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Comment Re:Typical AI issue (Score 1) 138

Let's get real here.

Yes let's.

I live near a light rail line, and that's still a 15-minute walk,

I wouldn't say that's near. I can hustle to my second closest station in 15 minutes, the closet being 8. I live in an area of london with a PTAL (public transport accessibility level) rating of only 2 out of 1 to uh... 6b with 6b having b for best I guess... yeah strange scale. But basically it's rated low for public transport. And there's buses too.

Or I can spend fifteen minutes, ten of which are on the freeway, and drive myself.

So, not in SF, so this doesn't really apply to the discussion...

Rail only makes sense if traffic is so bad that cars are completely infeasible. Otherwise, they're the wrong tool for the job.

You haven't even specified what "the job" even is. And, you do realise a substantial fraction of Americans can't drive, right? And a substantial fraction more really shouldn't be. Unless you like your 85 year old gramps with incipient dementia and cataracts to be driving.

it depends on where I'm going.

Yeah that's the point. With a car, people don't just "set off", even though this is often the claim. Same as a public transport system, whether you just set off or check conditions depending on the journey. I just set off from my office when I want to catch the bus because there are shed loads of them. I set off from home to get the closest train into London because it's frequent enough that it doesn't really matter. I check the journey if I'm heading somewhere unfamiliar or something I know has less frequent service.

So yeah, having to make unexpected changes to your plans is more common than you think.

Well it's not: you've picked a technique that's optimised for a car. Would you insist on a non drinking designated train rider if you go by train to meet a bunch of friends for a drink? No, that's daft! This is why if you use a different mode of transport you do things differently.

Naturally this does depend somewhat. If you live somewhere largely car dependent, then doing anything not in a car will suck royal dick, and its an exercise in frustration. The mere existence of an infrequent, poorly connected train doesn't make it a good option. If you live somewhere largely car dependent, you'll probably have mostly isolated big box stores with poor delivery options.

But that doesn't mean trains suck or are the wrong tool for some unspecified job, it means your city is poorly zoned and with bad connectivity.

On the flip side, for long-distance trains, the interval is usually anywhere from several hours up to a whole day, so if you do have a planned stop for some other reason, it's going to be a long stop, and will usually require a hotel stay.

This is not that trains suck and are the "wrong tool", it's that your trains suck. I've been travelling London to Bristol quite a lot recently. Not sure if that qualifies as "long distance", but it's much better by train since it has a top speed of 125mph which shaves off quite a lot of time, an it can hit that even inside London, somewhat beating the traffic. It's 4 trains per hour (depending on how you count it). If I hated my life and wanted to stop randomly at the city of Dis, or Swindon as it's known locally, to wallow in despair I could do so without too much delay. Though I've heard it said that an hour in this realm is a year in Swindon, so YMMV.

Sadly, that's not most places with trains. Subways, maybe, but surface trains tend to be more like every 15 minutes or more.

15 minutes is within the realm of "won't bother checking" for me. It's a bit irritating missing by a minute, akin to getting stuck in a traffic jam, but the mean wait is ~7 minutes, which is way less than the variance in equivalent car journeys due to traffic. Even going by bike (the lowest time variance mode of travel), traffic lights and general conditions can add on about 7-8 minutes to the journey time (speaking about the same destination as the train). I also don't take the train for very short distances, because there's generally a better way.

The most frequent ones in London has a heavy rail train every 2.4 minutes on one line. As you get further in, trains get very frequent as they un branch.

Comment Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score 1) 134

which is absurd as this repeatedly made claim by C++ developers is total bullshit,

Show me on the doll where the C++ programmer touched you. Seriously what is your beef?

Unsafe rust is still a HELL of a lot more safe than C++. Among other things, RAII is still enforced, whereas with C++ not only is it optional, most C++ developers are very bad at sticking to it even when they try.

This isn't correct. Let's say you make an unsafe low level call to an OS primitive from Rust, such as open() (yeah I I know this is windows not unix, but same principle applies). You'll get back an int. Rust won't enforce RAII file descriptor semantics on that int. It's memory safe, not telepathic.

Because inheritance is an anti-pattern.

Well, that's just, like your opinion, man. Inheritance has its place.

And what exactly is "non-standard OO"? C++ allows multiple inheritance, whereas JavaScript, Java, C#, and others do not. Why don't they? Because it's an even worse anti-pattern that even those

Good grief. Java and C# both allow for multiple interfaces, which is very closely related. That's the majority of use for multiple inheritance in C++. It's more or less nonsense to talk about that in JS anyway since it's fully dynamic and duck typed. You can completely smoosh two objects together. You can fuck with the prototype chain (even at runtime).

shitty languages have the good sense to stay away from.

Oh huh it's not just C++ that you've got a massive chip on your shoulder about.

When you pick up C++, everything looks like an object oriented nail, that inherits needle, that sometimes inherits metal, that inherits atom, that inherits proton, neutron, and electron, and those in turn inherit quark, that inherits...Fuck.

Right... tell me you've not touched anything newer than 1996 without telling me you've not touched anything newer than 1996. A lot of people jumped on the hype train of OO and wrote code like that in C++ in the 90s. They were bad and had many segfaults and jumped ship to Java. I've not need a codebase like that in decades. I gather many of them have left Java now and people are slowly unpicking the mess there as well.

or why other systems language developers say that keeping C++ out also keeps out bad programmers.

I can only assume those system programmers have no idea how to set permissions on their repo to be anything other than global write access. As such I don't think their opinions are worth listening to...

Also seriously bro, they're advocating C, not C++. You know all the lack of safety of C++ but with absolutely no zero tools from the compiler to manage the resulting complexity.

Comment Green projects get approved due to politics too (Score 1) 104

... and then what these assholes claim. Obviously any strategical or tactical impact would have been evaluated when these were applied for. It is all just straight-up lying now. How repulsive.

Not at all. Political bias extend in both directions. One administration would advance a green project over any military concerns. another administration would be hostile to the project for its own political reason. Any legit military concern a pretext. Either way, a political decisions does not speak to whether the concern is legit or not. FWIW, another poster pointed out Sweden has done this too, for military radar interference reasons.

Comment Political decisions are not evidence of facts (Score 1) 104

That would all have been evaluated before construction was signed off on by the authorities. This is a straight-up lie, nothing else.

Not at all. Political bias extend in both directions. One administration would advance a green project over any military concerns. another administration would be hostile to the project for its own political reason. Any legit military concern a pretext. Either way, political decisions do not speak to whether the concern is legit or not.

FWIW, another poster pointed out Sweden has done this too, for military radar interference reasons.

Comment Trump support does not make some wrong or right (Score 1) 104

This is most likely more of Trump's bullshit, but are there any radar experts here who can comment on the validity of the claim that the turbines interfere with military radar?

Another poster pointed out Sweden has done this due to interference with early warning radar too.

Trump supporting some existing argument does not make it wrong or right. It just means the argument coincidentally benefits him, for now. Its refreshing to see someone wonder whether an idea has its own merits.

Comment Re:National security: Obscures radars-Sweden (Score 1) 104

Last year, Sweden blocked the construction of new wind farms over concerns they could interfere with military radar, amid heightened tensions between the European Union and Russia. But experts have noted the design of wind farms can be adjusted to account for the issue, and it’s something US government officials have been aware of for decades.

And if the civilian project is not interested in redesigning things to adjust for military concerns, what might the government do next?

Comment Regardless of the politics, its still a legit prob (Score 1) 104

Yeah maybe, but this has nothing to do with stopping these projects.

You mean other than "national security concerns", which a coastal blind spot would be. ;-)

This was an issue being raised before Trump. One administration dismisses the problem for political reasons, another administration embraces the problem for political reasons. Regardless of the politics, it's still a legit problem.

Comment Re:Typical AI issue (Score 2) 138

Let me know when it will drop me off at my house.

You see those two meat sticks sort of fused to your torso around where your ballsack is? Turns out if you wiggle your meat just right you can kind of perambulate around and move the rest of your meat to other places, such as where the rails are.

Weird, I know. But amazingly, milions of people every day manage to wiggle their meat just right to move the rest of their meat to places other than their garage.

Or be available at a moment's notice.

Do you really just set off in your car with no thought about traffic conditions? Either you live in absolutely bumfuck nowhere in which case why are you discussing it in the context of city life, or you just have a weird fetish for sitting in traffic jams.

Or can make random stops on my trip and still be there when I'm done.

Do you really just stop completely at random? Or do you in fact plan where you're driving and then stop at useful places along the way? Because if the former, well, you do you, boo. If the latter, fun fact: you can get off a train or tram too at stops which are almost always located in useful places.

It may also surprise you that trains are not single use, disposable machines like vapes. Once the train is gone, it's not gone forever. In places with a functional transport system, they're frequent enough that it's often not worth checking the timetable.

Comment Re:Complexity (Score 1) 79

Java also has double and Double though (and outside of char and Character all of the other classes have the same name as the primitive with the exception of the capital letter), so I don't think that's it, or at least not entirely. For the most part (there are some exceptions) it doesn't matter since the compiler will implicitly handle conversions between the two. Syntax highlighting or other IDE features are likely more helpful at distinguishing between the two anyway.

I haven’t dug in to Rust enough or all that recently to know if there's a deeper reasoning behind the difference. Unless you can see the declaration it's the same problem as Java where you're probably relying on the IDE to inform you what type you're dealing with if you happened to forget.

Comment Re: Steaming Piles of Bullshit (Score 1) 65

I was similarly underwhelmed by the first. It was technically impressive, particularly considering it came out nearly 15 years ago and most computer graphics are lucky to hold up for a decade. However, narratively it was bland and from what I've heard the sequels are worse. It seems like Cameron has aimed the films at a younger audience, which of course is going to limit how complex they can be, but there are plenty of Pixar films that do a better job with their storytelling even though they're animated films designed for a family audience.

The film has already made $130 million globally for the first night release according to Box Office Mojo. It will probably do just fine. Everyone else in Hollywood would kill to be in Cameron's shoes right now. His film will likely end up subsidizing a lot of other crap that lost the studio money this year.

Comment Re:At first (Score 1) 127

Something changed late last year. It may just be that the shine is wearing off, but I find most of the AI products producing less quality results than they did previously.

Empirically, speaking around to a few people yeah something now somehow feels not quite as good as it used to be. I think the yes-man problem has got worse. If you're trying to find the API/argument/etc to do X it will always tell you what a great idea it is and give you the code, even if there is no way to do it. I think it's got more sycophantic and that makes it harder to break out of the doom loop to say that "tool X has no flag to do X" or whatever.

On the other hand my boss vibe coded an impressive demo last weekend. Basically a functional mockup (it was never destined to be production code). It's interesting though because he isn't non techincal, and does have some experience of web dev, enough to ask the right questions of the AI, I suppose. He was all "yeah I told it to use [list of frameworks I'd never heard of]". It does seem good at writing react components.

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