shirro

The US is a bit of an outlier in "the west". They have extreme protectionist trade barriers to protect the local auto industry and fossil fuel producers. Most other "western" countries have a more Laissez-faire approach. Ironically the biggest driver for EV sales at the moment is high oil prices caused by US military action.

The US is simultaneously driving global EV adoption and the crazy growth of Chinese automotive technology and manufacturing and stranding their own automotive sector in the past. A lot of people who thought Trump was going to be a disaster are seeing him as an unwitting ally now.

BYD went from unheard of to number 2 in Australia in about 4 years. Chinese made Tesla are still holding onto 10th spot here but they have MG and Geely coming up behind them. BYD and GWM are now supported by local dealerships that have been in my town for decades and I see the cars in the local community unlike Tesla. I don't know where the Tesla sales are but they aren't around here.

I am still driving an ancient Nissan and although Electric is looking very compelling at the moment I distrust all the brands and products currently on the market regardless of nation of origin. I guess if they are all privacy nightmares then you might as well go for the cheapest.

BYD is currently the second biggest selling vehicle manufacturer (not just EV) in Australia after Toyota and ahead of Ford. It is also the only one increasing sales in the top three. All the vehicles sold here meet our strict design rules. There are some notable US vehicles that even with substantial engineering modifications probably couldn't be made compliant with our safety regulations.

I heard my 12yo uses "AI" as a synonym for crap in a context which had nothing to do with machine learning. There is a pronounced and growing disconnect between the fervently pro-AI messaging on platforms like HN and regular people. Anti-AI sentiment goes deep and has momentum. A few billion dollars of marketing and influencer spend isn't going to turn it around. When the bubble deflates as most people feel it must I think it will only reinforce the negativity.

Our political and business elites need age verification added to their penis.

There is a medical recommendation for ages 9-25 in my country though the public funded mass vaccination program is for 12-13 as the most effective age.

The thought that a 9yo would need protection from STDs is very upsetting which I would guess makes it a talking point. It is better to mass vaccinate at whatever age is publicly acceptable than not at all so I would concede that to critics.

Anyone exposed to sexual activity at such an age is clearly a victim of abuse. Penalising victims of abuse, whether it be forcing them to attempt to carry a baby to term, against medical advice, or forcing them to deal with the consequences of STDs is a very peculiar and nasty attitude. When societies start justifying denial of care and treatment along lines of class, politics, age, race, religion, gender or perceptions of "morality" there's a bigger problem.

It doesn't matter so much if the LLMs are better or worse for learning things. I tend to think much worse in the long term. The problem is the reduction in choice. Soon we won't have web search. No user generated content. No genuine personal interaction. No blogs. No personal computer industry. No tech book publishers. Its all going to be LLM generated content owned by a small group of people. It sucks. I am in the opt out group wondering what exactly will be left to opt out into.

My understanding is that auditory hallucinations are more common in schizophrenia which makes this more of a WTF.

Aphantasiac here so this raises an obvious question. Cursory search suggests visual hallucinations due to drugs or schizophrenia are reported. Conscious and involuntary visualisation seem to be somewhat independent.

With all respect to Christoffer and Bjarne and many others who are much smarter and more experience than me who have said similar things I am far from convinced. Their languages are not memory safe and they either are not doing bounds checking or proving it unnecessary. If iteration is causing underflow or overflow then perhaps the problem isn't signed or unsigned indexes.

I don't recall similar arguments being made for Pascal or ADA.

Look around at the state of our C++ and C software and all the CVEs I think we probably shouldn't care about unsigned or signed loop indexes and move on before regulatory pressure forces us. Please language designers, give us some interesting alternatives to Rust.

People shouldn't have to justify not putting up with bullshit. It is a sensible default.

I haven't seen a stove top kettle since the 1970s. And they were an old design then. I have never seen one in a shop either. A typical electric kettle has the handle at the back and spout at the front. There isn't really anyway to come into contact with steam in normal use. They are cheap, safe and fast.

I think it is very clear from the way all US allies have reacted to various provocations that we are taking a long term view. That is the reason we are still spying on our domestic populations for the US despite our reservations about the current executive and their actions.

The problem for all 5 eyes (or 9 or 14) is that our co-operation dates back to the cold war and the institutions and thinking have not caught up to current geo-political and technical changes. If anything we are accelerating our co-operation at a time when many voters are seriously questioning the future of the US alliance.

I wish some of our leaders would be more forthcoming about the amount of foreign pressure their governments are under. We talk about the negative influence on social media and politics of countries we are not allied with often but there is an astonishing silence when it comes to the biggest player. There is a very real threat to local values and democracy.

It is getting more difficult to research now. Increasingly I just grab the source code locally and don't bother with the browser. Every search returns pages of wordy AI generated docs. At best they restate the code. At worse they read like badly written brochures. I am avoiding any project that doesn't have a long history. Large, feature packed projects that appeared out of nowhere on github with a single commit with no history or users are essentially stolen code that has been machine translated to obscure the original authors works.

I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.