In a dire emergency, your car is the last place you should be, and the last thing you should try to hang onto. FEMA's official disaster preparedness communication calls for you to have a PORTABLE AM radio and to avoid travel unless absolutely necessary. "Let's get in the car and go to Disney" is not part of FEMA's official recommendations.

Also, to assume that AM radio will even work in an emergency or disaster is a stretch in the first place. Ancient broadcasting equipment living in swamps with hundreds of meter tall towers, seldom internet access, and nonredundant uplinks, are not reliable.

When Helene hit us in 2024, AM/FM radio was the first thing to go off the air, followed by the land-based Internet providers, followed by the cellular networks. We got by with local amateur radio operators who were able to communicate outside the zone on batteries and solar panels.

There is no "one thing" that is going to be universally reliable in a disaster. You have to have an "all of the above" mindset and prepare to communicate by different available means.

It's not about emergency preparedness.

There's no reason why Python (compiled from Rust) would be any slower than Python (compiled from C). Both languages compile to native executable code, and both have good optimizers available.

I always preferred bayonet mounts over Edison screws. Thankfully 90% are the former around here. But I digress... I changed all my light bulbs to LED ones about nine years ago when we did some renovations and haven't changed any since. What the hell's going on with yours?

The wildlife in Amsterdam is very engaging to watch!

There's nothing wrong with knowing your own limitations and acting accordingly. Had Mr. Zuckerberg had that sort of self-knowledge, he might have avoided lighting 80-billion-with-a-b dollars on fire and renaming his social media company after a technology that nobody wanted.

Slave labor in the developing world helps keep prices down as well.

That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.

The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.

re: And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".

Compared to what? It's meaningless without a relative reference. Compared to humans, their "average" (mean or mode?) is going to be "average" but that mean/mode may be significantly lower than something else, something like Waymo.

One thing humans do tend to do is overestimate how good they are. Average to poor drivers do tend to think they are better and numerous studies have demonstrated this. And if you want to see this in action, try keeping to the speed limit on country roads. You'll quickly find out just how many aggressive, deliberately unsafe drivers whose luck will inevitably run out there are.

Yes, I agree. The problem with thinking "this bug seems harmless, because I can't imagine how anyone could exploit it" is in the "I can't imagine" part; my imagination is limited to what is covered by my mental model of how computers work, but an attackers' ingenuity is not.

In particular, the C/C++ optimizer is a devious beast, and will exploit any opportunity to make the code more efficient, even if that means doing things that are wildly unintuitive to a naive human reader -- and it sees any instance of undefined behavior as an opportunity to exploit.

(C) is the only one of those the AI companies are really concerned about -- they want to stave off model collapse for as long as possible. The problem is that AI generates so much content that the ratio of AI-generated data to human-generated data keeps rising, and sooner or later there simply won't be much human-generated data left to anything to consume. At that point they'll either have to figure out to ingest AI-generated content without causing degradation, or they'll have to accept that AIs have gotten as smart as they will ever get, and it's all downhill from there.

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.

That's easy to fix around here: if the employee was working at the time, they represent the bank, so ask the bank about their GDPR policy and information about the recordings the employee made and how they're being handled.

I'd think the bank would want to stamp that practice out anyway because they don't control the recordings, which could lead to a security issue for them.

Just to add: if the government, including the police, started mass video surveillance, there would be justified outrage. Meta has more data processing than at least the UK government and consequently should be given less leeway.

As a Meta customer or user, the person with the glasses has had to agree to Meta's terms and conditions, including their data processing. For me though, an innocent bystander in the street, I haven't agreed to have information processed about me by Meta. Meta has a long suspected problem with shadow profiles, and I don't want their massive processing capabilities to be able to reference me wherever I am, even if it's in a public place. They have no system for me to make a GDPR request about the data they're holding on me. Based on Meta's behaviour over many years and statements from Zuck about privacy, they simply cannot be trusted with people's personal data.