Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
These are supply chain attacks and in the case of xz utils, the attacker had gone to extreme lenghts to hide the attack from a well-meaning, good-hearthed but overworked and burnt out solo maintainer.
To compare this to bugs that people unwittingly introduce in normal human-written code is not sincere.
There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.
I am not talking about the Linux kernel or the Rust project - they have stabdards way above average commercial projects - but generally “using ai” in practice means to use it for code generation. Then, programmers are expected to review the output but are not given extra time for it. This creates an extremely slippery slope leading to mostly unsupervised code creation. Also because reading and understanding buggy third party code means more effort than writing new code.
Then there is the idea to get rid of the bugs by “debugging”, but debugging is frankly not a software engineering strategy, because you can always just recognize a fraction of the bugs that your process created in the first place. Debugging is also more expensive tha writing good code.
Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.
LLM code generation largely replaces clear specifications with plausible assumptions. That appears to make the process fast, but the result is often wrong. At times obviously wrong, and at times subtly and catastrophically wrong.
We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics.
You mean more lines of code?
A funny idea that one could also use thermal reservoirs to store heat in the summer, extracting cold medium of, say 20°C, and extract this heat again in the winter, cooling the reservoir. Which would be more efficient than to use river water, for example.
This has been proven to work well on relatively small scale (a couple multi-party houses) as “seasonal heat storage”. The key insight is that the amount of energy stored - being proportional to the volume - grows with the third power of the dimension of the storage, while the amount of insulation needed grows only with the second power, because it is proportional to the surface area. Therefore, a storage tank which is ten times as large by size, would be able to store one thousand times more heat, but only need one hundred times more insulation.
They are simply not in the same league as Einstein, Oppenheimer and Russel.
@bekkaboo@girlcock.club Linux itself is heavily using AI models.
For security analysis and uncovering bugs.
I think there are also cities with underground transport systems which are at extreme risk from flash floods, even more than Valencia/Spain.
You might remember these pictures from Henan, China. This is possible not only in China.
For example Munich. Munich is crossed by the Isar river, a rapid mountain river in a narrow valley which is in turn embedded in the Alpine Foreland or Molasse basin, a landscape shaped by the end of an ice age, with wide valleys which could collect considerable amounts of rain. In high waters that occur perhaps every decade, it can look like that. The subway of Munich crosses the river in tunnels which are many floors below the surface, I’d gues some 30 to 40 meters. And it has entrances close to the river.
In case of a large once-in-a-century flash flood, I think this is a really dangerous initial situation. (But be careful and use your own critical thinking - I am no specialist in this).
We have the general problem that we are largely not prepared for such situations, caused by weather conditions which were almost unthinkable as little as 15 years ago.
Uruguay
Namibia
Netherlands
Denmark
Lithuania
El Salvador
Chile
Greece
Hungary
Jordan
Heat waves are a problem, no doubt, but you don’t solve it only thinking to big cities, like for pollution.
No, like the OP The Guardian article, I was talking about larger cities which have decent public transport. They are also hotter than their surroundings which makes relief more important.
Though specifically ozone is also problem in suburbia; it is formed there during the day by photochemical smog, but decomposes way slower than in the direct city areas.
Works already fine for cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen and so on. Driving a ptivate car for transportation is for max comfort, not for need.
And also, heat waves are catastrophic emergencies which kill thousands of people. Wishes for mere comfort cannot have priority then.
Reasonable, few exceptions for really important things - I have no problem with that. But getting some bread rolls from a shop 1 kilometer away? Leave your Benz. Take the bike.
So who’s paying for the lost wages and companies’ income?
I’d suggest fossil oil and gas companies. The causal link was clearly shown by science, and everyone is liable for damages he or she causes. Including companies. Why should it be different this time?
Elect politicians which do build them.
That trick works here, too.
Also: The global market prices for oil and has are heavily influenced by the US. If their reserves run dry, this affects prices here - massively.
You need to see it more positively. What we are experiencing is a system that elegantly combines the shortcimings of capitalism with the disadvantages of communism!
This time, he might be correct.
Maybe it is time to either fight for a future that deserves that name - or leave the US. All of your ancestors (including the First Americans, ten thousand years ago) came there because they followed a quest for a better life.
We also need policies that ban all ICE cars - including Diesel cars - except emergency vehicles during and just before heat waves. They cause photochemical smog, which contains ozone, a highly toxic gas which in heat waves is deadly for people with pulmonary problems.
About Phoenix:
Landlords are required by law to maintain a safe indoor temperature (28C/82F or lower), and companies that contract with the city must implement heat safety plans to keep workers healthy and comfortable.
We must have that law in Europe. Now.
And the fact how it is used in practice, actually, in reality, is the very dark grey that some people call “black” for better clarity. The fact that you can use a large butchers knife for practical things does not mean that entering a primary school with one is the right thing. What are the actual intentions for grabbing that tool?