would have been. But he was an effective marketing tool. He was also intelligent enough to see that the Newton was overwrought as a portable device and demand something simpler. The market was moving in that direction anyway, and he charged out in front of it successfully.

Yes in fact they are, or at least, any persistent particulates are dangerous. That's what makes automobiles so bad, and why DPFs actually make diesels worse. We've discussed here on Slashdot before that gassers actually make just as much soot as diesels, it's just far finer so it's much harder to detect, which is why this fact went unknown for decades. The reason it's hard to detect is that the particulate sizes are very small. When they get very small (PM2.5 and below in particular) cilia have a hard time removing them from the lungs and they tend to persist. The soot particles are very stable since they are made out of carbon. All persistent irritants are potential carcinogens.

Some of the additives in tires are very carcinogenic.

It's both infeasible and impractical. Even the carbon black and silicates in tires can cause cancer for the reasons explained in the first paragraph. At best you can mitigate risk, you'll never make them non-carcinogenic. It would be better to also reduce the number of vehicles and also make tire compounds harder to reduce wear. This does reduce safe effective speed around corners and such, but most vehicles have a lot of excess in that department these days, and the ones that don't usually aren't going very fast. I like hard cornering, it's where the fun is in my opinion, but I do consider it to be more important to improve health.

This thread is supposed to be about wrongs that aren't necessary?

Or perhaps some sarren of the horde of sarrens intended "necessarily"?

Symptoms of something. Would that it would be funny something? Just on my way out the door, but an even less amusing visit than average. Am I diverging from Slashdot or is that just necessary? Necessity was the mother of a better website I hope to find somewhere?

(Irrelevant failed joke of the day, since I always feel the need to go a bit tangential and I already used the on Bluesky: Is it necessary to vote for Rumplicans or Dumbocrats? R where their noses are or D for belief in flying elephants? ROFLMAO. Not.)

Switching facilities are expensive, but you can design grids such that they are able to break into smaller grids, and that does get continually cheaper. Restarting and synchronizing grids can be difficult, but the more battery storage you've got, the easier that gets. So what we'll more likely wind up with is a grid with more compartmentalization, with a lot of people left in weird and unreliable sectors of the network with unreliable power because nobody will force the providers to actually provide them with power reliably.

There's a lot of space available because it doesn't need it all to itself. There's a lot of desert nobody is using, a lot of canals and reservoirs we could cover, a lot of nice safe flat commercial roofs, a lot of commercial glass, a lot of car parks. So since that's not a real problem, can we just legislate it and move on?

Because so many lies are being told about it, yes.

Show me your A*

The "on rails" complaint is indeed goofy any time the game is not open world, and all games don't need to be.

OTOH it used to be common for games to have both single and multi player, and that was good.

Seems like if you were sure of how that came out, you'd have gone and looked it up and had a stronger comment.

Supposedly it's as many as "breast, pancreatic, and prostate cancer combined." https://www.cancer.org/content...