- 53 Posts
- 300 Comments
1·24 hours agoI’d count my bike as ultra-low emissions since I use vegetable oil for the chain. Plus bikes improve the traffic situation in cities as Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam show.
1·2 days agoThat scenario is becoming more realistic:
Reid said that markets were especially wary of a domino effect, as the issues faced by the two banks followed the bankruptcy of the sub-prime automotive lender Tricolor last month.
The US regional banking industry has been under scrutiny after First Brands, an auto parts supplier, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in late September over creditor concerns.
In its bankruptcy filing, First Brands disclosed that it had at least $10bn to $50bn in liabilities against $1bn to $10bn in assets, the product of what appeared to be risky off-balance-sheet financing.Reid said that markets were especially wary of a domino effect, as the issues faced by the two banks followed the bankruptcy of the sub-prime automotive lender Tricolor last month.
21·2 days agoYikes.
I am already uncomfortable when my mom talks with her phone to search Google. But hey, she is 83 years old and her health is declining. Maybe she does not need so much privacy any more.
But here is a sad story: I have two friends, a couple. Both are automation engineers. They could not have kids, which was their life dream. So instead, they re-purposed their energy and built their dream house. A beautiful house. And, of course, with a lot of automation and logic programmed by them. Shutters which open in the morning and close when it is stormy. A shower which plays the right morning radio program. Extra settings for when parents-in-law visit.
But what makes me uncomfortable is voice control by speech recognition. All that cortana/siri stuff. For everything, even switching on the light. I don’t like that when I visit people. For me, it is like somebody is always listening, even to stuff that is meant only for my friends ears.
I have not told them, but I don’t like that house.
In Germany, new middle-range cars are just too expensive. So what happens is that companies get tax rebates if they give cars to employees instead of taxed salary, and these cars are sold a bit later on the used car market. This now covers around half of the market for more expensive cars, which covers maybe half of their running costs, and is nothing else than a government subsidy for the car industry - without that, they simply would sell less, and at a lower price. But there is never enough money for decent public transport or safe cycle paths.
Completely insane. It’s like listening to an indebted crack or cocaine addict rationalizing why he needs to spend all his money on the drug.
Another thing is that car insurance costs are also rising sharply in the US. This is caused by the surge of extreme weather which in turn is caused by climate change:
https://www.dailyclimate.org/climate-change-increases-car-insurance-2669563061.html
In a nutshell, car insurers make a profit by covering events that are expensive but happen rarely. Like your car being stolen, or being destroyed in a road accident, or going up in flames because something is wrong with the motor.
Extreme weather adds to this profile risks that are expensive and happen much more frequently. Like a large part of the cars in the area of Houston being destroyed by flooding. Against such risks, insurance does not help much, which means that owning cars becomes even less economical than it is already.
I don’t know what you mean with this - could you explain?
What he means is the following: When you discover one such company going bust because it was cooking its books, there are probably dozens hidden ones which are not yet uncovered and are doing the same. Like cockroaches: When you spot one, there are likely many.
The cycleways in the center of Munich along river Isar are also becoming quite crowded.
But know what? That’s life. We solve a nasty problem, and get a nicer problem or challenge in turn.
The company’s development and expansion of its services will rely in no small part on massive data center projects, which will require the same amount of energy to operate as New York City and San Diego combined—energy that currently isn’t even available.
In that case, there is a little but fundamental problem. It is based on basic physics: You can fake securities or earnings, or you can print money. But you can’t fake energy because that violates the laws of physics.
On the other side of the deal, OpenAI will have to pay about $60 billion per year to fit the bill for the agreement. It currently generates about $10 billion in revenue, which, statistically speaking, is less than $60 billion.
ok.
1·6 days agoWhy do you want to start a distro war?
Is this with the intent of trolling our community?
“Let many flowers blossom”.
I don’t use ChatGPT. I found that list in a one-minute search on Hacker News, and the only point my comment adresses is the factually wrong statement that memory leaks are not a problem.
19·7 days agoFirst interview from him I’ve read in a long time. He comes over as very down-to-earth, honest and humble. And he is not mincing words about his opinion on the AI hype.
Another thing, he confirms something I was worried about, in his comments on parallelism / Python without the Global Interpreter Lock (aka GIL): Some developments in the language serve rather the big companies, than the community and open source projects. For example, lock-less multi-threading in Python serves mostly the largest companies, while having little value for small projects.
Personally, I think this was already visible in the 2/3 transition: It would have been possible to make Python 3 backwards-compatible (as an example, SBCL added Unicode support without breaking compatibility, and in the same way Python’s Numpy was a compatible drop-in replacement for the old Numeric module).
But the dominant Python users were not interested in making Python 3 backwards-compatible. Now, mega-corporations with an overkill of money, or Silicon Valley start-ups which are unlikely to survive their third year, do not need backwards-compatibility so much. On the other hand, smaller community projects and above all the scientific community need it urgently. Just as an example: The Python Wiki is a MoinMoin wiki. MoinMoin was written in Python 2, and the maintainers did so far not have the resources to port it to Python 3. That’s a pity because it is the most, if not the only full-featured and easy to manage wiki software written in Python, and the situation can be seen as an example how the influence of big corporations like Google is killing the open web.
Also, structured programming was developed in the 1950ies, manifest by ALGOL being published in 1958.. McCarthy’s first publication on LISP was surprisingly close to that, in 1960.
It is a surprisingly fuzzy concept.
Historically, OOP languages like C++ and Java have evolved from Simula. Simula was designed and used to simulate ships. From this comes the notion that OOP objects should be physical “things”. But this has not aged well.
Simula also had the idea to build definitions by hierarchical implementation inheritance. C++ adopted that, too, and apart from usage in GUI frameworks, this has not aged well, either.
Then there was Smalltalk, which has an entirely different concept from C++, focusing on messaging. Here, methods are messages.
The best modern explanation I’ve read is from Sandy Metz in “Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby”.
https://hellread.com/2025/07/03/practical-object-oriented-design-in-ruby-by-sandi-metz/
https://sandimetz.com/products
What she explains is that one should group code and data so that this limits the scope of change when evolving the program.
Then, there is the much older idea that the programmer defines data types and operations on them which guarantee invariants. It is a very powerful concept, and was already described by Edsgar Dijkstra in 1970:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD249/EWD249.html
https://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Structured Programming.pdf
C++ uses this concept, too, in its container classes, but in a bastardized form: Invariants are suggested but rarely spelled out. You can for example iterate over elements of a container class / collection, but whether the iteraror remains valid with certain operations or not, and triggers Undefined Behavior, you are not told explictely. In contrast, for Dijkstra it was essential that operations and invariants were well-defined and written out.
I do not agree. I think the main characteristic is use of side-effect-free functions, which the article illustrates nicely.
Of course it will be “more functional” if you write in Clojure or Scheme. Or go hardcore with Haskell. But as John Carmack wrote, you can practice functional programming in C++:
That’s not so clear to me. It uses short sentences and has a presentation-style language, yes.
But what happened to QA?
Followed Microsofts example and fired these useless workers /s
They do not leak memory at all.
Here some examples of memory leaks:
Alternative OSes surely do have better privacy than Android, but that’s probably not sufficient. On Smartphones, there runs not a single CPU like on a laptop, but more like 5 computers and only one of them is controlled by the OS. For example, there is a baseband processor and a radio modem. And the SIM card is a computer. And part of these can be controlled remotely (have you ever wondered how your phone automatically re-programs it parameters when you change providers?).
And then there are gaps in authentication in the radio prozocol: Your phone / SIM card authenticates against a radio tower so that the right phone user pays the bill. But the phone has no way to detect a rogue mobile tower…
I am in the same boat here. I want a phone to fit into my pocket… personally I don’t like handbags.