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Submission + - Popular Tech Site Caves to AI $, Starts Serving AI Popups (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Popular but greying tech site Slashdot succumbs to commercial pressure, allowing AI-serving popups "Create AI Apps with Mongo DB!"

Long held to be a bastion of 'old tech' linux advocates and crusty DOS command-line devotees, they were widely representative of the cutting edge of the golden age of desktops and still regarded highly for their knowledge of kernel lore and deep protocols fundamental to modern computing. Fading in relevance since its heyday of the 1990s and 2000s, conventional wisdom would still have suggested this should have been the last bastion to fall to the idea of letting LLMs "do the coding for you", but Slashdot admins, alert for commercial opportunities (on a site that remains relatively ad free), clearly have a different opinion. "Our users need to understand what an opportunity this was for us" they are imagined to have said, "there's a TON of cash sloshing around the gigantic shamconomy of OpenAI, NVidia, and ChatGPT — why can't some of it splash our way? As they say: 'carpe pecuniam'!."

Comment Re:Code of Conduct - Exact Text (Score 2) 780

by sinij (#57334898) Attached to: Linux Community To Adopt New Code of Conduct

Because there may be times where they may be socially associated with an organization, but not acting on "official" behalf of them. As a contrived example, if they're attending an industry conference where they're not an "appointed representative", people may still identify them as a "Linux maintainer".

I don't disagree that it's ambiguous, but with people attempting to be hyper-literal in order to defend their terrible behavior as unactionable, I don't see any way it couldn't be. They have to leave themselves room to allow a case-by-case basis in egregious circumstances.

It should be unactionable, because alternative is subjective and selective policing and that is orders of magnitude worse. My view that it shouldn't be up to a project to police terrible behaviour that is not directly related to the project.

Submission + - New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance on Biofuels

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes that turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand and that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population. “I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated,” says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.

Timothy D. Searchinger says that recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. “It’s true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise,” says Jason Hill said. “We’ve found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system.”
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Submission + - Are 12-16 Hour Workdays 'A Good Life'?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: 'It's important to me,' former Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz recalls saying as he threatened a manager for termination because one of his subordinates failed to conduct 1:1 meetings, 'that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It’s why I come to work.' Ben seems to be cut from the same management cloth as new Yahoo CEO Marissa "I-Don't-Really-Believe-In-Burnout" Mayer, who boasted how she solved the work-life balance problems of mother-of-three 'Katie' [presumably Twitter's Katie Stanton], who was required to attend nightly 1 a.m. video conference calls with her Google Finance team in Bangalore, by no longer making Katie also stay for late meetings on her Google day shift on those occasions where it'd make her miss her kids' soccer games and recitals.

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Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter

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