I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

Right. Which makes Kisai's dismissal of the problem a waste of breath.

Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

I've had no success getting Agents to help write code for SQLite. All the code I've asked Claude to write for me is slop that didn't work or worked poorly and never got committed. On the flip side, I do ask Claude to review the code that I write prior to committing, and it is good at that, often finding serious oversights that I had missed.

This observation, that agents are good at code review but bad at writing original code, seems to carry through into AI-generated bug reports coming into SQLite from third parties. The bug reports are generally good, but the suggested fixes not so much.

One report from about a month ago illustrates this. The median() aggregate function in SQLite is implemented by collecting the input values into an array of doubles, using quicksort to put them in order, and return the one in the middle. The bug report showed a carefully devised sequence of 1 million inputs that caused pathological O(N*N) behavior in the quicksort algorithm, which caused recursion to go too deep and blow out the CPU stack. The AI's suggested fix: Add a depth parameter to the quicksort algorithm and fail over to a slower sorting algorithm if the recursion goes too deep. The correct solution (originally recognized in the 1975 by Robert Sedgewick, but unknown to me before this issue arose) was to only call quicksort recursively on the smaller of the two partitions, and sort the larger partition using a loop (tail recursion). If recursion only occurs on a partition that is half the size of the original or smaller, recursion depth is limited to LogN. That turned out to be trivial to implement, and is faster and uses less code than the AI-suggested approach. Furthermore, after seeing Sedgewick's tail recursion idea, Dan Kennedy recognized that we don't actually need to sort both partitions at each step of the algorithm, but only the partition that contains the median. Dan's observation more than doubled performance. Hence by ignoring the AI's suggested fix, we more than doubled the performance of the median() function in SQLite.

Before you ask: The median() function did originally use the standard library qsort(), but I changed that into a hand-coded quicksort some time ago because the hand-written variant did not require a callback for each comparison, and was thus way faster.

OK, so explain how you had supposedly never heard of the Transformers? They've been around since 1984.

I don't understand the nature of your comment. Are you confirming that you were 11 or 12 at the time?

Hint: Have you checked my /. ID?

And yet you'd never heard of the Transformers before you saw the Michael Bay movies. I guess you were 11 or 12 at the time?

I'm told she's had some well-liked stories.

Still, James Gunn seems to have this obsession with pulling up C-list characters from the comics and putting them in central roles in movies. For a lot of the running length of Superman, it was a movie about some guy named Mr. Terrific that nobody's ever heard of. I assume this is because he wants to tell new stories, rather than rehashing the same old origins and motives for characters that everybody's known about for years. But it's not the same as actually introducing new, appealing ideas; these characters are C-listers for a reason. Nobody cares.

Haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's not just that ... she also apparently spends a lot of the movie not seeming to believe there's much urgency to the situation at all. That has a way of hamstringing the idea of a "ticking clock" plot.

Two words: Government contracts.

"These things"? You mean the government shouldn't be drafting regulations for government, which is what we're talking about here? Instead, private industry should be telling the government what to do?

No, but HPE is. HPE does not sell printer ink.

Failing that, stroke something else.