Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Part of the reason: 2038 (Score 1) 24

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue.

Im can believe that, although it is a kind of weak reason. They could keep 32 bit FreeBSD around and make time_t a “long long”, I mean it is a typedef already isn't it? Sure it would be kind of a pain in that code that assumes it is an int or long wouldn’t work until patched, and the actual hard part would be on disk structures (like FFS inodes) very likely have 32 bits allocated (actually I think the FFS on disk structure had an adjacent unused 32 bit field, if so that one would be fixable!).

I mean that isn’t trivial (it is similar to a lot of the Y2K work people were doing in 1998/1999). It isn’t exactly hard though.

It is easier to drop 32 bit support though, so I can totally believe it.

Comment Re:It won't matter (Score 1) 30

at least from other companies, so they can have all the data for themselves

As an ex-Apple employee I can say at least a decade ago Apple didn’t want your data, like it wasn’t a “non-goal” to get it, it was a goal to NOT get it. They viewed it as inherently of little value, but having the data means they have to protect it, a data breach is bad for the corporate image, as is a warrant attack (i.e. any government forcing Apple to give up customer data was also viewed as bad for the corporate image, and it is expensive to decide which things to fight in court and fight them but even worse to just roll over for any request, and far far better to just not have any data so “yes, we turned it all over -- we had nothing, and we made a copy of that and put it in this empty envelope”; most of that was before Apple publicly started pushing privacy as a thing the iPhone (and to a lesser extent other products) bring. Which increases the downside of having anything that can get stolen or legally searched.

I’m not saying Apple does it out of the goodness of their hearts, or that all the board members/upper management actually believe privacy is a valuable thing to offer, but they do largely agree that making a promise at that level and breaking it is bad, or that was the view about a decade ago. Which is a big part of why most Apple product that could make use of more private data don’t really have it unless they can have it on only on your device(s) or as an encrypted blob that Apple doesn’t have the keys for.

Comment Re:John Gruber is thrilled (Score 1) 30

Someone useless occupies a high position because he convinces peers he is somehow insightful

Not really useless, he was an ok design lead for iTunes...and I think he did Xcode design a little later as well that wasn’t awful. So I think this was more of an example of being better at getting himself promoted than actually doing the work after that point.

Comment Re:Rolls eyes (Score 1) 30

Sure it plays an important role. The problem with it is that the meta-language of modern techology design is enshittification.

I don’t think that is true in general. In specific cases, sure. In this specific case? No, Dye’s designs are the regular kind of shit. He loves information hiding, and isn’t god at usability, aces ability, or legibility. Hierarchy of information isn’t a strong suit either (other then things he hides by default, as opposed to shows by default). Back when he was “just” the design lead for iTunes he wasn’t too bad, running all Apple UX? Nope.

Comment Re: An endless supply of nuclear waste. (Score 2) 120

How do you know that's the change they made to the crop? It's all self reported. Have you done the generic analysis yourself? How do you know the studies showing the pesticide is safe were not tampered with?

If you are going to worry that “they” are going to lie about the actual changes they make, or what studies show you are thinking small.

If “they” are going to lie about those, why would they tell the truth about using GMO v non-GMO crops? If you can’t trust them to tell the truth about the food supply you can’t trust them to tell the truth about, well, the food supply can you?

Comment Not sure of that valuation (Score 2) 60

Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth,”

I’m not sure I believe something can cost more per kilogram then ink jet ink.

Comment Nobody should be surprised (Score 1) 86

It is well known to developers that writing a new feature is the easy part, debugging it is the hard part. Letting the AI do the “easy part” and having the human do the “hard part” doesn’t really help. Debugging tends to be the largest part of an accurate schedule, and it is the most uncertain part. People frequently make pretty accurate estimates of how long it takes to hit feature complete, but poor estimates of how long it takes to debug those features.

Developers should have an intuitive understanding of this, while product managers, and upper management should have an observational understanding (as in they should have seen it before many many many times and been able to learn it is true even if they have no idea why it is true).

So why is it any surprise to people that having AI write applications and humans debug them doesn’t really save much time?

Comment Re:GDP stays the same if you replace a worker with (Score 1) 78

GDP is total value of products and services created. If you make the same amount of same things without workers, your GDP stays the same.

AI would increase GDP only if you can sell more of your products because of AI. But finding customers is much harder than automating work.

Maybe, but that isn’t what seems to be going on with AI.

We don’t get the same “news” publication with AI and zero workers. We get a crappy news publication with one worker and AIs cranking out the same volume of articles as 14 workers, but the articles themselves are crap. They manage to get some level of readership and sell roughly the same ad volume per readership level as a “real” news publication. In theory that should show up on GDP because it is a bunch of revenue from ads that didn’t exist before, or maybe that one person would have been 14th of the personal of another publication, so it should look like that one person is 14x more productive.

We get AI in our watch telling us we should see our doctors because we “might” have hypertension. If we do actually see our doctors when we wouldn't have otherwise done so, GDP gets a little boost, one more doctor’s vist! Or it doesn’t get a boost if we move it up 3 months sooner. If we do actually have hypertension and would not otherwise have spotted it before a heart attack and death maybe that has another GDP boost, all the productivity of a person who otherwise would have died.

We also get AI generated hog butchering schemes and mass customized SPAM that slips past traditional SPAM filters. AI seems to be a big friend to scammers, or a big tool of scammers. I don’t know if it is boosting scammers productivity, but assuming it does, how does that get measured in GDP? More fraud moves money from people’s life savings into fraudsters accounts where presumably they spend it in part laundering it into ligitimate seeming income and then buy some luxury goods, or maybe sustenance goods. The people who got defrauded now need to work extra hard to build up a new retirement savings? Do they? Maybe this is an untapped statistic! A major source of GDP growth! We should defraud some people for science! For the dismal science in particular!

Comment Re:glass, flat round square (Score 1) 33

Can we just stop changing icon and glass and round and flat evry few years and calling it new and better.

I don’t find liquid glass better (although the iPadOS 26 windowing system is much better), but it isn’t exactly like Apple does this every year, or two, or even three or five. They ran with skodomorphic for 7 iOS versions, then with the flat look for 9 versions. I think we are stuck with liquid glass for around a decade now.

Comment Re: This is so funny (Score 1) 377

There are a lot of details you donâ(TM)t have right here. For example many places require landlords to allow you to have a licensed contractor install a EV charger, and most landlords are fine is you pay someone qualified to improve their property. Second example there are a lot of solutions for charging multiple EVs by hooking them all up overnight and the chargers figure out how to allocate the limited power.

that doesnâ(TM)t mean there are no issues. For example renters are not wild about spending say $350 to improve a landlordâ(TM)s property even if they get use of the improvements for a year or two.

Comment I had a full garage ion a previous house (Score 1) 377

I use to rent a place in CA with a small garage (or really half the garage had been converted into another bedroom). What was left of the garage was the laundry area and tool storage. Car was in the driveway.

The driveway right in front of the garage, which is super common. EV charger ended up in the garage (shared the 30A with the dryer, auto switch that gave the dryer priority when it was on, otherwise the EV got it).

No problem, charge cable went right under the garage door. I guess if someone had wanted to steel $1 worth of electricity per hour they could have done it while I wasn’t parked. Nobody ever bothered to. So I really don’t see “all the junk” in garages blocking EV adoption. It isn’t even a speed bump. Maybe not having a garage at all, but even then if you have a driveway you can make it work.

On street parking is where it starts falling apart. When you can’t be sure you will get to park in front of your home, or if you can’t always do that, if you aren’t “allowed” to run power from your house across the city “right of way” on your own property to your parking space, that could be a problem.

Comment Re:So much Irony here (Score 1) 117

A group of runner women wanting to make sure that they're not fucking a dude that 10 other women are fucking.
Women have rosters of men. But it's not okay for men to do the same thing.

Men seem to care if a women has fucked 10 different men over his life. Women are mostly just making sure the men aren’t fucking ten women right now. Either way I think people owe their potential partners the truth, although for the most part I think expecting people to have had zero or close to zero prior partners isn’t a reasonable expectation while expecting them not to have other current partners is a common and reasonable (although not universal) expectation.

Comment Re:If "Tea" was really a "dating safety app"... (Score 2) 117

Who in their right mind would post that kind of stuff on a "dating safety app?”

I think the disconnect is you think the women are posting “I’m cheating on my husband and it feels so good!”, they are posting “I think my husband is cheating on me” (and some info about the husband) and getting back “He is, that bastard told me he is single!” (and maybe some info to confirm it, like intimate pictures the wife never saw, or dates he was with the other woman).

In other words it is getting some actual value (assuming the “other women” are telling the truth, which if the various wives have a reasonable standard of proof is going to be not too too hard to establish -- like someone won’t have pics of their husbands in any sort of sexy pose unless the husband at the very least was distributing them with the intent to cheat, maybe they haven’t actually had sex with anyone else yet, but they would have been doing the “check out my horse sized cock, wanna screw” type thing at the very least).

Slashdot Top Deals

We can predict everything, except the future.

Working...