Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:What congress already does (Score 1) 30

... if President Trump would sign ...

Of course the king of fraud won't sign but that's not the problem. Who has the power to seize e-mails and trace the payment of moneys? Without that, it's a "been a very naughty boy" posture: If you don't get caught red-handed, it's easy money. In other words, what US congress already does.

A better solution is to do the same thing that should be done with stock trading: Require government officials (and their family members) who might have access to insider information to publish their trades in advance. The advance notice wouldn't even have to be large if the information was published electronically in a feed that could easily be monitored by other investors and the press. A couple of business days, maybe less. This should apply to all securities, real-estate purchases, predictions, etc., anything people speculate on. Not only would this highlight possible insider trading, it would erase most of the potential benefit of trading on inside information. It wouldn't harm government officials' legitimate investment opportunities.

It would still be possible for officials to pass tips to friends who are outside the group required to disclose their trades in advance, of course. It's ultimately very hard to stop that sort of thing, assuming the friends stay loyal, but that's a risky bet. Especially since the sort of friend who would engage in such illicit trading is probably the sort who might end up in some other sort of trouble with the law, and might find it convenient to flip on their buddy.

Comment Re:Fuck "Eat the Rich" (Score 1) 102

And here's why that study was meaningless - "We are not going to consider the impact of the principle being decided. Rather, we just want to know who got the money in the case in question." That is, they ignore the single most important factor and focus only on the least relevant - the private fiscal implications of the ruling.

There may be something of interest in the findings, but in regards to the nature of cases being heard, not the relative finances of the claimants.

If it's the principle that's driving the decisions, not the affluence of the beneficiaries, across a sufficiently-large set of cases we'd expect to find no correlation between the political leanings of the justices and their votes benefiting wealthy vs poor people. Which is what the article said happened for many decades.

Unless, of course, the principle being applied is "Who benefits?"

It's worth pointing out that although gtall framed it as the Republicans siding with the wealthy, it's equally true that the Democrats are siding with the poor. Both sides are inordinately focused on who benefits.

Comment Re:I mean (Score 1) 152

I don't doubt that HP-UX was capable but it's exactly the situation that the guy in the article is describing -- it was 100% an enterprise product sold to banks and similar customers with zero effort made to make it sexy or accessible to even broader commercial customers.

I used HP/UX as a development platform in the mid-90s, cross-compiling to m68k boards running pSOS and VxWorks. It was a little weird, but rock solid, utterly reliable, as were the HP workstations it ran on.

Comment Re:More complicated (Score 2) 149

The 'killer app' will be a smaller lighter (and safest) solid state battery with a range over 500 miles Thats when adoption will take off to get the people that are hesitant to switch

Nah.

All that's required is that EVs be cheap. A 300-mile range is sufficient. When the purchase price of a car with a 300-mile range is at or only slightly above the purchase price of a comparable ICEV, EVs sales will explode because they're cheaper to operate and maintain. All of the range anxiety and concerns about fires (which are silly, since gasoline vehicles are a lot more prone to burning) will inhibit a few people, for a little while, but pretty soon they'll all have friends and relatives who are driving EVs and happy about it, and they'll start making the switch, too.

It's all about the benjamins.

Programming

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero (stackexchange.com) 124

Stack Overflow's monthly question volume has collapsed to about 300 -- levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform's activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. By May 2025, monthly questions had fallen to early-2009 levels, and the latest data through early 2026 shows the collapse has only continued -- the line now sits near the bottom of the chart, barely registering.

The decline predates LLMs. Questions began dropping around 2014 when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively. In mid-2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. The founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, exited before the terminal decline became apparent. ChatGPT accelerated what was already underway. The chatbot answers programming questions faster, draws on Stack Overflow's own corpus for training data, and doesn't close questions for being duplicates.

Comment Re:Makes sense to me... (Score 2) 205

The LLM's that ChatGPT and Perplexity use were trained on data that's at least a few weeks old before a new model is released to the public.

It's not really meant to tell you about today's headlines.

Sure, but Claude, at least, knows that its knowledge cutoff date is January 2025. It's sometimes lazy and will tell you that current events precede its knowledge, but if you tell it to do a search, it will, and then it will accurately describe what it found. Other times it just automatically searches when it realizes you're asking about something that is too recent to be included in its training data.

It seems strange that other LLMs that have the ability to search the web don't do the same.

Comment Re:Is it worth it (Score 1) 232

We went from massive worm problem to almost no worm problem overnight when connections were put behind a NAT.

And you could have achieved exactly the same thing at lower compute cost with a stateful firewall. NAT didn't save you from worms, the stateful firewall that NAT requires in order to work did. But you can have the firewall without the NAT, and the result is simpler, more efficient, easier to manage and more flexible.

Comment Re:Not everything is name based (Score 1) 232

We are so used to the constraints put on us by IPv4 that we don't even consider what opportunities open up when every single device on the planet has its own globally routed IP address.

Yes, all those opportunities for insecure IoT devices to be compromised.

So have your router run a firewall that denies inbound connections be default, the same way NAT does. This is a side effect of NAT, but can be done better and more easily by a simple firewall.

Comment Re: People gave up on the Internet... (Score 1) 232

I don't want people all over the world connecting to my bedroom. If I wanna host a website I pay an extra $8/mo for VPS

Then don't run a web server in your bedroom. And maybe have a firewall that blocks inbound connections by default (which is a side effect of NAT, but absolutely does not require NAT).

But many of us would like to run servers from home.

Slashdot Top Deals

Pascal is not a high-level language. -- Steven Feiner

Working...