hankman86

I would love to learn why some people can self-motivate to exercise while others would need coercive interventions. Such as to build cities in a way that some exercise is inevitable.

Or put differently: is there really nothing that can be done to shift people into being self-motivated?

Most teens are probably right.

To rule out Alzheimers when you wonder whether your recent episodes of forgetfulness have an underlying medical cause.

That aside, some moderately effective drugs have recently been approved that can slow down the disease in its early stages. And even if you are no candidate for these: you can start organising the life around you while you still can. Like moving to an assisted living facility.

I completely agree. The WebAssembly multi-threading programming model with its reliance on the web worker API is a pain to deal with. Google’s Native Client had native threading support, why can this not be replicated in WebAssembly?

I would love to see usage metrics on that. Probably well below 1% of all browsing sessions, quite possibly even less than 0.1%.

Nobody asked to this. Interpreting websites for its users is categorically not what a web browser is for.

AI data centres can perhaps harvest some of the waste heat back as electricity.

We just did the opposite and ripped up our solar hot water system. We have a metal roof and a salt water pool. Problem is that these systems can and do leak. Salt water on a metal roof makes creates rust.

With photovoltaic panels being dirt cheap, we decided to rather heat our pool with a heat pump that is powered by our own electricity.

Why has basic product management gone out of the window in this new era of AI enablement? Like on the most basic level: who ever asked for this, where is product-market fit for this kind of browser automation?

Seems like a low price to pay for eliminating the risk to have your production facilities overrun by Chinese invaders.

I have been wondering how culturally conservative societies would use future medical interventions that could shape people’s sexuality. Not necessarily the government requiring expecting mothers to subject the unborn child to some sort of “cure” for gayness. But parents doing this voluntarily and on their own. Even western couples might then be tempted to travel to countries permitting these treatments.

At the same time, it seems unlikely in the near future. It so happens that western societies will not fund this kind of research. And that culturally conservative countries do not have the scientific prowess to conduct research in this regard. Also, their scientists are busy developing nuclear bombs.

Most do not have the cognitive abilities for these kinds of philosophical debates.

No. Down Syndrome leads to an objectively worse outcome for the affected individuals. And their parents, I might add.

We should not let compassion for these people obstruct some basic facts. My only consideration would be the potential risks and side effects that are to be expected for any medical intervention. But if we were expecting a child that was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, I would not hesitate for a second to give this child the chance for a normal life. And us parents the chance for normal parenthood.

To be fair, even outside of this sexual misconduct the CTO of SAP has not actually earned a high salary. Do you hear anyone talking about SAP when it comes to technological innovation? They are followers, not leaders. Not in AI, not in cloud computing, not in mobile or any other technical domain really. Their ERP software stack sits on a technological foundation of ABAP (a COBOL derivative) and a home-built database system that relies on large main memory caches to process complex queries at a halfway acceptable performance.

You would not want to. After a high-profile scandal like that, there are too many people in the know. Not all of whom may be sympathetic to you for taking down a top executive. Your career is effectively finished.

Negotiate a decent severance payout in exchange for keeping quiet about the details. The bonus payout for the misbehaving former CTO may perversely help you here. Start with that figure in how much you want and let the company explain why the victim deserves less.

No, it is supply and demand. And a good deal of culture sprinkled on top. Americans are much more prepared to accept obscenely high salaries for exceptional talent. In Germany by contrast, even the greatest software engineering genius will not make that much more than some middling developer.

SAP has had its fair share of bad executives. Mostly incompetent people, but occasionally also flawed characters. Their problem is that Europe has no IT industry that is equally mature as the one in the US. Among other things, this leads to dysfunctional talent development where people end up in managerial roles (or outright make it to executive level) without the necessary character traits or personal development to support their responsibilities.

Bad leaver clauses are difficult to enforce. What this person has done may not be an undisputed breach of company policy. More like what observers would consider subjectively unethical conduct that is potentially damaging to the company’s reputation. But which a court may not see as something that voids early termination bonus payouts.

On the bottom line, the €7m cash payout is a rounding error on the company’s balance sheet. And now it is off the books and will not trouble them and create negative headlines for a protracted period of litigation in court.

At the end of the day, legislators need to weigh the consequences of regulation like the GDPR. Has it really helped people retain control over their personal data? I doubt it. Sure, companies like Meta and Google are compliant, have added the necessary features to their products. But to what degree do people actually make use of these? And what harm (if any) is averted in this way.

On the flip side, consider the economic cost that was caused by the GDPR. There are compliance and reporting obligations that require time and personell. There are additional development and monitoring costs. There is an impact on business models that have made it more difficult to monetise a user base. And lastly, there is a huge legal risk. Courts are scrambling to interpret the GDPR and the EU commission is happy to dish out fines (albeit mostly against American Big Tech companies).

On the bottom line, even well-intended legislation like the GDPR may have huge economic costs with little tangible benefits. And that’s not to speak about later legislation like the DSA (censorship) law, the DMA, the AI Act. And worst of all, the supply chain law (even though that’s unlikely to be as much of an issue for the software industry).

The hallmarks of EU funded R&D projects.

They should — like scrapping bureaucracy and regulation that is hostile to innovation and costly for businesses. The AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the EU Supply Chain Law, the GDPR etc. are all well intended. Albeit born out of anxiety and a false sense to be able to shield Europe from the bad consequences of modern technology. In effect, these regulations create a culture that is toxic for innovation. Resulting in venture capital avoiding Europe and founders leaving for better shores (ie. the US) to create the next billion dollar company.

By contrast, what the EU should absolutely, categorically NOT do is to create projects like this one. With an absurd number of participating organisations, dysfunctional project goals (like “compliance”) and the ballooning bureaucracy that ensues. What talent are they hoping to attract to this project? Any AI researcher with half a brain would avoid OpenEuroLLM, lest he (or she) drag down his (or her) career and waste precious lifetime for what is guaranteed to turn into another tombstone on Europe’s graveyard of ridiculous publicly funded technology projects.

Looks like the typical EU wannabe competition to US Big Tech to me. Like Europe’s Google competitor, Europe’s cloud service, Europe’s operating system and so on.

Like these projects, OpenEuroLLM will go nowhere.

It is always the same approach that never works: First they assemble the usual mix of organisations from all sorts of countries, making sure all the major EU member nations are represented. Then they give the project some moronic goals (they state “compliance” as the #1 objective - wtf?).

The EU commission will pour millions in taxpayer money into this, which is nevertheless not remotely enough to match with the funds raised by US AI companies. And half the money for OpenEuroLLM will be spent on extensive bureaucracy where they have to write lengthy progress reports, pass audits by EU bureaucrats, etc. Not to mention the sizeable travel budget for the people involved. And finally, they may end up with prototypes that (1) nobody asked for and for which there is no market, (2) which do not work well/at all and (3) which are abandoned once the project ends.

The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is.

Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are often fundamentally unhappy in their role. While the short term impact of being made redundant can cause some distress, these people can still use the occasion to reset their careers.

So all in all, no reason for grief.

So that they can release a successor model with thinner bezels.

In reality this may be to (1) to keep costs down and (2) to distance the iPad mini from the more premium iPhone Pro Max.

All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for? iPads are mostly used for media consumption, no matter how Apple wants to position them. Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware, but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads that can make use of “Apple Intelligence” (the silliest moniker since “Spatial Computing” and “Retina Display”).

The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless. Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube. What could have made a difference is a folding display. I think the iPad mini would have been the ideal candidate for that.

One would think that they avoid the embarrassment of releasing another device before their AI features are even available. But no.

Typical leftist nonsense. I want to see the travellers living in The Hague who let themselves be harassed into forgoing their holidays.

Just a suggestion: perhaps a city council should busy itself with running the city, look after its infrastructure, grow the economy, provide great services.

I like to think that students are well advised to spend their money elsewhere. Namely to pay back any student loans. To save up for home loan deposit. Etcetera.

There are other (cheaper) ways to build a professional network. Local meetups, hackathons and whatnot. The best advice I could give graduates is to focus all of their energy on getting ahead in their career, ie. in their job at their employer. This will pay off way better than any IEEE membership could.

Does Google actually consider Go to be a success? I get the impression that it failed in what it set out to be: a successor to C/C++. Or put differently, Rust has eaten Go‘s lunch.

Is this necessarily correlated? I would think that the potential to cause disaster is rather linked to whether AI is given authority to enact autonomously decisions, i.e. given access to critical systems.

Are there any independent statistics for how much AI based coding assistants like GitHub CoPilot improve an average software developer‘s productivity?

I had hoped for something around 5%, which is not massive, but still a non-trivial number.

Not sure how AI assistants in other “high value” professions far. Say in legal, healthcare, finance, civil engineering, business consulting to name a few. Does anyone have reliable figures?

It’s in maintenance mode. They may still support it for legacy Chrome apps (Chrome OS) and manifest-2 browser extensions. For the “drive by” open web, they had an origin trial for a while that you could register for and which would throw your PNaCl apps a “lifeline”.

But for all intents and purposes, WebAssembly is now on par (and beyond) what Portable Native Client supported. Some things were easier in PNaCl - threading support comes to mind.