• An experimental AI combat drone being tested by the US Air Force turned the tables when, stymied from achieving its goals by a no-go signal from its operator, it decided to take the human out of the decision loop - permanently.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This story came out a couple of days ago but I held off on it because it sounded more like a morality play than the kind of accident that actually happens with advanced weapon testing, which tend to be loud and messy and not relegated to a presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society.
  
  And in fact there were two issues with the way this story was at first reported:
  
  1. It was a simulation rather than a live test of actual hardware.
  
  2. None of it ever happened.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Does the First Amendment protect the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of their grievances?
  
  It depends.
  
  
  
  
  Depends on what?
  
  
  
  
  Oh, yeah.  Right.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is planning to end support for its Cortana virtual assistant in Windows by the end of this year.  (Thurrott)
  
  And replace it with something much worse.
  
  
  
• Microsoft had a ten-hour outage of its Azure platform in Brazil after a typo led to deleting a production database instead of just removing a backup of the database.  (Azure)
  
  That sounds like bad design - that the same command with very minor differences would delete your database instead of just cleaning up old backups.
  
  But it's alarmingly common.  ZFS uses the same command to remove snapshots and entire filesystems, and LXD uses the same command for removing backups and deleting virtual servers.
  
  Both have some degree of protection in that they won't normally delete resources that are in use, but it's a good practice to have two completely independent backup mechanisms.
  
  
  
• Or three, if you care about your data.
  
  
  
• More details of the alleged Arrow Lake desktop chips expected from Intel late next year.  (Notebook Check)
  
  This year's Meteor Lake is expected to be a laptop-only release, with only a minor refresh for desktop users - maybe another 100MHz or so.  Arrow Lake will double the number of Efficiency (E) cores from 16 to 32 but will otherwise be very similar to current chips.
  
  In 2025 there will supposedly be a new architecture with a greatly improved Performance (P) core design, up to 40% faster, similar to leaks about AMD's Zen 5 cores.
  
  
  
• Building a tree-walk interpreter in Julia.  (Luke Merrick)
  
  Pro Tip: Don't do this.  The results are...  Bad.
  
  Julia is a fine programming language but dynamically-typed interpreters are not its métier.
  
  
  

How That Bottle of Cherry Soda Gets from the Farm to Your Fridge USDA Documentary Video of the Day

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