This actually is news. That air pollution is in various ways bad for people's health is not news. The news here is the effect specifically on frailty in elderly people.

This illustrates why host countries should not be given too much power. It's one thing if Brazil or some other country wants put on a unilateral show, but when an international organization is going to have a meeting, it should have an organizing committee that has the ultimate say. Obviously it has to work with the locals, but if the locals propose something stupid like this, the organizing committee should be able to say no, either fix it or we move the meeting elsewhere.

Anywhere in Saudi Arabia would be problematic given the country's restrictions on freedom of expression, persecution of gay people, limitations on the rights of women, etc., but Mecca is out of the question since only Muslims are allowed to enter the city.

The cable didn't fracture due to the movement of the sea floor. It was broken by a large mass of rock and other stuff set in motion by the volcano smashing into it.

Why do pigs require a large area? Pigs are typically kept in small enclosures and do not wander over large areas like cattle.

The link in the post is bad. I think this is what was intended: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theregister.com%2F20...

I'm surprised that they expose their whole ordering and distribution system. Customers need to be able to send in orders, but they could do that on a machine that does nothing but collect orders. Once a day (or more often if necessary) an employee plugs a thumb drive into this machine, copies the data file, checks that it is in the correct format and doesn't contain anything it shouldn't, and transfers it to the machine that handles accounting, deciding which factory to send the beer from, etc.

It depends.

If someone is in active recovery, they may exactly know what they can handle at that point. For example, someone who had sexual abuse in their history knows they don't need to see someone else's depiction. That's not going to help them face and overcome it and will more likely set them back for the day. If they're going into an R rated movie, the trigger warning is right there in the rating system. That's not the case for all media.

Or, it might be that on some days they can handle it, and some days they can't. I don't always want to hear about religious trauma because I already have that T-shirt, but on other days and in other contexts I might be curious.

I appreciate trigger warnings though I don't need them anymore.

This is not an area I know much about, but I wonder what is so complicated. There are multiple good databases capable of handling lots of data and users, and many governments have systems that do pretty much the same thing. So why isn't implementing a new system for a particular government not simply a matter of installing a database system and configuring it with the local information: bank account numbers, business rules, etc.? Is this really something that requires a lot of expensive, error-prone work? Why? It doesn't seem like rocket science.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Who is "we"?

Why "should" a video game not be "killed"? Why "should" a company have to keep a game going into perpetuity? Ditto operating systems.

That's nice for Enterprise people. What about the average user? How does one get it? How much does it cost?...

Evidently we now need Robocops, who will be able to connect a port to the robotaxi and communicate with it.

Based on my personal experience, my impression is that full-sized USB-A connectors are more robust than the others. If, for example, you've got an external device connected to your laptop and you, another person, or the dog may knock the device off the couch or walk into the cable, the cable is less likely to pull out and the connector and port are less likely to be damaged.

Bad analogy. Using drones to seed clouds will have a very small impact on the jobs of pilots - there aren't many pilots who do this kind of work. And it won't have any impact on airline pilots, who are the people who fly airliners, not the small planes that do cloud seeding. Their concern, as the article says, is with drones flying in the same airspace as airliners and with the debris (like "space junk" but at a lower altitude) that the cloud seeding flares generate.