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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I think your take is a bit extreme.

    Currently their statement (regardless of the questionable justification) is largely correct, no major c++ projects have been written in a safe subset and no real work has really started yet. It isn’t practical.

    I do agree with you that a safe form of c++, once fully implemented and not frustrating to use, could easily become viable, the feature can be added. But that’s still years away from practical usage in large project, and even when done, many projects will stick to the older forms, making the transition slow and frustrating.

    The practical result is that he’s sort of right, if you just add the word “currently” to his statement.

    Otoh, I do agree with you that rust cannot be the sole answer to this problem either, it’s almost as impractical to rewrite codebases in rust as an as-yet unfinished safe form of C++. Only time and lots of effort can fix this problem






  • I disagree, they are not talking about the online low trust sources that will indeed undergo massive changes, they’re talking about organisations with chains of trust, and they make a compelling case that they won’t be affected as much.

    Not that you’re wrong either, but your points don’t really apply to their scenario. People who built their career in photography will have t more to lose, and more opportunity to be discovered, so they really don’t want to play silly games when a single proven fake would end their career for good. It’ll happen no doubt, but it’ll be rare and big news, a great embarrassment for everyone involved.

    Online discourse, random photos from events, anything without that chain of trust (or where the “chain of trust” is built by people who don’t actually care), that’s where this is a game changer.




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzT. rex
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    2 months ago

    I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.

    I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.

    I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…




  • scratchee@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzLinguistics
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    2 months ago

    “Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.


  • Reasoning is obviously useful, not convinced it’s required to be a good driver. In fact most driving decisions must be done rapidly, I doubt humans can be described as “reasoning” when we’re just reacting to events. Decisions that take long enough could be handed to a human (“should we rush for the ferry, or divert for the bridge?”). It’s only the middling bit between where we will maintain this big advantage (“that truck ahead is bouncing around, I don’t like how the load is secured so I’m going to back off”). that’s a big advantage, but how much of our time is spent with our minds fully focused and engaged anyway? Once we’re on autopilot, is there much reasoning going on?

    Not that I think this will be quick, I expect at least another couple of decades before self driving cars can even start to compete with us outside of specific curated situations. And once they do they’ll continue to fuck up royally whenever the situation is weird and outside their training, causing big news stories. The key question will be whether they can compete with humans on average by outperforming us in quick responses and in consistently not getting distracted/tired/drunk.








  • Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

    Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

    Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

    As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

    Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.