iRobot was not about Roombas. That's what their consumer robots were known for, but it was more of a side project.

They're main moneymakers were robots for the military - bomb defusing robots were something they were known for.

Their random walk consumer robots were good because they were cheap - and they worked well enough. We set a bunch up when we had dogs and they kept the shedding down.Basically we just set them up and let them vacuum while we left for work. it made the weekly vacuum much easier when they handled the daily vacuuming.

The room mapping robots were always way more expensive - a Roomba could be had for $200. The first ones with room mapping started at $600+, even the Samsung ones with cameras and all that were pricey. Then the Roombas got more and more expensive.

But in the end, one really wonders what happened to their military robots, because that's where the profits were...

I don't think there's any lack of fundamental problems. We're still primarily using a protocol that wasn't designed to be resistant to bad behavior, with address starvation, with assignments carried out by conflicted organizations, with name services likewise, with apparent disinterest from government organizations happy to write speeding tickets in anything like enforcement of existing laws about conduct on telecommunications networks, which themselves occasionally make a lunge towards censorship and all of which are somehow complicit in unconstitutional citizen spying programs. All of these problems are also international. When you want to discuss problems with the internet, the first problem is where do you start, and the last is where do you stop?

But on the flip side, at some point even the phone company is allowed to cut you off, and not only for reasons of nonpayment. It may have to involve legal action, but if you are problematic enough, you can be denied non-emergency phone services. Or, you know, imprisoned. Then you wind up with really terrible access to telecommunications. How much are we expecting to change society in the course of this conversation?

Slashdot, Reddit, and other atypical social media sites have their own benefits and pitfalls unique to their particular community and moderation designs. Aspects of Slashdot's specific mod system are beneficial and user-friendly, including the descriptive moderation and ability to assign scores based on it. I give bonuses for flamebait, troll, and offtopic on the assumption that much of that moderation is intentionally abusive, but I also don't want to wade in the muck of every single comment in busy discussions.

Sometimes I click around and eventually do read every comment, especially in discussions with few comments, but I'm not about to make that my default because I sure don't want to. But I still wish that metamoderation had any perceptible effects, or that you could comment in discussions where you've moderated — just not in the same thread — as the people most qualified to comment are also the people most qualified to moderate.

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

Now do Israel oppressing Palestinians.

Apparently you did, because equally apparently you don't understand as much as you think you do. You also seem to think you're the only descendant of Jews around here.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

When it comes to gun rights, I'm personally in favor of a strict originalist interpretation of the second amendment based on how someone in that time would interpret it, just like the right end of the Supreme Court claims to believe in.

You have the right to own and bear as many muskets and flintlock pistols as you want, so long as they are for use as part of a militia to defend the country.

Wait, what? You think the right to bear arms grants you the right to a fully automatic assault rifle of the sort that wasn't even invented until almost two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution? Sorry, but no. You want to buy a firearm so you can threaten your ex? Also no. You want to open carry your pistol so everyone knows not to mess with you? Still no.

The second amendment doesn't say what you think it does. It never did. It says that because a well-trained militia is essential to the safety and security of the country, the right of the people (as a whole) to bear arms (of some kind) shall not be infringed. A logical reading of those words does not prohibit taking away guns from specific people (e.g. those with a history of violent crime). Nor does it preclude restricting specific types of weapons to people who have been more thoroughly vetted (e.g. high-power semi-automatic or automatic rifles).

Strictly speaking, you could allow people who have never been convicted of a crime the use of only non-lethal weapons, and so long as learning on those weapons would qualify you to be able to use more powerful weapons if we ever get attacked, such a highly restrictive legal environment would still at least arguably meet the rather low bar for what must be allowed by the second amendment.

So no, gun laws do not inherently violate the second amendment. To violate the second amendment, they would have to make it substantially more difficult for an average person to obtain or use a typical firearm. Until a law crosses that threshold, it likely isn't a violation of 2a.

By contrast, executive orders that exceed authority specifically granted by Congress and exceed the constitutional authority of the executive branch to interpret and execute existing laws are per se unconstitutional. And those are highly scrutinized regardless of which party is in the oval office. The Republican presidents just have a tendency to wipe their a**es with the constitution a lot more often than the Democrat presidents, so their orders get overturned more often.

If you think being a CS RCG is bad, try being a 55 year old coder who spent the last 30 years honing the craft, only to be laid off into a market where those skills are just no longer needed at all.

The data centers will be supplied by nuclear or geothermal which is best suited to supplying a steady amount of power. Solar is better than burning coal, but it's not well suited to all problems and trying to force it into areas where it's not well suited is foolish and only breeds resentment. We should be more focused on getting solar into residential installations where it works great.

Nuclear and solar are actually similar sources of electricity. They're classed as non-dispatchable. which means they cannot change with demand. They're just on opposite ends of the same.

Nuclear takes hours to ramp up and down - you have to plan for increases and decreases in consumption hours ahead of time. Solar and wind just suddenly start and stop generating. So you under-run a nuclear plant (it only supplies most of the current demand), while your curtail renewable production (i.e., solar/wind always produce too much for current demand). The grid gets destabilized if you cannot turn down nuclear production, or you cannot ramp up production should solar/wind falter.

Coal, geothermal, hydro, natural gas plants are dispatchable in that their output takes minutes to change - you can ramp them up and down even from cold within 15 minutes or so, which is sufficient. Batteries are even faster since they can respond in under a second.

Datacenters while most of their demand is static, do have variable amounts of demand as well - it's why your laptop can go from a day's worth of battery life to 3 hours if you play a game or something. Likewise, an idle server may consume maybe 100W, while one fully loaded jumps up to 1.5kW.

The key with AI loads is nuclear can work, but you have to schedule it. If you know you have a major processing load to do, you can tell your nuclear plant to prepare for it in advance and have it ready hours later to run your task. And as it completes, it can ramp down as well.

But datacenters powering things like cloud computing are much less predictable - you can tell the plant that Black Friday to expect higher loads as instances are spun up to deal with the influx of demand, but it's a lot more variable and if demand spikes you might not be able to handle it. Or if demand fails to materialize it can be devastating (and expensive). .

I didn't have you being a little bitch on my bingo card for today.

It's extremely antisemitic to conflate all Jews with Zionists, as Zionism is antisemitic. But...

...most of the Zionists' ancestors weren't even semites, unlike the people they're genociding. Tell me again about how it's 100% about race. You're focused on this incident, I'm talking about the bigger picture, of which this incident is only one piece. Was it anti-semitic? Yes. Is Israel's genocide promoting anti-semitism? Also yes. Does that justify attacking all Jews? No it does not, not any more than being opposed to actions of some Muslims or middle easterners or any other group justifies attacking all of them. But since I never said so, it is you who may fuck all the way off. If I had meant that, I would have said it, because I am not a mealy-mouthed little fuck who can't say what he means. I don't have to make points through weaselly implication because I am not afraid to simply say what I mean, despite the accusations of cowardly clown fucks.

A significant number of Jews insist that their ethnicity and their faith cannot be separated, which is only true to the extent that some of their sects refuse to consider you to be a Jew unless your mother is a certified Jew — another practice which both limits the growth of their faith, and alienates them from everyone else. It's not universal, but it's universally harmful, because the people who do this insist with their fundamentalist fervor that it's the only valid way to be a Jew. So while I would say that for individuals it's entirely possible for those things to be separate, it's not reasonable to expect people to believe that it is.

Every person is an individual, whether it's the shooters in Australia, or their victims, or the Muslim who took the shotgun away from the shooter and got shot twice in the process. Everyone's potentially got their own narrative about every other person, none of which will fully capture who or what they are. All we can do is look honestly at situations, causes, actions, and results, and look for solutions. None of them come from being willfully ignorant as you are demonstrating here, nor from a jerking knee.

Do better.

Funny, given about 7-8 years ago I was tasked with coding in Java (something I barely have skills in except back in the Visual J++ days because it was the cheapest way to get Windows NT).

No "vibe coding" for me, but I managed to piece together something that worked just by scouring the documentation I had, some code examples and a lot of Android Studio (IntelliJ) helping me with the syntax intricacies. The code worked, was relatively clean and I could explain it all. I'm sure a seasoned Java developer could write it 10 times better, but it was sufficient for the job (it was a debugging tool). And that was with the tools I had - my brain, Google, and development environments that do a lot of the boilerplate. I wouldn't call myself a Java developer because I know I relied a lot on tooling and help and would be lost if I was given a text editor only.

If you're a seasoned developer who knows the basics, picking up other stuff is syntax and library calls. Heck, I still remember using Android Studio to write some Android NDK bindings as it handled the JNI trickery. Still not a Java developer, but a little logic and exploration with the tools meant I could fake it but understand what I did. I also understood the faults in the code so to avoid coding more bugs.

You're pushing a stupid agenda and seem to expect that everyone reading this is illiterate, which is also stupid.

Section 230 isn't about protecting them for the sake of protecting them, it's about protecting them for the sake of our rights. You might hate feceboot with good reason, but a lot of people have a lot of serious conversations there amidst the stacks of shit.

Every platform has to decide what to show users. Even Bsky has a "Discover" feed which is algorithmically generated.

If people are using R, it's because they are doing statistics. R doesn't compete against other languages, it fills a different niche. Its use grows or shrinks depending on the size of that niche.

That would put it in the domain of a 4GL (4th generation language) which are generally domain specific languages. You already can name another 4GL - SQL.

And you probably can tell you are unlikely to write the next Chrome killer in SQL (though I'm sure people have tried).

R is just another one of those - for statistics. Sure you can do a lot of it with NumPy and other Python packages, just like you can do a lot in C as well. But it's just a lot easier in R since you get to abstract away most of the crap and just get it to do what you want.

It's also not new - the Apollo Guidance Computer software was structured the same way. Because obviously a 15-bit (plus sign) processor with limited instruction set wasn't going to get you to the moon easily and back. Instead they created a runtime on top of it (a virtual machine) which provided far more capabilities including floating point that did all the orbital mechanics computations needed. The key point is that the machine had limited task slots so it could only run a few of those at any one time. Those task slots contained the state of the VMs and its registers (which were far larger than the 15+1 native hardware registers) and there were limited amounts of them.

The whole Error 1202 was the executive (hypervisor) basically saying it was out of task slots because the radar computations started occupying task slots until they ran out. The executive then did a reboot, and restarted the essential tasks (whose state was saved in the task slots), while discarding the useless radar computation tasks (because new radar readings would make the old ones obsolete).

That's what R does - it provides a programming environment abstracted out from the actual underlying hardware to let you get your statistics done. Its optimized for that, and while it can do other things (Turing complete, after all) it's just awkward at best.

That's why 4GLs often provide linkages to other languages so you can give it the hard analysis tasks while you work on the things it's less suitable for. Just like you use SQL to interact with structured databases but don't use it to be your HTTP server, but use linkages to whatever your web application uses.