I simply can't imagine why it wouldn't be orders of magnitude cheaper and faster to just use short segments that don't need to be aligned so precisely.

So having 100 times the number of segments but now all with poorly aligned joints would be better?

I used to think that maybe I, a simple country ignoramus, just wasn't equipped to understand the Wonders of the Modern Age. ...

Rebecca Watson is a quite famous skeptic, and a former co-host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Since Dawkins is also in these circles, not too crazy to bring her up.

The class of bugs for PipeFail can be prevented in principle with X^W, which is implemented in PaX, Exec Shield, and some SELinux configs.

Is any distribution that comes with these in the default installation protected against these exploits? If not, what is missing in terms of mitigation protections against this class of bugs?

Either you get faster and faster at it, or 2026 is the year we work on pen and paper until the storm is over...

... for the low low price of a quarter peta-buck.

There IS a place for AI as a coding assistant. If used right by someone who COULD write good code from scratch AND who is well-versed in using his AI tools, it could actually save time.

In very limited problem domains, non-AI program-generators and LLM-"AI" program-generators can actually produce usable, correct, reasonably efficient code almost all of the time. But so could a reasonably competent programmer who was an expert in the problem domain.

In any case, using AI is likely to use a lot of electricity.

Old way for a small task an entry-level person could do in 2 weeks solo: a week to design, a few days to code, a few days to unit test

New way - "official/what you tell your boss": a few hours to design/decide what you want the output to look like and rough-draft your prompts a hours to "code"/prompt the AI, including iterations, and a few hours to test the results.

New way - "reality/what you actually do": design? what's that? a few hours to iteratively create prompts until you get output that "feels good," and testing the results - yeah, right, who has time for that?

Sigh.

We need to distract the public from the Soviet bomb sniffing balloons we're flying... er, embarassing sex files we're hiding! What should we do?

UFO stories?

How did you manage to spell UAP wrong when writing it out correctly immediately after?

What letter in UFO do you think stands for "aliens?"

Yeah, but you also send some of it. That's negative data (the opposite of receiving) so it cancels out.

P2P to distribute updates, which can dramatically reduce the amount of data sent over the wire.

Google's wire, sure. Your wire, no.

You are (nominally) a democracy. The voters are responsible. That's what it means.

Voting is important. Maybe stop treating it like a football game. You bet, a first good step would be getting rid of the paid sponsorships in the stadium.

Damn, that's half of all the sick leave taken in just a quarter of the week!

They pile rocks on top.

Hey, can you imagine how much better the plumbing in your house would be if the pipes were a bunch of 1 inch sections connected by joints?

I don't know why you'd think the short sections would have to be aligned less precisely. A 1 mm error multiplied by a a couple thousand joints between 10 m sections has a good chance of being a lot bigger than a 1 mm error multiplied by 80 joints.

I used to think that maybe I, a simple country ignoramus, just wasn't equipped to understand the Wonders of the Modern Age.

Nonsense. The key is to keep that humility and read a book or use the informative parts of the Internet.