Before Rust can save Linux from AI, wouldn't someone need to save Rust from AI first? The Open Slopware page claims that LLVM's LLM policy requiring a human in the loop is overly permissive.

Agreed. Deliberate adding of surface roughness (and even multiple surfaces) have been used in racing yachts for many decades. I think they started doing this in the 90s.

For space systems, there are a few choices.

For ground based gateways, there are a lot more choices.

For domestic flights, most in-flight WiFi is ground based (think a really sophisticated form of cellular technology). This is because you only need a few ground stations in various locations in the US for coverage. It's also much cheaper than space-based systems, which is why most domestic flights have made in-flight WiFi basically free.

It's also why international flights the in-flight WiFi is often horrendously expensive.

The real innovation here is that Starlink is relatively cheap enough that you can offer in-flight WiFi on domestic flights for basically free as well and be competitive with the ground based systems.

Trying to get the real table to update the ball at 20fps is proving insanely difficult.

Maybe on a 20Mhz 386, but by the time Windows XP was being tested, it would do over million FPS so the XP version was hard-limited to 120FPS, dropping the CPU to under 1%.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com...

Oh, they know; it's more that you can't really put "fuck palantir!" in an encyclical; but you absolutely can choose which perfectly plausible catholic author to quote in your piece on how weaponized AI is bad; and going with Tolkien over the other options seems deliberate.

Age-verification at OS levels was always a terrible idea. It's difficult to see under what rationale Linux should be granted an exception for this dumb idea. The solution is just to repeal the law and flog the sponsors.

Well, the problem is age verification to begin with. But since we have some states wanting age verification, it's a privacy nightmare. OS based age verification seems to solve the largest problem of all - needing to submit to a third party your ID information to confirm your age. Because they've all been hacked and that ID leaked But if you can embed that in the OS - and Apple and Microsoft know information about you to get a good estimate (e.g., if you have a credit card), then it can be used to attest your age instead of having to submit to the third party.

That's why they don't mind doing the Linux exception - because if the OS doesn't want to do it, then those users can rely on the third party services. Those third party services will exist anyways to handle the many OSes that won't work.

If you think the CloudFlare interrogation is bad now when you use a VPN...

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

When "AI-enthused defense contractors with names out of Tolkien" are literally a genre I suspect that he chose that particular citation because he knew it would lead to a few amusing crashouts.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

When you're on the ride of a sigmoid curve, you never know where you are. How many times has Moore's Law died now?

Isn't much of the point here the cultural shove? Sure, there's the line-go-up stuff; but that doesn't explain the companies gutting quite profitable software development operations to shovel money at Nvidia for things that have no demonstrated ROI; if it were nothing personal, just business, the level of enthusiasm for taking on poorly characterized risk would not be as fervent as it is. It's absolutely about resentment of the human resources that has been running at least as long as the demonstration that it would actually take some shoving to get them all to come back to the office, likely significantly longer.

It's the significantly less common case, for some combination of a lot of high-visibility stupidity being lethal and lethal accidents being public in ways that the details of nonlethal accidents aren't; but destruction of gonads under sufficiently foolish circumstances qualifies a living recipient.

They already pretty much are. You have to do at least a little performative fretting about the risks, which spoils the enjoyment of pure cheering at the best crunching sounds; but there's no way we'd justify the level of recreational head trauma something like football produces if we didn't fundamentally regard the players as relevant only the the way racehorses are.

Probably it will be a posthumous Darwin award.

I don't think there have been any Darwin awards that were not awarded posthumously. The award requires you to have removed yourself from the gene pool in order to be considered for the award.