davidgay

For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.

This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...

The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.

You can proportionally reduce the time in the role;) Though the most senior people wouldn't be there long...

There's about 500k kids in California each year. The 100th smartest is undoubtedly smarter than you or me.

This is an extremely simplistic view. For instance, the US moves more of its freight (by percentage) than all western European countries except Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

Not to mention India without the spicy peppers...

I don't think the other governments that collapsed in 1989 in the face of public protest could be honestly described as "relatively liberal".

Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity.

An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc

[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church

No, this is bunk. App Engine and GCE, the earliest components of GCP predate Kubernetes.

[I've been there for nearly all the relevant time]

Not intrinsically or commonly deadly. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas... says "1 in 10 people will develop a pituitary adenoma in their lifetime" - pituitary adenomas is the more general class of these benign tumors, as the pituitary gland produces multiple hormones.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.

Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine?

The unemployment one is interesting because if you look at that graph, the universal pre-2022 pattern is basically a spike of unemployment during recessions followed by a gradual drop.

The recent pattern is a gradual increase.

I'm not a big fan of "numerical only / shape of graphs" analyses, but this does seem strange. Of course, the 2020 Covid spike is also unusual, so...

The bit about "Canon, Sony, and Nikon may have replaced Kodak for professionals" was entertainingly silly. AFAICT, Kodak cameras were never used by a significant fraction of professional photographers? (maybe pre-WW2?)

Film is a different matter of course.

Except it cannot decide all Horn clauses.

In my experience, when one begins to program in Prolog, they pepper their code with cuts to try and stop unwanted bactracking, which can often be avoided by understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place.

This gets to the heart of my problem with Prolog: it's sold as if it's logic programming - just write your first-order predicate logic and we'll solve it. But then to actually use it you have to understand how it's executed - "understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place".

At that point, I would just prefer a regular imperative programming language, where understanding how it's executed is really straightforward, combined with some nice unification library and maybe a backtracking library that I can use explicitly when they are the appropriate tools.

renewal mechanisms

Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.

And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...

Quite the opposite. The benefits of rent control grow the longer you are in the same apartment without moving as the difference between what the tenant pays and the

You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).

The GRE vocabulary is actually based on French, Latin and Greek, not English. Much less rare and unusual once you realise that.

Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy

Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.

> History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma

i’m extremely skeptical that people move on

Historically, essentially everyone who lived long enough to have children had some of those children die [1]. So either:

- that wasn't traumatic

- they managed to deal with that trauma

- or they didn't move on, and everyone was somewhat traumatised

You can take your choice from the above, but on the whole this was the normal state of affairs for most of human history and prehistory.

[1]: from https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an..., 50% of children died by age ~5

I'd write code after work if I wasn't writing code at work ;) But...

... memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates.

This is overly simplified. To a first approximation, bandwidth has kept track with CPU performance, and main memory latency is basically unchanged. My 1985 Amiga had 125ns main-memory latency, though the processor itself saw 250ns latency - current main memory latencies are in the 50-100ns range. Caches are what 'fix' this discrepancy.

You would need to clarify how manual memory management relates to this... (cache placement/control? copying GCs causing caching issues? something else?)

The quote is referring to fights between people who already have tenure.

Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/

French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:

- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)

- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)

- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")

The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.

However, in many developed countries today’s pensions are mainly paid for by today’s workers, often through a combination of social contributions and taxes.

If one accepts this hypothesis, then raising the retirement age is good for all previously-working people, as they now have less people to support and more workers providing that support...

Also still running, after more than 33 years: mume.org

Disclaimer: I used to help run this - my main contribution was an extension language, which started as a Scheme+Forth hybrid (everyone hated that...) and quickly morphed into sort-of-Scheme with "conventional" syntax.

This description is misleading (as many of them seem to be), because you're only describing the first year.

After 5 years of constant expenses, the deductions match the costs. If expenses diminish, deductions exceed costs.

-> this is bad (in the short term) for companies that are growing.

I'm of the opinion that

  var ageLookup = new Dictionary<AgeRange, List<Member>>();
  foreach (var member in members) {
    ageLookup.getOrCreate(member.AgeRange, List::new).add(member);
  }

Everything you said is supported by regular image formats. You can adjust white balance of any photo and you think image formats are only limited to 16-bit and sRGB?

No - the non-RAW image formats offered were traditionally JPG and 8-bit TIFF. Neither of those are suitable for good quality post-capture edits, irrespective of their colour space (in fact, too-wide a colour space is likely to make the initial capture worse because of the limited 8-bit-per-colour range).

These days there is HEIF/similar formats, which may be good enough. But support in 3rd party tools (including Adobe) is no better than RAW yet, i.e., you need to go through a conversion step. So...