mathw

I think it's "scam everyone into giving us lots of money, then run before the bills come".

They had to keep those sweet TV millions flowing in though!

And keep players in condition for when the crowds could come back without too much risk of death.

Those are both pretty good reasons to keep having the games.

Yeah there's a lot of stuff comes off tyres, and EVs still have that. They also produce brake dust, although maybe less of it because of regenerative braking.

But they do have no tailpipe emissions, so they're still kicking out a lot less air pollution than a combustion-fuelled vehicle with not just the carbon dioxide but the myriad of pollutants which lower urban air quality so much.

Ultimately, a less dusty tyre would be a good thing, but the significant impact we can make now is to continue the EV transition knowing that like all solutions it's imperfect and we also need to use fewer vehicles and keep looking for better options.

It's definitely a thing in parts of the UK - it's to do with what the ground is made of.

My understanding is that more recent fission reactor designs are done in such a way that they fail in ways which cause the reaction to diminish rather than build up further, which puts you in a better place than, say, Chernobyl.

You still have a very hot very radioactive lump of death in the middle of your busted reactor when it's all done though, and that's definitely not fun. Fusion failure modes - in current designs anyway - are far more appealing to anybody who happens to be in the area at the time.

The author claims so, but there don't seem to be any sources.

Given how the AI hype has been going though I wouldn't be at all surprised. And the article's following conclusions are also unsurprising (other than the bit where it claims AI can actually replace your software engineers)

That one is fairly easy isn't it - it's because it's not very good. Or at least, it doesn't live up to its own hype.

The thrashing wails of people who've spent billions on something that they should have done more due diligence on and don't want to write off their investment.

Yes, in Google Workspace it's shoving itself at me continually.

And it should be fairly easy for them because they're already doing it for most of the rest of the world.

Foundationally though C++ still allows a lot of implicit casts that can and will shoot you in the foot.

You CAN write nice modern code in C++, but the ability to force yourself and all your colleagues to do so in perpetuity isn't really there yet.

Although it might be in the future, which would be nice.

It's all rather pointless. The technology exists, therefore criminals will use it. Banning it for everyone else doesn't really achieve anything.

Hungary sadly shows us that the EU's defences against one of its own members going rogue are very poor. No doubt a relic of the idealism in which it was founded - we're all nice people, of course we're going to stay that way.

And also the pragmatism of not handing over too much control from national governments to the EU bodies.

And why shouldn't incitement to racial hatred be illegal?

People might choose to fly somewhere else instead though, so it doesn't necessarily reduce the overall amount of carbon emissions from air travel. Especially if you see Europeans deciding to go somewhere else in the Americas instead, which I've heard some of my friends considering. Although if Europeans choose to travel within Europe instead then yes we'd see a reduction as the distances are rather shorter (and with any luck some of them would go by rail)

Solving complex problems with simple systems is really really difficult.

Most people can't do it.

Even worse, most businesses are actively preventing it with the way they want their teams to work. How many people reading this can honestly say they get time to address technical debt or rework things to fit a more coherent view of the overall pattern that has developed with time and fixes and added features? How many developers can truly say they get to choose the best technology to do their job? Do you actually use the languages and tools that fit your domain best?

Almost none of us, right?

Also some of what you cite is fairly early-stage tech. IaC is still such a new concept that it's not surprising nobody's figured out how to make something that isn't incredibly annoying yet. Terraform, Bicep, whatever, it's all pretty raw and hideous still.

It's not so much that we like complex and messy tools and solutions, it's that we don't - for various reasons - have a choice.

Absolutely. Trans people should absolutely not consider travel to the USA at the moment.

Everything has changed in practice, when people are detained at the border because they posted something on social media which was critical of Trump, in a country which prides itself on having "freedom of speech" in the constitution. When denial of entry means weeks in detention rather than an expedient flight back to where you came from. When going to speak at a conference can get you detained for violating a visa which has always been fine for that before. When people with green cards are getting arrested and sent for deportation... everything has changed.

They didn't actually change anything, they just tried to clarify what had made people panic about things they never intended to do.

At least, that's how I read it. IANAL.

Sure, search every outbound shipping container in case it's got a stolen car in it. Super practical.

And what about the cars which are stolen and then broken up and sold as parts? That's fairly common.

And the ones which are given false plates and resold - perfectly doable if nobody checks the VIN - and never leave the country.

Just because we're an island doesn't make it easy.

But we do need to spend more resources on crime prevention and the apprehension of criminals, we've known that for years but we've also kept electing governments who refuse to do it while also claiming to be "tough on crime" so it's the usual mess.

By making tools used to commit crime illegal where they don't have a legitimate reason to be carried, you can charge people with that crime if they're found rather than having to wait for them to actually commit the crime the tools are for. Less harm done but they still get stopped, is the idea.

The other idea is that if the tools themselves are illegal it's a higher barrier to entry for the people who want to get into that kind of crime so maybe some of them will never start in the first place.

And it does work in some circumstances.

They perhaps could have gone with clarifying or strengthening existing legislation instead of course. There's already an offence of "going equipped to steal", but it is hard to prove because you might be able to get a court to believe that you were carrying a bunch of housebreaking tools around in the middle of the night for some legitimate reason.

So that's why we tend to pass laws to target tools.

And yes, hardened car thieves probably won't be deterred, but it will be easier to prosecute them if they're found in suspicious circumstances and found with these now-illegal devices. It's not like criminals usually think they're going to get caught - the deterrent effect simply doesn't work on some people.

That wouldn't help people who have cars that already don't do that very sensible thing which yes should be mandatory on all new cars with keyless entry worldwide.

Well of course you can. We have freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences.

I'll agree with you on that, but I think there's a really important thing that we have to also say about their business model: they developed and launched a product they knew couldn't live up to its billing or its price point. It shouldn't ever have made it beyond its conceptual investigation. Put it on the back burner, try again in five or ten years.

I've yet to see an ORM which doesn't just eventually make everything harder. Especially when it comes to automatic migrations, which seldom seem to take into account production necessities like multi-node deployment, downtime considerations and not destroying your production data silently because it doesn't fit.

And if you think China and the USA and Russia wouldn't want it... hey I've got this bridge for sale.

Both easy and difficult problems can have simple or complex solutions. Two different axes of measurement.

Most problems in software seem to end up being harder than they look, so if I think something is easy I have to suspect I've missed something.

Most solutions in software end up being more complicated than they needed to be, because we don't have the hindsight to realise that until after we've done it and our managers are demanding the next thing.

I'm finding Kagi gives me relevant results much more readily than Google, where I have to wade through all those sites which take technical content from other sites and repost it for ad revenue. I'm on the lower tier plan and haven't hit the monthly search limit yet... but I'll consider upgrading if I do, because wow it's so much better for me.

It does seem likely though that it's not going to be better for absolutely everyone, other than in terms of having their business model being "give good search results" rather than "give people adverts we can charge advertisers for".

This is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake.

I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.

If they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?

s/Fun/Excruciatingly Tedious/