I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .

Between “One too many nulls” and “The tests are larger . . .” in the beginning, then moving up one notch for each day you’ve been wrestling with it.

I actually have a bit of hope for this one, since they seem to have figured out a way to avoid one of the known problems with these systems. At very least, it’s an angle worth exploring.

Yes, but as a solution it’s far inferior to not presenting questionable output to the public at all.

(There are a few specific AI/LLM types whose output we might be able to “human-proof”—for instance, if we don’t allow image generators to make photorealistic images of any sort for any purpose, they become much more difficult to abuse—but I can’t see how you would do it for search engine adjuncts like this without having a human curate their training sets.)

Because a lot of people won’t look at sources even if you serve them up on a silver platter?

eat as much glue as you can

Likely won’t make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue (“white glue”), is safe to ingest. The Elmer’s glue “recommended” in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.

Eh, I’m sure we can overrun it just by gluing sufficient instances of Factory to the end of the classname.

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to “buy” or “own” anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you’re buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that’s what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

That assumes all the trees survive. A lot of them apparently don’t.

And Perl.

Modest profit isn’t an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.

If it’s just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that’s no problem.

All software has bugs in it.

People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn’t scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.

The service went bankrupt.

When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn’t get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.

The money didn’t get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.

So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone’s ticked off.

Oh, there’s undoubtedly plenty of blame to go around. Samsung is one of the few manufacturers large enough that they might be able to apply some pressure to Qualcomm and its ilk, and they aren’t doing it, or at least aren’t doing it enough.

Part of the problem is the chip manufacturers. They provide precompiled device drivers for one version of one kernel only, no source, and refuse to update them ever again. It can be a bit difficult to update the rest of the software stack when there’s no way to shore up the foundations. Device manufacturers need to start insisting on updated drivers and/or provided driver source code before they buy the chips to put in their phones, tablets, and other systems.

Good luck on that.

Nah, the relevant question is, “Did Boeing force the Soviets to make shitty planes?” If not, you can’t claim capitalism is the source of crappy planes.

My understanding is that it’s more for logging in industries like aerospace, where it’s imperative to be sure that bolt X was tightened with force Y if you don’t want the airplane to fall apart. Networking isn’t the only way to do this, or even the only automated way, but I guess they didn’t want to have to hook each wrench up to a USB cable at the end of every shift to download its log.

(The comments section on Ars is studded with remarks about Boeing, as you would expect.)

If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.

If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅

Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a “music library” that doesn’t in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it’s still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.

Tesla and Rivian are both newer electric-only manufacturers, though (unless there’s something I don’t know about Rivian). Their market is quite different from stodgy old GM’s.