Not quite what I meant, but your point is valid. I was more meaning that discussing repairability without also considering reliability isn't as informative as it could be.

Surely how often repairs are needed should be taken into account? Anecdata time: 26 years without a fault in any of my laptops (they're Apples, but I hear Lenovo and other brands can be quite reliable as well) or either of the desktops. No iPhone (since 3G) or iPad that I've owned has ever gone wrong either.

Previous Dells and other cheaper brands that I owned last century weren't so reliable for me and I would have cared about repairability.

No, "law-abiding". Don't use a pejorative term for what should be regarded as the norm. All administrations should strive to be law-abiding. Not saying that they will always achieve it, but it should be the default.

You've got into the habit of not making any effort to obey any rules, whether your own or international (Guantanamo for example). If you regard following such rules as "legalistic" (ie excessive), then you really are doomed.

And at the same time ensure that everyone becomes more dependent on data centres, the cloud etc. So we don't own our own data, and so they can strip-mine it on the way into the cloud to "teach" their beloved word sausage machines.

Except for governments, rulers, elites etc, I presume. That is, perfect targets for this sort of malware.

Indeed. I've been using `uv` for a year and don't really want to lose it, but this is surely game over.

Also, why didn't OpenAI just get someone to vibe equivalent tools into existence for them? I sure ain't buying their dog food.

Not wrong. Naive. You can be right all day and not get the outcome you imagine being right will get you.

I started lurking in 4K enthusiast groups to see if they were all cracked up to be. The arguments about relative quality of various BD/4K releases isn't even the most interesting part.

It turns out that there are a lot of issues with set top boxes playing particular disks. The disks themselves also seem terribly fussy.

And when you succeed, you will find the illegal immigrants were not the cause of society's problems.

Recent result from Penrose showed that a gravitational gradient also collapsed wave functions. So it's not just you. The universe is doing it too.

Moderated troll? So we're back to the dark days of Slashdot where criticism of Trumpster Fire was verboten? Cool, cool, cool.

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

And the toddler in chief just spat out his dummy, stamped his feet and screamed and screamed and screamed, putting a 10% tariff on all the nasty people in the rest of the world.

... AI stories.

We all know the emperor has no clothes. We know the "stories" are PR pieces from AI boosters. We know that autocorrect can't replace anybody whose job doesn't involve following an exact script or redoing work that already exist.

Just stop it. Stop promulgating the nonsense. There is no "I" in AI and there is no creativity in the autocorrect that they're pushing on us.

In the meantime we're paying higher electricity costs and having to hold off purchases of equipment or pay extortionate prices for RAM and disks.

All so some billionaires can add a few zeros.

I'm retired, no job to be replaced by the stochastic musings of an over-sold Excel spreadsheet. Just sick of the lies and marketing nonsense. Sick of the slop in the music and writing spheres. Sick of the "I made a C compiler from scratch" lies.

And yes, you can get off my lawn.

I've been using AI to write code recently. I figured I should give it a go.
Not reviewing and understanding and editing the output code is a recipe for disaster.

For example, in code for a cryptographic hash function there are padding rules to bring the data size to a multiple of the block size and add a length. So for example with SHA3, a minimum of 65 extra bits. If your data length mod the block size is 65 bits less than the block size, then add the pad bit, put the length at the end of the block and fill in between with zeroes.

If you are longer than that, then it all spills over into the next block and you add a block.

If your length exactly ends up fitting in the block size, then you add a whole extra block with just the padding bit and length and a bunch of zeroes.

The hash that claude spit out missed that last case, so creating a hard to find bug, where in one out of 512 bit sizes, the hash fails. If I had not spotted that by reviewing the code in detail, there would have been a catastrophic bug creating a security vulnerability and system failures in chips.

So read the code and fix it or be doomed.