Hence Google's investment in RISC V. It's not yet competitive, but with some time and money it can become competitive. Also, ARM can't raise the prices too much because x86 is still right there.

You don't get to be a three trillion dollar company by saying "We have plenty of money so we don't need to be efficient". You also don't stay a three trillion dollar company that way.

Please elaborate.

I came to a similar conclusion about a year ago. I have an app that, among other things, lists news headlines for local communities. Some news sources provide a short summary of the article as well, but many do not. If no summary is provided then I'm relegated to using the first sentence or so from an article.

I'd hoped to use AI to generate that summary when given the body of the article, but no matter how I prompted it would fabricate "facts" into the summary far too often for me to actually feel comfortable using it. 90% of the time it was great, but the utter failure the other 10% of the time made it unusable.

I think the way this is addressed now is just throwing more processing at it (and more energy expenditure) by having an additional arbiter AI role that checks the output to see if it is factual.

I *HATE* "shorts". And never watch any.
I also don't login with YouTube.

My life was made so much better when I discovered that UBlock Origin (Firefox, of course) can actually hide all the Shorts crap!

https://github.com/gijsdev/ubl...

Let's not forget the Cowbell++. It's like Rust and Java, except that it won't corrode your car, or spill your beans. It's a safe, secure language, backward and forward compatible with Rock, Hard Rock, 70's Rock, and even Rock'n'Roll.

When writing in Cowbell++, there's no possible problem that can't be solved by adding more. It's really the ideal of the fictional programming languages.

I'm willing to bet that some executive, somewhere, was able to meet and exceed his KPIs for IT cost, resulting in a bonus. The most important thing is that the executives get paid for continuing the status quo.

Whether said executive still works at the company or has moved on to another company misses the point: the circumstances which enabled the hack were created by the manner in which the company rewarded cost control, rather than security . Security is not quantifiable; no one was ever rewarded for the hacks that didn't happen. The only question remaining is if the board has enough sanity to hire a CEO who won't incentivize financial performance at the expense of security.

Not where I live. They do have a stop sign that flips out to the side.

I'm wondering what I said that made you think I thought otherwise.

Have you pointed this out to Waymo? They're pretty responsive from what I've heard, and this is exactly the kind of thing they'd want to know about and update their model to consider, before a kid gets hit. Not only do they not want to kill kids because Waymo employees are humans, but it would also be horrendous PR that would seriously damage the company.

You can submit feedback through the Waymo app, regardless of whether or not you've used the service. There's probably also a way to report concerns through their web site.

One note: You might be surprised how good the cars are at noticing hidden dangers. I got a ride about ten years ago (when I worked for Google) and I was annoyed when a light turned green but my car just sat there... until about two seconds later when a cyclist came whizzing across the road in front of the car. There was a tall hedge in the way and I don't know how the car "saw" him -- no human driver would, the dude was asking to get squashed -- but it clearly did, and waited. My guess is that although LIDAR and cameras couldn't see through the hedge, RADAR could. Waymo uses LIDAR, RADAR, visual and infrared cameras and ultrasonic sensors so it's quite a bit better at "seeing" than any human could be. None of those can see a kid behind a parked car, though, so maybe they do need to update the model to be more careful in those circumstances.

I'm pretty sure the purpose of the pole is so the kids walk far enough in front of the bus that the bus driver can see them. Buses are tall and kids are short, so if a kid walks right in front of the bus they'll be hidden from the driver by the dashboard. If a bunch of kids disembark and several of them turn left out of the door, the driver would have to keep a very careful count to make sure they've accounted for all of the ones who could have turned left again, right in front of the bus and might be walking close enough to the nose that they're in that front blind spot. The pole makes the kids walk far enough in front of the bus before they turn in front of it that the driver can definitely see them.

It probably does help in the way you describe, but if that were the primary purpose the pole would be on the driver side.

Only if during that hour those customers make the decision that they really didn't want what you were selling. If they buy it later today or tomorrow or next week, you didn't lose anything. If a container ship carrying your product across the ocean sank, that's a loss. The item you didn't sell during your e-commerce website outage is still in a warehouse waiting to be sold. When it sells, you'll collect the money that you didn't collect when your website was down.

And if the outage did allow them to realize that buying the item from you would have been a poor choice and a regrettable use of their money, that's probably a net benefit.

No money is lost just because a transaction doesn't take place. The seller still has whatever they were selling, the buyer still has the money they would have spent. If a delay allows the buyer to reassess and determine that their money is better spent on something else, then different sellers make sales they wouldn't have.

If billions were truly lost by some, most of those billions were gained by others. But I suspect that at the end of the week the net losses were negligible. The vast majority of money that would have been spent during the AWS outage probably was still spent. The vast majority of work that would have been done during the AWS outage probably still got done.

A few people were busier than usual, other people got a bit more time to slack off. But most of the people who slacked off, probably made up what they missed a bit later.

Are you claiming that people went hungry because of this AWS outage? I find that hard to believe. But even if some people did skip some unhealthy delivered meals, the money they would have spent is still in their pocket waiting to be spent on something else. You could just as well claim that billions were gained as a result of the AWS outage because people who couldn't order food delivered bought something later with the money they didn't spend on food delivery.

And I seriously doubt AWS or other companies spent any additional money fixing this outage that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. Some people had a busier day than expected, others had a less busy day waiting around and reading slashdot or other non-AWS-dependent entertainment of choice. But at the end of the week it is very unlikely that very many people accomplished less than they would have if the AWS outage hadn't happened.

Are you claiming that bakers couldn't bake without AWS? Or that people went hungry?

Even if a bakery did shut down due to an AWS outage, which I doubt, the people who would have bought the baked goods almost certainly bought something else. No money was lost, it was just spent somewhere else.

When things are destroyed value is lost. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy because the work that went into replacing a broken window could have gone into installing a window in a new location. Two windows is more than one, so replacing a broken window is a loss compared to installing a new window while still having the unbroken old window.

Shifting money from one place to another is not a loss.

If some companies lost billions due to a few hours of AWS outage, it's likely that other companies gained billions from customers who went elsewhere. But more likely, in most cases the customers just waited and spent the same money later.

Or, perhaps the customers just saved money. Maybe they would have spent money, but when the AWS outage prevented them from spending it they had a bit of time to think and realized that they didn't actually need to buy the thing they would have bought. Perhaps in some cases the AWS outage was a net benefit, preventing people from wasting money on something they didn't really want/need.

No kidding. Those guys are scary.