I would doubt that the average self-updating Windows program has better security.

Related: Robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks saw this coming: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-go-within-10-feet-of-todays-walking-robots/

I think this is a well-written and important article.

One more aspect: The article lines out that todays control algirithms for robots are not inherently stable and can’t guarantee safety.

I have seen some code that runs in some if such humanoid robots and would like to add the following warning: the control code for robots is typically written by researchers, not safety experts. While there might be some brilliant programmers among them, such code will be, in most of the cases, a hot mess which cannot guarantee any safety. It will certainly not meet requirements which are commonly mandated for things like complex medical devices, automobiles, or other dangerous work equipment - but due to the much larger complexity and dangerous mechanical forces in such robots, the requirements should be higher than in automobiles.

Well, what the world really needs are laptops with built-in HVAC support!

Would you go near an uncontrollable maniac swinging a ten-pound sledgehammer, or stand two meters below a larger-than life bronce sculpture of Neptun with a harpoon, weighting 150 kilograms, which is not fixed, unstable and could at any moment fall upon you?

No? Then you should not go near such a robot.

Yeah, but is it useful to rob the Mona Lisa?

I can confirm that even female penguins prefer to wear tuxedos ☺

Yeah Brexit was a test run. Great Summary by Carole Cadwalladr “The great British Brexit Robbery” (published by the Guardian, de-published following pressure by Google, I guess, but can be found on the net).

I was completely spooked by the fact that these Brexiteers were using language in a Nazi-like way. At one point a former Thatcher minister was booed out of a conservative party assembly which shouted “he is a traitor!”.

What should that babble even mean?

In a data center, you have 4 main problems:

1. Get an massive amount of computers there, and maintain them to keep working, including repairs and upgrades
2. Get an massive amount of data there and the results back
3. Get a constant and massive flow of electrical power there
4. Get an equally massive amount of heat away from it.

Being in orbit helps with exactly none of that. For example, the heat: In orbit, there is no air or water which would work as a cooling medium, but just a vacuum which cools almost nothing. It is like a vacuum flask. Get your smart phone when running hot in such a vacuum flask and tell me how it worked…

So what is the purpose of all that bullshit??

Much better to install Linux, install a virtual machine (GNOME Boxes) in which you run what you still need Windows for, and access files via a Samba service as shared files.

Or just switch to Linux, and copy your files. It is good for daily use.

Dumb question: What exactly is “ricing”? I’d also be curious to learn about the etymology of that term…

Yikes.

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.

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.

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…

It seems to be just accepted that everyone is going to jump to another company every couple years (usually due to companies not giving adequate raises).

Well. I did the last jump because the quality was so bad.

I am physicist and software engineer. My current Linux desktop PC is now 16 years old, from 2009, and with 8-core CPU and 16 GB RAM is still plain over-powered for running Emacs and rustc under Debian and Arch in VM. It is only the third desktop computer I own. I bought the second one in 1999, and that one had an AMD K6 (Pentium-like) CPU with 300Mhz clock, running S.u.S.E. Linux, and I used it for writing uni stuff and my PhD thesis on digital speech processing. The first PC I owned was a old PC with an Intel 80386 CPU which my uncle gave me in 1995. I could barely run Word 6.0 on Windows 3.11 on it (MS Word became very instable for larger documents), but LaTeX (emTeX) was running totally fine (after installing it from about 30 floppy disks).

So, to sum up: Using Linux you will save a ton of money for hardware.