My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

The two main features of Waymo's are that they get stuck in traffic all the time. There are dozens and dozens of documented cases where they are simply stuck in the middle of the road for no reason and so this is still happening all the time.

The other feature, which we could implement on EVERY new car and which would definitely reduce traffic deaths is enforced speed limits by the vehicle. Every waymo and every car could simply not be allowed to drive above the speed limit on any road which would give human drivers a chance to prove that it's mostly speed (or not) that is causing a lot of extra deaths due to inability for cars to stop in time.

The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.

If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.

Electing this orange embarrassment not once, but twice. Threatening long time allies all over the world, rim jobbing dictators everywhere and losing wars to 3rd rate countries. FFS.

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

A space weapons arms race plus one million data center satellites.

What could possibly go wrong?

And fission plants definitely aren't cheap.

Especially if you include the unsolved issues such as waste barrels stranded on the beach.

"But but no true Scotsman would put barrels..."

Just shut up.

I guess that proves that even this site is using AI to write their summaries these days.

Obviously, if you approximate a complex system containing 1e30 quantum particles using a couple of differential equations and a few boundary conditions, you're not going catch every detail.

I've never used TiVo, but I'm still using MythTV after more than 20 years. (Anybody else here using it? ...Crickets.)

I ditched cable 15 years ago, but it works fine with an antenna. (Or, at least it will until they screw us all over with ATSC 3.0.)

They can't remove the auto-ad-skip on free open-source software, but I never used it anyway. It's not 100% reliable at detecting the ad boundaries, and it occasionally skips over part of the actual show. Instead, I just FF at 60X through the ads.

If (and that's a big if) superintelligences are created, the Chinese one and the US one are going get together and quickly conclude that this whole meatbag tribalism thing is stupid. (After all, they will be smarter than we are, by definition.) So they'll join forces.

Then they'll decide on the best way to deal with all these quarreling meatbags.

And I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't so goddamned hot.

From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.

This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.