I'm starting to suspect that slashdot itself has been taken over by an LLM tasked with AI propaganda, given the typical story selection nowadays. Maybe it is just use of LLM in screening stories leads to a certain bias in topic selection.

You seem to have what I would call a mistaken idea: that Linus will "choose" his successor. He won't. The community will. Even if he recommends someone, the community will either accept or reject them (or do both). It is entirely possible that nobody can really succeed him (because he has a genuinely unique combination of skills, motivations, and contacts), so he will effectively have no successor. The structure of the open kernel project now called Linux will change.

I think that is just reality and anyone trying to "choose" his successor in advance of it needing to happen is just getting in early on the politics of the community deciding who coordinates core kernel development after Linus steps down. If that is even still a thing and it doesn't splinter. (There is a reasonable argument to be made that it has already splintered into the distribution kernels, and what we call the core kernel is just the working space for coordination between the splinters.) I think deciding succession in advance is pretty demonstrably a waste of time, and possibly even counter-productive, since the situation is likely to change between now and when the change needs to happen. I'm glad that Linus himself seems to be aware of this.

The US has been occupying an artificial position since the end of WW2, since it was the only developed country to not be basically destroyed. We are just living through the transition to a broader world economy. And listening to racist xenophobes rage about it.

Assuming you aren't a pro-china bot or shill, you seem to have a westerner's lack of understanding of the absence of political freedom because you have always had it. Propaganda about China being 100% evil is pretty recent - mostly the west has treated China fairly nicely even when China has acted badly because the western powers at the time understood that building and sustaining relationships is more important in the long run than any individual dispute. The weird thing is now China has grown up, it complains about being treated as an equal. China seems to want to be a leader but still with all the perks of being considered a developing economy. That's not going to happen. If China wants to treat a particular market in a protectionist manner (social media, cell phones, etc) nobody should be surprised when other countries do the same against them. That is normal international trade relations, not nationalism. It's when the two get conflated that things go badly.

That is false. To quote article 2: the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" i.e. the laws passed by congress. If congress sets some rules that the SEC enforces, the president cannot change those rules (laws).

Which means that the title of the article is not even correct - there is almost no way that this is a standards-compliant disc, so it is not a "CD", as you point out. It is a non-compliant optical disc of the same size as a CD. (a NCODOTSSAACD ?)

Somewhat sadly for SpaceX I think any launch in which starship block 2 made it through its ascent burn is a step forward, and therefore "success". Certainly the transition from block 1 to block 2 for starship has been far rockier than expected, but at least it appears they have implemented a solution to the (first) major problem that destroyed two test articles in a row. Unfortunately due to other failures we still don't know if block 2 will behave similarly successfully on re-entry as block 1. That was originally supposed to be the main difference between block 1 and 2, but after 3 flights it is still untested. This continues to make Musk's blaming the government for delays seem like his insanity talking. Success seems to be limited by SpaceX's internal ability develop without excessive regression. Block 1 starship performed a successful reentry on its 4th flight. So far block 2 has done no better, and we will still have to wait to see if it even does the same. It should have taken fewer test flights to get to a reentry test, given that the booster has performed so well.

You don't seem to realize that many (most?) people don't even know how to use a calculator properly. We are not talking about people like yourself who maybe can't do long division by hand, but people who don't even know what to do if you ask them to make change for a 20 for something that costs 18.62 and they aren't sitting at a cash register. i.e. they don't even know what subtraction really is or how to use it in a general context.

We're also pretty obviously not talking about using LLMs for "checking" one's writing. We're talking about people losing the ability to even form their thoughts into a coherent paragraph because they think all they are supposed to do is feed a prompt into an LLM. I actually totally agree that LLMs are very much the language equivalent of the calculator. We are still in the process of figuring out how to integrate them into everyday usage in a way that benefits the user more than it hurts them. I would argue it took a while to figure this out for calculators and we still don't get it right at the general education level.

What you are saying is a false narrative. From article 2 section 3: "he [the president] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". The president's authority is to execute the laws passed by the congress (the article 1 body). In fact, the president does not execute the laws his personal self, but is supposed to run an executive organization that executes the law, NOT his will. This is tantamount to the definition of what it means to have a constitutional republic instead of a dictatorship.

The execs appear to also not understand southwest's business model. The boarding and checked bag rules were obviously specifically designed to make getting people on the airplane far far faster. (assigned seating and dealing with carry-ons is super slow). Southwest's business model was based on getting planes loaded fast and getting them back in the air. Presumably that meant they could service a particular passenger base with fewer airplanes. If they slow down their boarding, then they are just another airline without that advantage anymore. This does sound like new upper management just not understanding the structural strengths of the company.

Though honestly "no free check bag" has turned into "take a carry on size bag and check it at the gate for free because too many people are bringing carry-ons" for most airlines anyway. So I don't really know what this policy accomplishes other than selling more travel-sized toothpaste. I can see charging for more than 1 bag, but charging for the first bag just doesn't make sense because there simply is not enough carry-on space for everyone to bring a carry-on size bag. So the main impact is actually to just slow down boarding and increase the work the gate agent has to do. That sounds a lot like bad management - a policy that only appears to increase revenue because the trade-offs aren't being accounted for correctly.

I also think this is a step back and not a good sign, but to add some detail: SpaceX are now on the second major version of their upper stage. The first version worked great with multiple successful reentries some including soft landings on the water. The problem is that most of the major changes were supposed to be related to re-entry, NOT ascent. There are some ascent-related changes, but not very big ones I didn't think. They now are zero for two on ascent for the new version of the second stage and still have no data on the reentry-related changes, which was supposed to be the primary test goal for this flight and the previous. It is concerning that the upper stage is failing in ways that were supposed to be already tested. That all being said, another successful booster catch is good. Some setbacks are ok, but that doesn't mean all negative outcomes are equally negative. I also think the extracurricular antics of their CEO are more of a liability than a benefit, regardless of external issues with them, but that is a separate discussion.

What we call "AI" now seems to be largely a copyright washing-machine. It takes code or other work licensed in a particular way, washes it of its license and context, and re-creates it. Of course that is cheaper than actually respecting licenses. Don't want to use a particular library because of its license? Just ask a code agent for a similar thing and it will just regurgitate the library with its license removed. Or just skip the first question altogether because the entity running the LLM wants you dependent on them as the middle-man instead of having the original code. Tada, 95% LLM-generated code that can't ever be reused.

I think "a generation or two behind" for AMD is reasonably comparable to intel integrated graphics.

Nope. If you live in a very blue or red state there is not a lot of reason to take time off to go vote if you didn't do so last time. Because of the vast difference in population density among states, and the fact that blue states on average have more people, there are more people who don't really need to vote in order to have their state's electoral votes go to the democrat. So the 30% for Harris known for sure to be more of an undercount of what people "want" than the 31% for Trump. There's a reason why the con artists target red states - less people to con to get the needed votes and to gerrymander the maps there. Note that this means that the result of the presidential election in the US does not actually tell you what policies people want. (Really the legislature is supposed to be the entity setting policy anyway, but I digress.)

Well you know that, but it seems like the rabidly anti-tax people in the US have forgotten that.

Not that I'm an apologist for China, but the other way to look at this is that the Western IP rules are a little overboard. It was supposed to be the case that if you see what a product does and independently come up with a way to do the same thing, then the patent doesn't apply. (That seems like a pretty workable definition of "obvious to someone skilled in the art", or the required specificity of the patent.) The whole point of the patent is that the patent document is used to implement the solution. The modern "intellectual property" system, at least in the US, has gone so far off the rails that one shouldn't be entirely surprised that some governments are not going to treat it the same ridiculous ways. This seems to have become more and more the case in complaints about China, where the complaints are about them "stealing" things that are not really subject to any significant protection. Also if a company farms out production to somewhere in China because it's cheap, then they don't due diligence on whether that particular production facility (not all of China) is going to agree to the desired terms or whether the terms can be enforced, then that is not "China's" fault. There is a monstrous amount of replacement parts available on Alibaba because the US-facing companies just stopped stocking them (to force purchase of new hardware), but the Chinese suppliers can just make them because that's who made them in the first place, or the other supplier just down the street. Is that IP theft? I would argue no. That's an open market working as it should.