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Comment Re:They are objectively wrong (Score 1) 198

>The ruling elite has decided they do not want you to be educated

No, the ridiculous price of tuition is actually the result of the government encouraging people to go to college. They will pay whatever 'need' is, and 'need' is whatever the price of college is... so colleges keep raising the price, year after year, much higher than inflation.

It's not going to the professors, either. At my local state college, only 13% of the budget goes to professors (including benefits).

At community colleges here in California, 50% goes to direct instruction. Why? Because state law mandates the 50 percent rule. So community colleges are reasonably priced and often do a better job actually teaching with smaller classes than state colleges, but I guess we have a good 9-3 football team at state, so...

Comment Re:I'd be interested to know... (Score 1) 97

>... what he thinks of modern C++ where the learning curve for newbies is now getting close to vertical. Speaking as a C++ dev of 25 years I wouldn't go near the language now if I was starting out, the number of paradigms and syntactic complexity has become ridiculous. And yes, if you're going to work on code written by others you do need to know and understand all these paradigms.

C++ is the easiest to learn now in, like, ever.

It's a mistake you have to know all the ins and outs of the language. The minimal set you need to do interesting things is quite small and it is much more usable than ever. I haven't had a memory leak or other memory issue since I switched over to modern C++ 10+ years ago.

Well, I had one once, but I did it deliberately to see if my tools (ASAN) would detect it. It did.

Comment Incompatibilities (Score 1) 150

I use Firefox as my main browser.

I can't uninstall Chrome though, because so many sites break on Firefox (and like major sites too, like Gencon's website or really annoying things like hotel wifi login sites) I have to keep Chrome around to keep my computer usable.

I don't care about Pocket or these other useless things. All I want from Firefox is for them to figure out why their tech stack is incompatible with Chrome and fix it. Even if it's not standards compatible. Make a compatibility layer so I can uninstall Chrome spyware.

Comment Re:You can do amazing things... (Score 1) 179

I was going to post a very similar comment: these people are not coders but they are project managers, and they are "employing" AI as their coding employees.

The thing is - there's "nobody" to take credit for the work, so the manager gets credit for something they didn't do. So it's definitely a skill and is work, but it isn't "coding" at all.

It's an interesting world - the AI is an extremely inexpensive employee and has enough skill to displace increasingly higher-skill tiers of actual software engineering and programming.

If I was running these hackathons, I would disallow AI or I would allow people to hire "code-as-a-service" people. Those seem functionally equivalent activities, just with AI being vastly easier to manage the logistics and you don't have to pay employment taxes or benefits to the AI.

It's no wonder there is so much tension about the many uses of AI - instead of hiring people to do work, it's another instance of paying to use a machine to do work at a price point lower than paying people.

Comment Re:Compare Starship to the Saturn V (Score 1) 167

The important distinction though is if this was a "preventable" failure that is due to something the engineering community already knows but was just omitted or done carelessly, or if the failure was indeed due to some new physics or unique application.

But just saying "hey we learned that this didn't work" is only useful if you learned a new thing that didn't work - if instead you had a structural failure because you didn't employ known best practices... that's wasteful.

I don't think we know enough at this point to know which case of learning this is. Hopefully it is truly new learning and not just "oh whoops we forgot to inspect those welds."

Submission + - Rapid unscheduled disassembly of a Starship rocket (apnews.com)

hambone142 writes: I worked for a major computer company whose power supplies caught on fire. We were instructed to cease saying that and instead say the power supply underwent a "thermal event". Gotta love it. Continuing, an A.P. store about a SpaceX rocket:

It marked the latest in a series of incidents involving Starship rockets. On Jan. 16, one of the massive rockets broke apart in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” sending trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean. Two months later, Space X lost contact with another Starship during a March 6 test flight as the spacecraft broke apart, with wreckage seen streaming over Florida."

Submission + - Starship destroyed in test stand explosion (spacenews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: “SpaceX provided no other details about the explosion. It took place as Ship 36 was being prepared for a static-fire test. However, the explosion occurred before the vehicle ignited its Raptor engines.”

Comment Re:Believe it when I see it (Score 1) 200

The unfortunate aspect of that philosophy is that our society now confuses "don't censor political speech I don't like" with "don't censor falsehoods which are tied to politically-charged topics."

We should absolutely encourage discussions about things we may not agree on - but we should also not give audience to things which are demonstrably incorrect.

Comment Re:Honestly they are probably right (Score 4, Insightful) 42

How much of this, I wonder, is that Qualcomm has patents on things integral to the physics? So that inherently anyone else trying to make a modem has to use alternate means to make it work, which are basically poisoned by the standard so of course they won't work as well?

It can't really be that hard to make a radio from a physics standpoint, but I bet it can be difficult to work around patents. Especially if it's a "dumb" patent like "put a filter here" which should have invalidated the patent due to "anyone skilled in the art" of radio devices... but because of it competitors can't put a filter in that exact spot, so have to figure out some other place to put it which of course doesn't work as well because it isn't where you'd want it...or "we set this frequency so it can only be done using a component with this material's band gap, and we have the patent on this material" or something like that.

Comment Re:Palantir to the rescue! (Score 1) 122

I always laugh / cry when people say something about "stop indoctrination!" because what they really mean is "we don't want that kind of indoctrination, we want this kind!"

What we really need as a society is critical thinking skills, the ability to draw conclusions from evidence instead of reporting only supporting evidence for a preconceived conclusion and suppressing other evidence. We need to have people that can determine if the evidence is complete and conclusive, not just matching what people want emotionally.

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