djray

This pertinent paper appeared more than a decade ago about the flaws in the amyloid plaque hypothesis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4207354/

Many people without dementia show amyloid plaques in their brains in autopsies. It's becoming more accepted now that there are multiple interrelated causes after decades pursuing the simplistic amyloid plaque theory.

The article is bordering on irresponsible.

They aren't equal, as the faster version does an unconditional memory write instead of only writing to the array if the condition is satisfied. The compiler is strictly forbidden from turning a conditional write into an unconditional one.

Large organisations have advocacy, support and friendship groups for many underrepresented or protected groups, such as those for religions, mental health issues, physical disabilities etc. I imagine this is simply one of those internal group's organisational repos.

Just fucking use the language appropriate to the task you're trying to accomplish.

Just fucking use the language your colleagues can understand and support for the next few years.

Just fucking use the language with the framework and tooling you need to get your job done efficiently and effectively, and one at the appropriate level of abstraction for the project.

Just fucking use the language which AI agents can read and write well, because we're in the End Times and this stuff matters.

Just fucking use the language with great testing and CI/CD support because you'll be spending longer supporting your code than writing it.

The skill is choosing well, and a key realisation is that it's never a one-size-fits-all thing. That's why an article like this is less than helpful, gosh darn it.

"Skirmish" or "Conflict" or "Action". It's less illegal if you don't call it a war.

It says "approx. 5 hours" in the "Power & Batteries" section.

I said in my comment that it was GPU bound. Task Manager was reporting 100% GPU usage from the browser, which went down to 0% after closing the tab.

It looks to be that the demo has been fixed since I initially looked. Testing today showed much improved performance.

The demo runs at 5 FPS on my laptop (11th gen Core i5 and Iris Xe graphics, Chrome Latest as the browser, with the GPU being the bottleneck). I was hoping for something rather more efficient given the write-up saying it ran at 60 fps on mobile.

The maps are pretty, but the per-tile build constraints of the WFC build approach means that pretty unnatural generations end up happening because non-local influence is difficult to take into account. I think this may be OK for games where you discover tiles one at a time, but for a full map generator it's not great, and better solutions exist. Red Blob Games did a writeup of a noise-based method which looks superior imo. You can use moisture-tracking approaches for rivers, lay roads, bridges and other artificial elements in a separate pass, and it will likely end up faster and more robust. I think WFC is an interesting programming problem, though, so it was likely fun to implement.

Nonetheless, this was an excellent write-up and impressive demo.

This is quite insensitive and a poor analogy. Telling someone who's struggling to "Get your head in the game" is unhelpful in the extreme. It's like telling someone who's drowning to "Just swim better".

Free climbing is a high-risk pursuit. A free climber goes on occasional expeditions where they solo a route, but before then, they train with others, have spotters and partners during route practice, and whole communities to provide help, support and emergency contact should things go wrong. Alex Honnold doesn't just rock up to a mountain (if you'll forgive the pun) and solo it every day for months on end.

It's very difficult to just put everything aside and focus on a singular task for the amount of time it takes to complete a significant software project. Once the initial enthusiasm wanes, keeping going can be a real challenge when you're on your own. The OP's concerns are absolutely valid and deserve respect.

I think the key here is the ability to focus on the privacy-first nature of local LLMs. A cloud-based service will always be more powerful (and markedly so), but Apple is very cautious about pursuing cloud-based solutions when user data is involved - privacy is a selling point of their products, after all. This is a double-edged sword, as you get to sell your services as privacy-friendly, but your offerings can be significantly less capable than your competitors' (see the iOS messages summary debacle, for example). The advantage of waiting is that smaller AI models are becoming much more powerful all the time.

Of course, Microsoft is also at this with its Copilot programme for laptops, where an onboard Neural Processing Unit has to be a particular speed to qualify. This lets you do local AI things like content-aware image snipping, text summaries and...er, Recall.

As to whether Apple will come out of this looking good or not, I think they're currently regretting rolling out a shitty initial AI offering, and will get better with the next release. It'll be like Apple Maps. Or the butterfly keyboard. Or any number of other broken version 1 Apple things.

An interesting question is to whether Apple Intelligence can be cancelled or pared back now the landscape is so AI dominated, i.e. will the lack of AI offerings be seen as a competitive disadvantage, or are people so sick of AI by now that it isn't a factor.

The reality is more akin to me agreeing to have my car covered in your bumper stickers (and anyone else's, as long as they abide by my particular set of bumper sticker rules), and then having to remove some without notice at a later date because the chap at the gas station got offended and wouldn't serve me any more.

And there being only one gas station.

And the guy having not objected to the exact same bumper stickers for the last 15 years.

Visa have said this is because of 'enhanced risk' caused by this content, but they've been fine with it up to now. It's only because of the Australian group's censorious actions that they've decided to act. That's the frustrating thing, at least to me.

Whether they have the legal right to do it or not, it's still a dick move.

(If you'll forgive the pun.)

What you gain in performance, you somewhat sacrifice in flexibility, at least in comparison with OpenEXR.

OpenEXR was designed for modularity, allowing efficient access to individual layers or channels. This is crucial in VFX workflows where only specific passes (like normals or diffuse) might be needed at any one time. This access is possible because EXR stores channels separately and supports tiled or scanline-based access.

The custom compression method Aras proposes - using meshoptimizer on 16K pixel chunks, followed by zstd as a second compressor step - achieves significantly faster decompression and better compression speeds than EXR ZIP, HTJ2K, or JPEG-XL lossless. However, it trades off random access and requires decompressing the entire image at once, which increases memory usage. Individual frames for a VFX production can be multiple gigabytes (i.e. dozens of 32-bit layers at 4K resolution).

The author's proposal is still compelling, and I wonder if a variant could find its way into some sort of archival format.

There seems to be a mistaken thought that having an AI (or indeed someone else) help you achieve a task means you aren't learning anything. This is reductionist. I suggest instead that it's about degrees of autonomy. The person you're responding to made a choice to get the AI to help integrate a library. They chose NOT to have the AI edit the files itself; they rather spent time reading through the changes and understanding the integration points, and tweaking the code to make it their own. This is much different to vibe coding.

I do a similar loop with my use of AI - I will upload code to Gemini 2.5 Pro, talk through options and assumptions, and maybe get it to write some or all of the next step, or to try out different approaches to a refactor. Integrating any code back into the original source is never copy-and-paste, and that's where the learning is. For example, I added Dexie (a library/wrapper for accessing IndexedDB) to a browser extension project the other day, and the AI helped me get started with a minimal amount of initial knowledge, yet I learned a lot about Dexie and have been able to expand upon the code myself since. If I were on my own, I would probably have barrelled ahead and just used IndexedDB directly, resulting in a lot more boilerplate code and time spent doing busywork. It's this sort of friction reduction that I find most liberating about AI. Trying out a new library isn't a multi-hour slog; instead, you can sample it and possibly reject it as unsuitable almost immediately without having to waste a lot of time on R&D. In my case, I didn't learn 'raw' IndexedDB, but instead I got the job done with a library offering a more suitable level of abstraction, and saved hours in the process.

This isn't lazy or giving up the opportunity to learn, it's simply optimising your time.

The "not invented here" syndrome is something I kindly suggest you examine, as you may find you are actually limiting your own innovation by rejecting everything that you can't do yourself.

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." -Paul Ehrlich

I think your project is at far too early a state to share. You are currently literally using 'fs::recursive_directory_iterator()' to search one file at a time on the selected drives. You aren't even using multi-threading for solid state volumes or caching the file system details during iteration, meaning every search is going to take several seconds on even modestly-sized SSDs. I can't believe this is faster than a comparable Windows 11 search, as you claim on your GitHub - I suspect the Windows search was for a non-indexed location and/or from a cold start, meaning the file system entries weren't cached already by the OS. (By the way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should publish reproducible benchmarks, so people can test your methodology.)

You also say that you want a solution more integrated with Windows, yet your UI is in SFML and your screenshots look nothing like a native Windows application.

Your project website doesn't render correctly on non-wide screens.

You are using a font which won't render many Unicode filenames correctly, e.g. Japanese or Chinese characters.

You have given no thought to accessibility or localisation.

You argue that Everything doesn't work with non-NTFS drives. That's incorrect - you can add them manually. See https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#how_do_i_index_a_fat_volume . You can also add Network Drives, NAS volumes etc.

Everything will run as non-administrator, but it will be unable to index NTFS properties. This is an OS-level restriction. You will face the same when you attempt to read these properties. The same goes for accessing protected folders - you just skip them.

You mention that you also want to feature file encryption and file transfer features in the same application. You are taking on too much here; each of the three features (file search, file transfer and file/folder encryption) is challenging and could take months to years to develop on its own. There are already accomplished apps satisfying these needs. Why would anyone use your solution over 7-zip?

You have no tests. If you want to feature encryption or file transfer, you will need an extensive test suite. Users will not be happy if your tool deletes or mangles their files.

Looking at your "Da-file-encrypter" repo, you don't seem to have any knowledge about how to actually encrypt files - you are doing an XOR against the bytes of the key, which is derived from the same bytes each time. Please NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN encryption strategy. Even the experts get it wrong. Instead, use a proper cryptography library. If you take anything away from this, please let it be that - never implement your own encryption.

Voidtools' Everything has an API and people have used that to integrate with launchers like PowerToys Run. It may be better to use the API and to add the features you think it is missing. It is very unlikely you will be able to beat its performance.

Judging by your licence and the Donate button on your website, you seem to have recently switched licences and want to make money out of this. In my personal opinion, that's not a good look for a project in this state.

These start from 450 euros.

To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.

The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating your job was categorically does no fucking good, and neither does writing about it after the fact. You may think you're fighting the good fight, but this isn't a grassroots protest if the only people you were complaining to were your manager and/or your colleagues.

Yes, inefficiency and bureaucracy suck. No, the answer is not to scrap it all without knowing what the hell you're doing and "just wing it", which is exactly what Musk and co are doing. Strangely enough, the solution is probably a compromise. Compromise takes two sides actually talking to each other, with people familiar with the matter present, and an acceptance that the goal is to make the process better without negatively impacting important things like security, safety and data integrity.

Please forgive the tone of this message, but I can't help wonder how many thousands of people are going to die because of the effective abolishment of USAID and other programmes.

The OP misunderstands (perhaps deliberately or for humorous effect) what a co-pilot is. This is telling:

"I learned that I need to stay firmly in the driver’s seat when tackling new tech."

Er, that's pretty much what a pilot is supposed to do! You can't (as yet) just give an AI free reign over your codebase and expect to come back later that day to discover a fully finished implementation. Maybe unless your prompt was "Make a snake game in Python". A pilot would be supervising their co-pilot at all times.

Comparing AIs to junior devs is getting tiresome. AIs like Claude and newer versions of ChatGPT have incredible knowledge bases. Yes, they do slip up, especially with esoteric matters where there are few authoritative (or several conflicting) sources, but the breadth of knowledge in and of itself is very valuable. As an anecdote, neither Claude nor ChatGPT were able to accurately answer a question I had about file operation flags yesterday, but when I said to ChatGPT that its answer wasn't correct, it apologised and said the Raymond Chen article it had sourced wasn't super clear about the particular combination I'd asked about. That's like having your own research assistant, not a headstrong overconfident junior dev. Yes, they make mistakes, but at least now they'll admit to them. This is a long way from a year or two ago.

In conclusion: don't use an AI as one of your primary sources of information for technology you're new to, especially if you're not double-checking its answers like a good pilot.

I rather think using AI to generate scripts for other DBs is a disadvantage. Scripting is a deterministic process, surely? Can you create a common internal representation and write exporters for each supported DBMS from that? Maybe the JSON format you use is a path toward this.

I dislike the multiple references to 'Magic' on the site, but I realise that's probably a subjective thing. Maybe I'm fatigued by the AI-in-everything trend.

I don't use all the DBMSes you support, but I'm not sure having a single query to run is really much of a selling point. For SQL Server, I'd rather execute a stored procedure with permission checks, and progress feedback, than a big chunk o' SQL. (Again, that may just be a me thing.) If it's an efficiency thing for very large DBs then I think you should emphasise that, and also detail how much faster it is to gather all the info in one fell swoop than if you split up the queries.

The Examples link is currently broken on your site, btw. That sounds like a really useful way that people can evaluate your application without having to run a query on their own DB, which they may be reticent to do for testing out a new app.

A lot of conspiracy talk here, backed up with nothing other than a note that the AI chat API isn't public yet.

I'd argue that MS has been on a very different trajectory since the "Linux is a cancer" Ballmer days, and open source is a big part of that movement. I never thought I'd see them buy and open source Xamarin, or open source the entire C# compiler and .NET Framework. It's worked well for them - .NET is being actively developed by many volunteers as well as the core MS team, and performance has improved significantly in the last few years. There are a lot of associated technologies being developed in the open, too, like Terminal, the C# language itself and so on. I find it difficult to think that this was all a grand plan to extract more revenue out of devs. Rather, I think MS realised that it was instead a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation, whereby bringing more devs into the fold - including those on Linux and Mac - would be mutually beneficial. Let's not forget, Visual Studio Community Edition wasn't around until relatively recently. The only legal way to get Visual Studio was to fork out for a Pro or Enterprise licence.

As for AI integration into VS Code, I share kaelini's opinion that the chat feature is still new and possibly very alpha (it's certainly not very fast at the moment), so that's probably why it's not all been open sourced. But, of course, MS is perfectly within their rights to release closed-source extensions to the VS Code marketplace - the new C# Dev Kit is a case in point here.

C# support in VSCode is fine at the moment; I sometimes use it for quick scratch-code experiments. The OmniSharp-powered extension which provides basic support is under constant development, so things may have improved since you last used it. Microsoft have also added a closed-source extension recently which provides Visual Studio-like extra features on top, like Solution Explorer, better Test integration etc.; that's free for individuals and small teams but you need a Visual Studio Subscription if you want to use it in large teams or if you're making >$1M per annum:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

I think that's more like a valley than a hole.

I'm not a fan of the trend toward monochromatic, low-contrast desktops. Colour iconography seems to be frowned upon, whereas it's a definite aid to speed of comprehension. The settings list in particular is just a sea of text with small icons that are only minimally useful. Microsoft went this way with its Metro design language but has come to its senses in more recent years and both Windows and Visual Studio are more colourful now.

I'd recommend a tweak to the amount of whitespace, too. I'd prefer smaller dialogs or a larger default font (and maybe a wider one, too) to balance out the vast areas of blank space.

Moi aussi! :D

I've been using Duolingo for a while, but I think effective learning needs more than just that daily practice to really get lasting results.

Can I ask which programmable keyboard you went for?

Strong disagree. You present a very poor strawman (sorry, straw-person). Don't attempt to equate physical disabilities with what is effectively learned behaviour.

Academic institutions are increasingly places which attempt to police language (and consequently thought). It's a nigh-on puritanical drive to molly-coddle the overly sensitive and limit debate. And it's even more frustrating considering the fact that an academic institution is the place where young people should be exploring all viewpoints, not just what has been deemed acceptable by the elite or those in power. Also see: de-platforming.

It's telling that some of these are terms which have been used without issue for far longer than half a century. It's only recently that they've ever been deemed to be "harmful". I don't know, it's almost as if...the same word can have different meanings depending on its context!

You may say that this is optional and just a suggestion, but it's a short path from compiling a list of these terms to real honest-to-goodness compelled speech.

Exercise and a better diet are proven to help with depression. They aren't cures, but they can help. Speaking to someone such as a therapist or doctor is great advice.

The standard for game music contractors is to get paid for minutes of music which are used in the game or in promotional material. Rejected material should not be used at all, which is one of the main issues here (id used more than double the amount of music that they accepted and paid for).

Mick had been a contractor for Bethesda previously and hadn't experienced these issues, so I don't think it's fair to blame him for approaching a new project in good faith.

From his essay, it seems that Marty Stratton was the main actor in all the issues. The rest of id and Bethesda seem to have acted reasonably, only circling the wagons when legal got involved.

You really should read the full article before commenting. The apartment was in breach of several local laws (for example, no working fire extinguisher or first aid kit, inadequate signage, non-working lock), and the electrical wiring was faulty, causing 2 people to be shocked. The lighting circuit had totally failed by the time the OP wrote the article. It certainly wasn't someone moaning about a minor issue, and it's not too much to ask for a $3000-per-month rental to be excellent quality and not...you know, try to kill you.