"Racism" is not the answer to every fucking political disagreement. The black guy in question did just as well as a percentage of the electorate (or better) than the white guys in the three presidential elections since he left office.

The government is currently shut down because, apparently, the "affordable" care act is so affordable that the emergency subsidies put in place during Covid now need to be made permanent, or, apparently, even people with six figure incomes can't afford it. I don't see "skin color" being at issue there, do you?

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

This guy specifically invited this result with his "All copyright is void because Covid and we say so" bullshit, and his surprised Pikachu face and heartfelt appeals are infuriating. He hasn't just damaged the Archive, his moronic actions killed the idea of format shifting being legally acceptable.

$10 for a hard pull seems crazy, hopefully the rest of the banking industry destroys these rent seeking assholes.

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.

LK

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

Do I have to put out a hit on a whistleblower who exposes my illegal business scheme?

if your PC meets the Windows 11 Hardware Spec.

Reportedly that bug would have been caught if they passed the preexisting date test suite, but their attitude was 'meh'.

I'm not advocating for C but I am advocating for Level I software engineering. Rust doesn't fix this.

Breaking updates is one of the worst positions to be in. Press coverage is a poor substitute, though it's good that it got some.

I want all the comforts of a modern life but I also want to stop all industry because I heard that energy is bad and I want to feel good about that and also I don't know how anything actually works that I believe is essential in my life.

(anybody remember the Greenpeace campaign to ban chlorine?)