> Any programming language needs the equivalent of Rust's "unsafe"

Not really, no.

> Without it would be impossible to do any input or output.

Have you ever used any programming languages other than C, C++, etc? The important thing is that the language itself implements an interface between the OS and programs written in that language. In addition to that, most usually have an ABI that can be used to glue assembler libraries to the language - this is not the equivalent of "unsafe", because it's not part of the language, and a person downloading an application can see right away that it includes external libraries that interface with it.

Unsafe is in Rust because... well, Rust is designed to try to make memory safety attractive to devs who traditionally don't like being told what to do or that their favorite language sucks. Which is why, for example, advocates go to great lengths to claim Rust doesn't have garbage collection when, actually, it does, it's just not mark and sweep. Rust is as much about public relations and trying to get people to stop assuming they have to sacrifice safety for efficiency and low level access as it is about producing a useful programming languages.

And, unfortunately, part of that PR is to say "Look, we even have an "unsafe" keyword so you can get rid of (some of) our restrictions on you for those rare times you actually need it", and the group Rust is aimed at, of course, go "Oh, I can do this with a 2% speed up if I use unsafe, so I'm going to do the unsafe version, that's what makes Rust great" *insert Naked Gun facepalming scene here*.

I like Rust. But let's not pretend "unsafe" is a positive thing, or that most languages need it. Rust needs it because of its intended audience, but plenty of languages don't let the code itself be unsafe. Some have an unsafe keyword, some allow linking with unsafe assembler packages, and some... honest... don't have either, and your code is only unsafe if your compiler/interpreter is.

> Broadcast networks have to give the different major parties equal time.

The rule that this applies to late night talk shows is literally months old and has no basis in any new legislation. It was introduced by the FCC on a whim basically because they didn't want Colbert to interview the same person as Kimmel.

Under exceptions the same Wikipedia article, correctly, points out the current administration changed these rules to apply to... late night talk shows:

If the airing was within a documentary, bona fide news interview, scheduled newscast, or an on-the-spot news event, the equal-time rule does not apply. Late-night and daytime talk show interviews were long considered to be bona fide news segments until the FCC issued new guidance in 2026 signaling that these types of shows would no longer be automatically granted the bona fide news exemption.[3][4]

This is a new interpretation of the equal time rule designed to make it difficult for late night shows to interview politicians, and if it wasn't for SCOTUS being nakedly partisan these days, it wouldn't muster a single court's scrutiny.

There is no equal time rule that applies to late night talk shows. This came up with the Colbert thing last year when Paramount similarly caved into FCC threats about it. This is a rule the FCC have arbitrarily decided to re-interpret despite decades of precedent.

You're still a moron. Fascism is not "Anything the government does that's bad", it's a system of corruption and abuse of power.

You may not agree with the vaccine mandate (because you're probably a moron as we've just established) but a vaccine mandate is not an abuse of power, literally the only incentive to do it is for the public good. It's not being done to enrich those in power, it's not being done to damage opponents, or to scapegoat powerless groups. It's not even being done to cement the power of those in power outside of persuading voters that they're competent. It's being done to prevent the spread of a disease.

That's text book "not fascism at all". The only thing it has in common with fascism is that "(whines) the government did something! It did something I tell you!" which is a pretty fucking stupid definition of fascism, and is the same definition a lot of Americans think applies to socialism, which... I mean, you fuckers have never heard of trade unions, the cooperative movement, independent private voluntary communes, or Robert Owen? Really?

If the government does something, and it's for the public good, rather than to cause unnecessary harm to the powerless or opponents or to steal from people, it's not fascism.

Insignia sells dumb TV, at least when I had to get a TV for my 80 year old in-laws a couple of years ago. (The whole "You must have a smart TV" thing is so stupid even when privacy issues and nerds aren't taken into account. It's like mandatory smartphones, or mandatory car driving.)

I can't say I was impressed by the quality however.

You think this is limited to $199 TVs? The full report (yeah, I watched it) focused mainly on TVs over $1,000.

Not that a TV being $199 is an excuse for spying on people. That's bootlicking bullshit, and you should be ashamed for even hinting that it's fine because of the price of the TV.

A year or two ago I noted that LLM answers to general queries seemed to be wrong 1/3 of the time, right 1/3 of the time so far as I could tell, and 1/3 of the time were completely irrelevant. I have noticed that this ratio appears to have held steady or is in fact getting worse, at least using the major public LLMs. At best, some slopcoders feel that for their applications it may be improving. But in terms of general knowledge even of, say, high school math (and I don't mean asking it to do the equations, just telling me how to do the calculation), they're embarrassingly bad.

I do not see where this "progressing rapidly" stuff is happening. They seem to be churning out the same slop they've always done.

Serious question, but I don't expect you to answer this in a forum like this: do you think it's possible you have a rosy eyed view of LLM tech because it tells you what you want to hear, not just in terms of viewpoints etc, but it keeps reassuring you how right you are, how your ideas are valid, it doesn't question your reason for wanting to do anything, it just supports you, not as a coworker, but as a minion desperate for your approval? And maybe you've never had that from coworkers before, because quite honestly, people in coding especially can be jerks sometimes, and will argue with you about why you're doing whatever you're doing. Perhaps it's possible that after decades of bullying and abuse, because that's what that behavior is even if it's normalized - you're just glad to have someone who does things without being argumentative about it?

There's more to it than just "they're better", there's also massive disparities in labour costs, etc, because of the high cost of living in the US.

If BYD wants to sell cars in the US, why not tell them they can but they need to build them in the US, just as Honda, Toyota, and Nissan do?

Supposedly Google's policies are to follow whatever names the locale the user is in uses. In some cases, this is legitimate, as there are several disputed territories around the world and Google isn't a position to pick and choose. On the other, clearly ridiculous situations such as where a President writes an EO, which merely orders his government to do something, and doesn't impact the rest of the country, are an absurd extreme of this.

But, if that's what they want, I'd totally understand if the Canadian government declares all Trump properties in the US having the name "Pedophile Palace", so someone who tries to find Mar-a-lago on Google Maps in Canada is instead presented with that name.

Maybe cheap and petty is the way to deal with cheap and petty.

IIRC it isn't enabled by default, and is considered a dev feature.

The summary and article are, more or less, bullshit.

Basically they're making it sound like these cars are catching fire because ICE cars have some special fault that makes them vulnerable in a way BEs don't. But... turns out all the examples are of the electrical systems of those cars catching fire. Not the engines. The very first example is about the front seat catching fire because the power seat switch on it is poorly designed.

These are all faults that could just as easily be in a BE vehicle. If Kia had a BE version of the Telluride it would have the exact same fault.

This isn't some ICE vs BE thing despite the breathless attempt to suggest it is.

(I say the above reluctantly because I really want BE vehicles to take off, ICE cars just seem more and more ludicrous as time progresses given the massive improvements in battery technologies. But this article isn't the reason to start going "Aha! ICE cars are just as bad!" on that one criticism of BE vehicles that's legitimate.)

Cool story bro.

This article is about Debian allowing the use of genAI for code incorporated into the Debian repos despite the international legal uncertainty, the environmental impacts, and the lack of quality that's largely being ignored solely because software in general has seen a collapse in quality since the early 2010s.

It isn't about your slopware habits.

I'm curious to know whether the people in charge of Debian have a back-up plan if Debian turns out to violate copyright in countries across the world or whether their solution will be to just shrug and say "Well countries that don't allow AI generated slop without compensation to the original copyright holders will just have to do without "open source" - which today is adulterated by shitty unreadable code from slopgobblers."

AI can destroy jobs by destroying the businesses that have inexplicitly decided to rely on it.

Of course, Gates is far too part of the tech establishment in this country to actually say that.

TBH while Trump is pretty much telegraphing that he'll do just that, this story is unlikely to have anything to do with it. We happen to be in an era in which nation states have learned how easy it is to hide secret remote controls in all kinds of apparently innocuous hardware.

It's just difficult with Trump who swings wildly between ludicrous justifications of import bans, and occasionally doing what his administration's smarter advisors are actually telling him needs to be done. One of the reasons this presidency sucks. That and all the fascism.