Karellen

Oh yeah, "nine blue fish" would make a lot more sense there.

if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish,

I don't get this. What does the proportion of blue fish have to do with the total number of fish you catch?

Is there some stats knowledge I'm missing?

    Marty: Organised crime?
    Cosmo: Trust me, it ain't that organised!

Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)

Um, malloc() is not a system call?

But then strings with the hash code HASH_MAX would wrap to 0 instead.

Can't believe no-one else has made a comment about how great the form id "230" (tooth-hurty) is, yet. Bravo.

Is there a 2010-era feature you're relying on that LibreOffice doesn't have yet?

When was the last security update for MS Office 2010? Wikipedia reckons sometime in late 2020. It might be worth looking at alternatives if you ever open potentially untrusted documents - maybe ones that appear to have been sent by people you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Support_polic...

At a Morgan Stanley conference this month, Brian Robins, finance chief for San Francisco-based software maker GitLab, said GitLab is aligned with the goals of DOGE, because the company’s software tools aim to help people do more with less.

“What the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to do is what GitLab does,” Robins said.

...well, fuck

I need to give a name to my theory which posits that horseshoe theory is a bullshit right-wing talking point, no different from the classic villain trope "We are not so different, you and I", where one side admits to being awful but uses false analogies to try and paint the other with the same brush, and the other rejects both the comparison and the conclusion.

The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.

...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.

That takes a really long time though. Most domestic dogs can still breed with wild wolves after ~14,000 years of being pretty well separated by humans, and after some fairly substantial phenotypic shifts.

During the discussion, Hu said that even if product builders rely heavily on AI, one skill they would have to be good at is reading the code and finding bugs.

Naturally, that brings to mind the classic:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

-- Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

And also:

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

-- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Yeah, these new-fangled "compilers" will never catch on.

Programmers who rely on them will stop learning machine code, and won't know how their program really works. That's if the compiler actually compiles your code at all, without throwing an internal error, making you change your (correct) code around arbitrarily until it actually accepts it. But at least with an internal compiler error you know the compiler has broken - rather than it silently miscompiling your code to do the wrong thing.

But even then, even if the compiler accepts your code without barfing, and generates correct machine code from it, it still won't generate as efficient machine code as you could write by hand yourself.

Nope, these compilers will never catch on, and never get reliable enough to be useful for serious software engineering.

-- Some programmer circa 1975, probably, who lives in my head mumbling this to themselves whenever I'm sure generative-AI-based "programming" is a crock of shit. Although, to be fair, the 2005-era developer who is drunkenly ranting that UML diagrams will make programming 100x more productive any day now, is a handy counterpoint.

On the minerals front, the US doesn't need anything from Ukraine.

Need's got nothing to do with it. Bullies don't take what you have because they need it, they take it because that's what you have, and they want to take it away from you, just to be taking it away from you.

For Trump, it is not enough that (as he perceives the situation) he wins, rather than (as he perceives) everyone else loses. Even people's whose backs are up against the wall. Especially people whose backs are up against the wall. If you don't exploit the weakest player at the table, why are you even playing?

(Not that Trump knows anything about gambling... who the fuck loses money running a casino... on multiple separate occasions...)

Trump isn't making deals based on carefully considered advantages and concessions. He's just grasping his tiny hands at whatever comes in reach, whether or not he needs it, like the half-wit schoolyard thug he is.

Yeah, thinking of the puzzle as a game, rather than a competition, allows for a different perspective.

If I think of a competition, then I'd expect the rules to be determined ahead of time according to some pre-imagined criteria. If someone manages to find a clever hack within the rules that allows for trivial "breaks", then that's good for them and they just get to beat everyone else at it.

But if I think of a game, then it's much more natural for the rules to adapt over time as people realise that some types of "play" make the game less fun, or straight-up boring. They don't have to be self-consistent, or logical. They're essentially arbitrary, and just whatever they need to be to make the game "better".

What if it turns out that the radical (square root) symbol is a letter from a language (if a little squished)? And we somehow figure out one day which letter it is, for sure?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_symbol#Origin

But also, if the criteria for allowed functions is that they are "reasonable, elemental" (as per the fine article), then I think it would be quite hard to come up with a set of rules to encode that in a way that includes log() and sqrt(), but not S(). It's hard to imagine a function that is less elemental than S() (except maybe the identity function), or why its inclusion would be unreasonable when the other two aren't.

So nice that the site still has an "email etiquette" page - so few of those still around these days!

https://www.pmail.com/etqtte.htm

Well, the earliest version of the code that would morph first into a terminal emulator, and eventually become Linux "was written to use one thread to write the letter A to the screen. The other thread wrote the letter B."¹ Who knows what direction this OS will evolve along?

¹ Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun, pp.63

I think that's debatable. Many open source licenses have a definition of accessible source code that is similar to:

The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

Certainly, in the past "a tarball of the source for whatever version you have" was absolutely considered sufficient for that. But these days the features provided by source control systems, such as "annotate"(/"blame"), "bisect", etc... could very well be argued to have raised the baseline for what "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" should mean.

In a similar vein, there's Device Orchestra

https://www.youtube.com/@DeviceOrchestra/videos

Has its own JRE bundled, and uses that one if you don't have any JRE installed.

Starts in 5 seconds, uses ~600MB of RAM (less than VSCode!), and works very snappy.

The trick is, it didn't get bloated or heavier over the years, the contrary,

...and you're mentioning these features as points in Eclipse's favour ... when comparing it to vim?!?!?

I think you forgot the "/s"

And a bowl of M&Ms, with all the brown ones taken out - to make sure they did read this far.

Don't focus on how naive you were then, think about how much you've grown since. Well done!

Imagine if you don't learn anything new in the next 25 years, and all your opinions stay completely stagnant. What a waste of 25 years that will be.

Huh. In that case, the upthread commenter likening the new model to being more "linux-like" seems confusing.

Given that they didn't mention which Linux security model the new system was like, I presumed they meant the most commonly referenced model for performing administrative tasks: sudo/doas - which elevates a process for its entire runtime.

But if it's a per-operation model, I guess they might have been comparing it to the "desktop portal"/"policykit-dbus" model instead? Which does kind of fit, but I don't think is the security model that most people think of when someone says "linux-like just-in-time escalation"?

Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale

Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web

Sorry, I'm confused. I can't figure out from your explanation how the new adminless just-in-time elevation is supposed to be different from UAC's just-in-time elevation?

It's probably worth trying LibreOffice again if your last install was a couple of years ago. They take document compatibility bugs pretty seriously and fix a bunch with every release.

That's probably the easiest step to take next, before looking at virtualization or a full Linux install with Wine.

You write in one language

Not quite. Web assembly isn't a source language, it's a compiler target. So you should be able to write in C, Rust, Fortran, or Lua and compile any of those to WebAssembly.

Except that WebAssembly is a cross-platform assembly language/machine code which is very similar to the native machine code of many/most contemporary CPUs. This means a WebAssembly interpreter can be very straightforward, and could often translate one WebAssembly instruction to one native CPU instruction. Or rather, it can compile a stream of WebAssembly instructions almost one-to-one to native CPU instructions, which it can then execute directly.

to show that they were NOT simply regurgitating a cultural stereotype, but that it is in fact a real phenomenon.

Right, but does anyone think that that's what people with NDEs are doing?

I don't get what the poster was trying to say. It's like they're trying to debunk something that doesn't exist to need debunking? And the article isn't even about NDEs, like, at all.

I'm just really confused what the point of the comment was?