It's a paper copy of underground utility records and a backhoe.

Probably the next code that it outputs will be:

My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

It's not even a legal stretch to do so. If I encourage a 6 year old to drive a car and there is an accident, I'm legally on the hook for the lot of it with criminal charges on top. Why shouldn't the AI companies face the same liabilities?

Moving from 1024 to 2048 when 768 is broken is one thing. But so far, quantum computers have only managed 6 bits and had to cheat a bit to do it. It took longer than a child with pencil and paper would take. The new improved quantum computers that were going to do better than that some 6 years ago just kinda didn't happen. We'll get 'em next year?

The fact that this RSA weakness is not based on quantum computation is irrelevant

It's extremely relevant. An actual computer that we can build today can exploit the new RSA weakness. We have no computers today that can run Shor or Grover and the timeline for one that can on a useful scale is somewhere between years and never.

Also how we got to post-quantum when quantum computers have yet to factor anything faster than a 6th grader with pencil and paper.

You are both done laughing and not done laughing.

The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.

If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.

I just wanted to let you know that you have successfully driven me off of /., after some 25 years.

Not just you, obviously, the site has been in steep decline for a long time, but you were such a huge asshole that you managed to be the last straw. So, congrats for that. I won't be back.

If they would reprocess it, much of that 3.6 million pounds would become either valuable nuclear fuel or totally inert scrap.

The rest would only last 200-500 years before becoming totally inert.

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

Who wizzed in your wheaties?

And I stand by what I said. Practically no phone that still works at all does it at the low level of a capacitor anymore.