Free Software benefits from bug reports - eventually the software gets better.

Only the legitimate and quality ones.

The author of curl has been receiving a variety of reports that were generated by AI, none of which are legitimate. The latest one seems to involve a function that doesn't exist within curl, meaning he spent time tracking down a bug that didn't exist.

As for the Free and/or Open Source Software paradigm - it requires both "many eyes" and "many hands". Being able to spot problems doesn't mean a thing if there's nobody able to fix these problems.

Perhaps these requirements to drop DEI were not so much about DEI

X11Libre, a DEI-free fork of X11, needed to explain its DEI-free commitment: https://github.com/X11Libre/mi...

And in doing so, the developer used the wrong "power-of-two" operator: https://github.com/X11Libre/xs...

This fork was specifically created because the developer was thrown out of the parent project for pushing code that broke things too much, requiring a mass rollback.

It's only technically correct that a dropping DEI isn't related to DEI. Rather, it's an overt requirement to dislike people based off skin colour. This is consistent with the US's demands on French companies, and their policies that attempt to deport immigrants that don't look like americans.

but about savings and getting the job done.

Python is open source software. Anti-DEI policies run anti-ethical to it, simply because they take contributions from all over the world. Putting in policies that prohibit most of the world from contributing is much more costly, especially since labour is provided by unpaid volunteers - all of whom can decide to split off and create a new fully-compatible software package, "Vyper".

And, considering that "DEI" is the current code word for dark skinned people, I find this unlikely. If the government actually wanted savings and getting the job done, they can make provide efficiency benchmarks in the funding guidelines.

AI has problems for sure. Not a month goes by without news of yet another idiot lawyer getting sanctioned because of the hallucinations were presented as fact. However......have you tried coding with AI? I have. I'm 5x more productive than before, and I can solve problems now that I wouldn't have touched before. I still test my code. I still review it. But man, this thing is a game changer. I can see why people are paying big money for it. It absolutely is delivering.

To give you a recent example - I know nothing about terraform, but I had to implement a proof of concept in AWS and was mandated to use terraform. Previously, I would have spent some time understanding terraform concepts and then worked out some basic examples before attempting the task at hand. None of that was needed. I was coding from day 1. Yes, the AI can go wrong, but I find its never a syntactical error. When errors do occur, its usually a misunderstanding of the requirement I gave it, and because I know what I had in mind, I can always rephrase to get the right results. I have not so far encountered a situation in the coding realm where hallucinations caused me problems.

The other day, I asking the AI to do some task it noticed that I was using java 17 and offered me the upgrade to 21. I thought it was a trivial upgrade, but the implementation, when I said "yes", was breathtaking. It asked for me to sign into git, then created a branch, generated test cases for my code, after applying its changes, it ran the test cases, committed its changes, asked me for approval to merge to main and then did it.

Magnificient!

Yes, lesser number of programmers will be needed. What makes me most happy though is that this levels the playing field. No longer do I have to deal with those difficult prima donnas who are only tolerated because they are good developers, even though they mess with the team and make everyone elses life miserable. I can't wait for those people to get fired because there is no more excuse for them to be kept on.

Since they're claiming it's a Weather Balloon, it was really hit by Swamp Gas.

Source is the UFO identification chart..

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

More like a coder for a previous version of the Apple calculator app:

https://thedailywtf.com/articl...

Note how it drops button presses, meaning 1+2+3+4+5+6 = 75.

You shoehorn a claim with 21K vaccine deaths per month...

Come on, that's a 99.8% survival rate since those vaccines started. Vaccine denialists say that number is perfectly fine, being happy enough to plop the same number on the side of a protest sheep.

Let me know when this death rate approaches the older claims where everyone would die within 2 years of taking the vaccine.

...that there's a LOT of minerals and other nutrients in food, only a fraction of which are produced from chemicals in fertilisers, O2, and CO2. If you produce too much with too little consideration of the impact on the soil, you can produce marvellous dust bowls but eventually that's ALL you will produce.

There's a lot of stuff that is on the Internet that doesn't end up in AIs, either because the guys designing the training sets don't consider it a particular priority or because it's paywalled to death.

So the imbalance isn't just in languages and broader cultures, it's also in knowledge domains.

However, AI developers are very unlikely to see any of this as a problem, for one very very important reason --- it means they can sell the extremely expensive licenses to those who actually need that information, who can then train their own custom AIs on it. Why fix a problem where the fix means your major customers pay you $20 a month rather than $200 or $2000? They're really not going to sell ten times, certainly not a hundred times, as many $20 doing so, so there's no way they can skim off the corps if they program their AIs properly.

Let's take a look at software sizes, for a moment.

UNIX started at around 8k, and the entire Linux kernel could happily sit in the lower 1 megabyte of RAM for a long time, even with capabilities that terrified Microsoft and Apple.

The original game of Elite occuped maybe three quarters of a 100k floppy disk and used swapping and extensive use of data files to create a massive universe that could be loaded into 8k of RAM.

On a 80386SX with 5 megabytes of RAM (Viglens were weird but fun) and a 20 megabyte hard drive, running Linux, I could simultaneously run 7 MMORGs, X11R4, a mail server, a list server, an FTP server, a software router, a web server, a web cache, a web search engine, a web browser, and stil have memory left over to play Netrek, without slowing anything down.

These days, that wouldn't be enough to load the FTP server, let alone anything else.

On the one hand, not everything can be coded to SEL4 standards (although SEL4, by using Haskell as an initial language to develop the core and the proofs, was able to cut the cost of formal programming to around 1% of the normal value). On the other hand, a LOT of space is gratuitously wasted.

Yes, multiple levels of abstraction are a part of the problem. Nothing wrong with abstraction, OpenLook is great, but modern abstraction is mostly there due to incompetent architecture on previous levels and truly dreadful APIs. And, yes, APIs are truly truly dreadful if OpenLook is the paragon of beauty by comparison.

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

And if you got it, you had to include the sector number in the file name.

Only if you're using a custom loader (e.g. commercial game). Commodore 64 Basic abstracts this with the LOAD and SAVE commands, and the 1541 also takes care of placing files onto any available sector. It's not like most developers needed to memorize the file system just to write a file.

It didn't have any security features AT ALL,

It's basic security feature is restoring itself to factory settings whenever the machine was turned off. This didn't stop viruses, but it greatly reduced the spread, and makes it slightly easier to try detecting if there is a virus on the system. Because there wasn't an obvious soft reset, it was safe.

This is compared to Amiga, where resetting the system didn't always clear memory, or PC, where a virus could sneak itself into a boot sector of a hard drive, and where both systems were designed to allow multiple programs to run at once (as opposed to the C64, where hiding a program in memory might not be practical.)

no logins, no memory protection

This is less important for a single-user and single-tasking operating system.

Logins would be substituted by bringing around disks with you, and memory protection is more of a shoot-self-in-foot approach. Even with memory protection, it doesn't stop assembly code from soft-locking the system, because the executable had a bad assembly code in it.

Same with finding the best prices.

This isn't too hard, simply by tracking known websites (i.e. any major retalior, etc.)

I don't know about security

AI falls for fake websites. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Pretty sure AI browsers would check email, see an important account issue from a scam email, and happily log into the scam website to resolve said issue.

I bought a Prius PHEV even though I'm firmly convinced that the PHEV is the worst of both worlds. You don't get the freedom from maintenance hassle that the BEVs give you, and the battery is small enough that it cannot fill all use cases _and do what you paid the premium $$ for_. If you want compromises, the hybrid will be a cheaper car.

Why did I buy this car? Because for reasons that I couldn't fathom, the BEVs that were in my price range were simply not available on the dealer lots at the time I needed a new car.

That being said, the car is working out great so far. Its been three weeks since we drove it off the dealer lot and thanks to our normal driving patterns (to the office / grocery store and back), we have not consumed more than half a gallon. There is a real danger that the gas in the almost full tank we have will degrade to the point its unusable before we end up using it.

We'll be fine, then. There's lots more gold than Sarah Conner clones.