people donâ(TM)t have time to wait 30 minutes or an hour to charge their car.

Maybe that's a problem in the USA, given how you seem determined not to import Chinese technology. But the rest of us are able to buy Chinese cars that charge in 5 minutes.

We are so fucked.

Who is this "we"? I just sold my house and build one 40m above the surrounding flood plain. The old one was on the river. Beautiful place, tranquil water views, several meters above to 100 year flood level. But floods have grown noticeably more frequent and higher in the 20 years I owned the place. The writing was on the wall, so I decide it was time to move on. Despite the new house needing far more $ coverage, the insurance is around 1/2.

I for one there are still people out there who believe climate change is crap. Without them I would not have been able to see my old house for price I got. Without people like them, my I would not have recently got the excellent price I did for my Tesla shares. I'm sure the good lord provided such people so I can have a comfortable lifestyle until I pass from this world into the next, and I am very grateful to him for it.

I see these sorts of comments repeatedly, yet they are so far from my experience it's like they are from a different world. The code generated by AI's is so wrong for me, it's not worth my time to review it. Why review something you are 9 times out of 10 going to throw away? Since I've never personally seen AI work well, all I have is youtube videos of people using it successfully. Mostly, there people are developing web apps. Sometimes they are developing in Python. Neither are languages I use a lot of now, but nonetheless there is a recognisable pattern.

The AI's seem to memorise code snippets they've seen on the web. They combine that with a remarkable ability to recognise and process the English to adapt those snippets to the context you've supplied. It's sort of like using Stack Overflow, but you don't have spend 15 minutes googling, you don't have to copy and paste, and you don't have to adapt the code mung the code to your organisations style. It's an intelligent templating engine if you like, and watching it work (when it does work) on youtube is pretty memorising. On the downside, it's wrong far more often than the Stack Overflow answer google finds, and all the context and background that tends to accompany the Stack Overflow answers (ie, the bit you learn from) is gone.

The other downside is it only works if it has seen a lot of examples of the sort of code you are say you are after. If it hasn't it will still give you an answer, but it will be so wrong you would have saved time if you hadn't seen it. So it works well if you are doing something very similar to something that's been done 1000's of times before, and posted to the web. But that's not something I do - it would bore me silly. Talking to my peers (all senior software engineers), that's not something any of them does.

Nonetheless, you 10 person shop spends their day writing your typical web app that throws up forms, collects the data, and displays it in various ways I can well imagine it works well for you.

Ahh, finally. We have a believable origin sort for The Matrix. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Zuck who sold humanities sole to the machines, given how careless he is.

This appears in the story: 37signals spent $1.5 million on 18 petabytes worth of Pure Storage kit that Hansson wrote will cost less than $200,000 a year to operate. It's the only thing they mention they are moving "in-house".

18 petabytes will take maybe 200 drives plus (around USD$130k) plus other bits and bobs like SSD caches and an InfiniBand, network so at $1.5M it doesn't sound like they are scrimping. They also don't specify what "in-house" means, but given they are moving from S3 it might might co-lo. It's only 4 racks after all. That means all the power and cooling issues are taken care of.

What does that leave? Maybe installation, but usually remote hands do that. Certainly not maintenance. If a Dell server fails within it's warranty period (5..7 years), Dell handles it - it's included in the price. What's left in the way of ongoing maintenance is a very part time job for one engineer.

overstated marketing claims

I'm not sure what marketing claims you are referring to, but if it's AWS's claims it's possible to connect your first server to a Postgres database, and start serving your Route 53 hosted domain in under a day it's largely correct. It's also a damned sight cheaper than buying hardware and putting it in a co-lo. But if you look around, it's not difficult to find a lot of mature successful companies that started like that, but now suffer from boiled frog syndrome. And every time one of then wakes up and smells the roses, you get a small army of people claiming "but setting your own infrastructure so hard the staffing costs will send you broke". No it's not hard, and no there really isn't much in the way of engineering costs. I never seen marketing that says otherwise, but it must exist and it sure must be good, because it has a awful lot of people convinced.

If you stop those policies you stop the next pandemic.

If I was forced to place bets on the country of origin of the next pandemic and it's source, it would be leaping from USA cows to humans. 100 days ago the USA's record as a scientific, pharmaceutical and in particular vaccine powerhouse would mean I'd be laying odds they squash it before it makes the leap. My how times have changed.

Be realistic here. You probably speak for about 300 Canadians at most.

Being realistic, he speaks for exactly 1 Canadian. But his echo's the thoughts of most of the planet, including mine. I'm an Australian.

You clearly don't realise just how much on the nose Trumps USA is right around the world. I thought that Tesla plummeting global sales would have been a hint. Apparently not. Well, it's gone well beyond rational reasoned responses. A rational reasoned response would not impose retaliatory tariffs (Australia won't), as while they will damage the USA they also damage the country imposing them. But now it's a guttural, instinctive response: "Fuck the pain it causes, I just want to hurt the bastard".

The USA has pissed off nations before of course, but it was always just one or two nations and it's the 1000lb gorilla. But now it's the entire world (bar Russia!) and the USA only controls 18% of world trade. This time the 1000lb gorilla is gonna hurt.

Let's also keep in mind there was no tariff on Russia with a bs excuse that trade is so low its not working setting a tariff. Meanwhile we set a tariff on Fiji which has even lower levels of trade.

There is an a better example: the Heard and McDonald Islands. They are Australian territories, and thus should have inherited the 10% tariff imposed on Australia. But no, they got hit with a 37% tariff. That's doubly puzzling as the highest life forms you will find on those islands are seals and penguins. Any USA imports from them (and yes your records say there are at tiny amout!) are clerical errors. Amusingly the 37% was probably arrived at by dividing two clerical errors, imports and exports. Both are much lower than the trade with Russia.

As for the bs excuse - yes it's pure bullshit. The sad thing is if we ever discover the real reason, it will probably make less sense. But we probably won't discover it. It's likely Trump has forgotten it already, and will change his mind next week anyway.

The FirebirdSQL Foundation is an Association incorporated and registered in Czech Republic (Czechia).

Of course they are wasted tax dollars. Tesla has already build a fabulous EV charging network.

This does that have the side effect of letting Musk get a cut of every dollar they spend on charging, but I'm sure that never entered anyone's mind when they made the decision.

I don't think so. The efficiency they are targeting involves processing network packets in large batches. To do that you need a network card that buffers large numbers of packets. You don't find them on a pi.

When you do have a card that buffers lots of packets you get a trade off. You get efficiency by waiting for a long while until a lot of packets arrive and processing them in one batch. But waiting for a lot of packets to arrive could take a long time when there is little traffic, which can create big latencies. Your weapons in this fight are IRQ's, polling, packet counts and time outs. You use time outs and packet counts to intelligently choose whether to use IRQ's, and the polling frequency. This patch introduces a new time out.

Finally the headline 30% is under ideal test conditions. Nobody is likely to see anything like that in real world scenarios, to the point that in any application that isn't a network appliance I doubt the speed difference will be noticeable.

And how many pharmaceutical drugs were developed in your country in the last 20 years?

You in the wrong discussion. This isn't a complaint about patents. The money in the article didn't go the pharmaceutical companies. It went to the insurance companies.

The idea behind insurance is you pay while you are healthy, so if you do get sick you pay far less. Here you still pay the money up front, but then if you get sick you pay 1000% more than elsewhere. I've read about this several times before. I've tried to understand how they pulled it off each time. I still have no idea. Good old yankie crony capital at work I guess.

You forget that California is earthquake country, brick houses are horrible in a quake.

Brick is an example. There are lots of different sorts fireproof cladding. The Australian East Coast gets around 1.2 meters of rain a year, far more than California. Stuff grows faster here that most places. Yes, California is different, but really - simple things like metal leaf shields and insect screens work everywhere. It's not that different. And in the end California is more similar to Australia than New York. It has urban islands in a lot of space that is a mixture of desert and coastal plains..

Well, let me tell you how Australia does things.

• Every building site is given a Bush Fire Attack level, or BAL. It seems to be based more on geography then vegetation. Not have a tree within miles, but be on a slope and your up for a high BAL.
• The higher the BAL, the stronger "it shall not burn" becomes. At the highest level we are talking stainless steel gutter leaf shields, external walls must be brick, roof metal sheets, gauze over weep holes, all exposed floors must be concrete, and so on.
• Every house must have 3000 gallons of water on always hand. A pool will do.
• Windows must have steel insect screens.
• 30 metre clearance from all flammable things, like wood piles.

Now lets compare that to what happened in California. No water in hydrants? No problem - every house has it's own water. Houses burnt to the ground with no walls left standing? Evidently they weren't brick or concrete. Windows shattering in the heat and letting the embers in? What did you use for insect screens? Gutters igniting - did you plastic leaf shields, or none at all?

Nothing can resist the 2 mega watt / meter fires we Australian's had in Canberra, but that requires years of accumulation of fuel in a woodland. Despite the claims in the article, a well built suburb should not be giving the file that much fuel load.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for managing the fuel load with burn offs like the natives here used to do. In fact it's the law where I live - land owners must burn off after the last rain in August. But some don't, and some years it doesn't rain in August so it's too dangerous. So now we have very strict house building rules. We've had them for decades now, but there still is old housing stock around, so fires are still a major concern. That's was what caught this Australian eye about the pictures of the California fires. The houses looked newish and there didn't look to be much bush around - it was suburbia.

Your slashdot ID suggests you may not have seen how the younger people consume their content now. I bet when you see a kid learning something by new watching a Youtube video, you shake your head as you think "I can get the same info in 1/2 the time by reading it". I've got some news. Video content is so infested with ads you can't skip, it's more like 1/4 of the time.

This outlook is common among man above a certain age but if you move down just one generation, it all changes. My son and I are both have 4 year degrees in Software Engineering. I keep up with the art by reading voraciously. He accomplishes the same thing with youtube. The ad problem was solved by buying getting a subscription.

Times move on. Yesterday I did a Python2 to 3 conversion using an LLM. My first actually, in front of a group a bit you you here - they were insisting copilot and it's ilk are useless. I can't say it was faster than me doing it by hand, and it's hallucinations made for much group chortling at it's flaws. But before doing that, I demonstrated how this editor feeding RAG info to AI could replace grep, and that took their breath away. Even a hoary old grey beard whose fingers tap dance regex's into vim will be orders of magnitude slower than this thing at locating some calculation in some new body of code.

I don't know where this world the younger generation inhabits is headed. That's concerning. Even more concerning, it's I'm having more and more difficulty understanding what that world looks like now. It's charging off into the distance without me. Who knows, it may be a place where literacy is optional for a large percentage of the population.

English literacy that is. I see math literacy is failing too. These bottom 60% are already becoming serfs to the nerds. They elected their fellow STEM illiterate Trump to turn back the clock with coal and tariffs. What may happen instead is the nerds replace the recalcitrant serfs with AI's. I'm not sure what happens then.