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Comment Hmmmm. (Score 2) 34

It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Comment Due to circumstances (Score 1) 204

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.

Comment Back in the day... (Score 2) 22

I remember when IBM, SGI, Infornix, Oracle, and HP first got involved in Linux. At the time, I included patches from some of them in the Functionally Overloaded Linux Kernel.

I proposed, back then, a simple league table for commercial support of Linux: Every new major feature or software product got so many points, and every bugfix release got a smaller number of points. Kernel features that made it into the mainstream kernel would qualify as goals for, kernel features and products discontinued were goals against. Closed-source contributions got half points, and were also considered goals against.

It would then be obvious which companies were serious and which were piggybacking, and it would also be clear who understood the philosophy, not just the opportunity.

Such a table would have ensured that nobody forgot the companies who contributed. Quite the opposite. There'd be an incentive to encourage the team you supported to improve position in the table.

Of course, no such league table ever happened. I could have maintained such a table without difficulty, but it would require the vendors to openly say what they'd contributed. I couldn't invent one out of thin air.

So I'd say Oracle has to look at themselves, not just the Linux community.

Comment Re:It would be surprising if it wasn't shedding mo (Score 1) 36

It's possible to conjecture - we know it collided with something massive, so if said body contained very limited radioactive materials, one might expect this to reduce the radioactivity per unit mass.

Is this the answer? Probably not, but it's good enough (I think) to argue that a simple answer is possible.

Comment Re:Dictatorships should evolve naturally (Score 1) 70

It has never worked in any empire, it has never worked in any software development team, it has never worked in any rock or metal band. I see very very little reason for saying there "should" be a power struggle, that always ends badly with no exceptions in any domain. C++ has never been in the kernel, so it's hard to see how Rust could defeat it there. Rust is unlikely to replace C because they do different things well - if the Linux devs have half the intelligence they seem to, there will be a natural federation.

And that is the key concept. Linux is, by its very nature, a federated OS kernel, many teams working in their territory but cooperating with other teams working in other territories through a central "government" that happens to have a hereditary god as head of the state machine.

Comment Re:Can it have a succession plan? (Score 3, Interesting) 70

The problem there is that the BSD folk did that, once William Jolitz quit, and found that people followed a very large number of different groups, to the point where none of the BSDs really progressed the way they could, and perhaps should, have done. The scene splintered. One of the most rock-solid, reliable Unix kernels ever devised has, to put it bluntly, not died (despite Netcraft confirming it) but seriously dwindled into a small niche.

You've got to remember, 386BSD came out a year or so before Linux and had X11 running on it by version 0.1 because essentially all the major challenges had already been overcome. It was THE OS to use, for a long time, for most serious geeks, although numbers were seriously cut into when Manchester Regional Computing Centre produced what was possibly the very first Linux distro, using Shoestring as the bootstrap. The MCC distro was easy to install - far easier than any BSD - and although it couldn't do much, it did turn heads. Further, Linux was gelling around a standard framework, whilst BSD by that time was starting to fragment and bicker.

My great fear is that, when Linus finally stops running the show, Linux will suffer much the same fate. There's a LOT of highly-strung egos involved, and a LOT of very rich companies who would far far prefer Linux to be owned solely by them.

Comment Re:Not a useful addition. (Score 1) 38

*ignores sarcasm because, well, I have a 4 digit UID and get to.

I think everyone pretty much knew it already, the point is that I can measure the complexity at which AI breaks, which is quite different from merely qualitatively feeling that it doesn't work as well as the claims say.

Comment Re:Butlerian Jihad? (Score 1) 11

Agreed, "AI safety" is neither practical nor possible, in part because AI has no awareness or meaning, in part because AI has no capacity for introspection, but also because AI is only useful if it can handle hard questions and hard questions are, by their nature, not safe, and (as usual) because it would utterly destroy the entire economic model of the AI companies.

I can't find any obvious evidence that the guy really knows what "humanity-advancing" means, beyond advancing his own take on the world.

Comment Not a useful addition. (Score 2) 38

Gemini still struggles with complex problems and large numbers of files. These, IMHO, should take priority over personalisation. I've mentioned in my journal that it is really struggling on anything that is non-trivial. Why should I care what it remembers if it is going to be used in engineering but can't solve engineering problems in areas where you'd actually want AI?

The benchtest I'm using is, yes, more complicated than figuring out how to wire up a Christmas lights display. On the other hand, it's also where it's going to get used and where it needs to work well.

Let's leave the pretty baubles to one side and actually get Gemini working well, OK?

User Journal

Journal Journal: Testing AIs

Ok, I've mentioned a few times that I tried to get AIs (Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT) to build an aircraft. I kinda cheated, in that I told them to re-imagine an existing aircraft (the DeHavilland DH98 Mosquito) using modern materials and modern understanding, so they weren't expected to invent a whole lot. What they came up with would run to around 700 pages of text if you were to prettify it in LaTeX. The complexity is... horrendous. The organisation is... dreadful.

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