Dave.

I was talking more about unwrap causing a panic rather than calling the actual panic macro directly. Rust forces the programmer to deal with bad or ambiguous results, and what that is exactly is entirely decided by the function you are calling. If a function decides to return None when (system timer mod 2 == 0), then you’d better check for None in your code. Edit: otherwise your code is ending now with a panic, as opposed to your code merrily trotting down the path of undefined behaviour and a segfault or similar later on.

Once you get to a point where we are doing the actual panic, well, that is starting to just be semantics.

causing the program to crash if it actually was an error, restoring the more unsafe behavior of other languages.

Wellllll it’s more of an abrupt exit rather than a crash, which is still better than eg. silently accessing beyond the end of an array, or ending up with a pointer to nowhere when you thought you had a sane memory reference.

A guy I used to work with went by the nickname of “Womble”, his name was actually Raymond.

One day I was poking through work orders in our system and discovered that it also officially knew him as “Womble <last name>” and there was no sign of Raymond in there.

Conjuring up a frequency graph from 2004-present doesn’t help your argument, as the VCR format wars were pretty much over a good 15 years beforehand.

“VCR” could have meant either VHS or Betamax to a consumer in the early '80s.

At least VHS specifies a particular standard, and “player” in that context has a loose connection with record player, or tape player , being the thing you play your purchased records / tapes / videos on.

wut

Seconded.

Why?

Because people should be looking to expand their knowledge by getting into the details. By handwaving those details away with an AI summary that may or may not actually summarise the article correctly, people lose the opportunity to learn.

If your attention span or cognitive capacity can’t get you through a basic Wikipedia article you need to work on that, for your own betterment.

If you’re reading an article and you’re lost in the weeds you should be taking a step back to simpler concepts in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) first. Don’t trust a LLM to make a coherent summary about a topic you can’t understand, because you won’t be able to tell if it’s feeding you bullshit.

It’s BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.

Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the “magic packet” of wake on Ethernet.

Super convenient for “find my device” applications, also nice to be able to connect and activate the device without having to press a power button like a peasant.

It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for “convenience”. With BLE on it would be flat in about 6 weeks regardless of whether I’d used it or not , which really ruined ad-hoc usage for me.

We’ve all been there, back in the day haha

But they had “kernel tweaks for buttery smooth performance!!! ^*”

* oh yeah bluetooth, wifi, fingerprint sensor doesn’t work, camera takes green tint pictures, phone app crashes, and I’ve had some hard lockups, but it’s been my daily driver for two hours now and it’s awesome!!1!

Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.

Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.

Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we’d be set for a century or two.

Australian here.

Step 1: design your damn toilets so they do not clog.

Step 2: there is no step 2.

Seriously, half a century of toilet use here in Aus and I’ve never caused - or discovered even - a blocked toilet at home.

Clearly the fact that I can buy a toilet plunger from the local hardware store indicates that this can happen here. But it seems that every American household has a toilet plunger and poop knife on standby and many articles are devoted to what clogs, and how to unclog, American toilets.

There are better designs for both toilets and plumbing out there guys, maybe you should look into using them.

These kind of “manual” a/c units normally have a little sticker or a caution in the manual to “wait 5 minutes before restarting”.

People can easily trigger this kind of thing just by turning the thermostat back and forth, so there is usually a thermal cutout on the compressor to keep them mostly safe.

You can usually hear it when it activates, there will be a hum from the stalled compressor for a few seconds and then a little click, and then the compressor won’t start for a minute or two.

This kind of reliability is huge for prosthetic limbs, fitness trackers, and robotic arms, where precision and durability are non-negotiable.

Thanks, AI slop! Sensors that have been durability tested for a few hundred cycles will be perfect for prosthetic devices that can do that in half a day of office work, or fitness trackers that can do that in five minutes, or in robotic arms that can perform that kind of movement in 60 seconds! I’m going to use them in my next safety critical robotics project for sure!

It’ll be fine as long as you don’t try and start it up again within a few minutes of turning it off.

Pressure just needs to slowly bleed from the high pressure side to the low pressure side of the compressor before it starts again, so that it isn’t initially stalled against high pressure.

"automated decision systems "

“IF X THEN Y” satisfies this description.

Soooo basically just take the handbrake off practically every chunk of software ever written then?

Are you familiar with https://old.reddit.com/

How much longer do you think Reddit will keep an option that doesn’t maximise end user engagement metrics?

I was reliably informed at the start of the year that the US was just days away from the best jobs, the biglyest paychecks, and a golden age.

Was I misled‽

Public with conditions on behaviour which can lead to your licence being revoked, just like the current GPL. 🤷‍♂️

Those who use AI to report to open source projects and flood the volunteering devs who keep the World going, should be disqualified from using those open source projects

I propose a GPL-noAI licence with this clause inserted.

Linus was ahead of his time in the human-identifiabilty stakes.