heikkilevanto

I don't like the idea of a persistent id for my machine. Would there be any harm in rewriting the machine-id at every boot? Or just deleting it as part of the shutdown sequence?

And you need to stop telling everyone what we need! "You might be interested in this <thing> if you have this and that" sounds so much more reasonable.

... And watch stupid people do stupid things even faster

I am sure there are reasons why this won't work, but could it really be so hard to show both the faked number, and where the call actually comes from, so I could choose which one to add to my block list.

Interesting idea. But why audio? I can't be the only one who prefers to read text.

Oh no I got 5 emails I better write a post complaining about this massive inconvenience hmph

ONE unsolicited unlawful (EU) spam mail is quite enough reason to get angry, block mail, and to complain to the relevant authorities. This spamming has to stop!

Every interaction I have with a store or site signs me up for some promotional thing, which I unsubscribe from immediately, only to find it's one of 4 different lists I was added to.

Luckily this kind of thing is very much illegal here in the EU. If they send me marketing shit without my explicit active consent, they are in violation of the law, and I can at least report them. As I do. It is still not perfect, but the amount of spam I get from previous business relations has declined a lot in the past years. Other spam is still rampant, and I can only block any such sender until they find a new way to push their shit.

Sounds interesting. But I suspect my astigmatism would kind of exclude just turning the lenses around

I am not so sure about the eye tracking and autofocus stuff, but would love a simple focus knob on the frames to adjust instead of changing to a different pair of glasses. I suspect the tracking and focusing electronics must be somewhat clumsy and a battery life of a single day sounds suboptimal for me.

The comments here say that all Android phone manufacturers do stuff like this. I have never noticed that kind of things on my Fairphone. But then again, I don't have many apps and certainly not Amazon.

I don't buy "Anywhere, anytime, by anyone" - no language can be that. Different people and different projects have wildly different needs. It looks like it tries to provide a single binary offering most of the compiler, debugger, linter, etc. on "all" platforms. Noble goal in itself, useful for some cases, but utterly irrelevant for many (most?) projects. If I have already decided to work on Linus, I don't care about Windows compatibility. And why "by anyone"? If a language is optimized for school kids, it can not be optimal for serious professionals, and vice versa.

Oh yes, I cut my teeth on a Finnish 1802 based TELMAC in the 1970s. It all of 2 kb of RAM (in 16 chips manually soldered on the board), and room for another 2kb if anyone would need so much, as it said in the instructions. I might almost be able to reconstruct the instruction set now, it was so deep ingrained in my brain. Once I had nightmares directly in hex. Sold my first pieces of code on that CPU, a 2kb long "monitor" rom, maybe a bit like a BIOS in today's terms. Added .5 kb of new features and optimized it so it could still fit in that 2kb EPROM.

It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines

You mean like stopping at a red light?

Of course all governments want to control every move and thought of their citizens. It makes governing easier. We expect that in autocracies.

Are you implying that all governments are autocracies? Rather pessimistic view, in my opinion.

Ownership is one question. IMO, a more interesting question is who is responsible when the code does some real-life damage.

I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.

Why would FBI ever announce that they are investigating something? Is it that time of the year where they have to convince budget makers about their importance? Or are they trying to direct attention from something else? Epstein?

Yes, that is the law here in the EU. You are not allowed to send me emails unless I took some positive action to subscribe. Rightly so.

I use SqLite for a small hobby project, fine for that. Wanted to read the article to see why I should not, but it attacked me with a "subscribe" popup, so I stopped there. The comments here seem to be based on daydreaming on scaling to a lot of users who need 24/7 uptime, which is not always the case.

I guess EU will have to retaliate, and forbid any US based routers, for exactly the same kind of reasons

Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.

I retired a few years ago, and I believe and insist that I am very much the same person.

To see a person only as what they do at work seems awfully limiting. Even when I was working, I was also a sailor, musician, woodworker, home brewer, cat person, chess player, leather guy, and a good number of other things. And yes, even after retiring, I am still a computer guy. I even like hobby coding projects more than I did.

And before that, COBOL was supposed to allow computer users to write in almost plain English without even knowing the machine instruction set.

It did change the programming landscape, but there was still a huge need for this new kind of programmers.

I like their privacy policy

I find it interesting that a substantial number of people seem to think it's wrong or unethical to cold-email someone about a potential recruitment or business opportunity if they post their email in a public place

I find it interesting that some fucking spammers think that just because they found out my email somewhere, they should be allowed to waste my time and resources for their shit.

That is explicitly illegal here in EU. Unless I have clearly given you my consent, you are not allowed to spam me. Is informed consent really such a difficult concept to understand?

Not everything is a state secret.

No, but almost everything is a potential DDOS. And slight modifications to emails, documents, and calendars can cause a lot of havoc that may be hard to detect.

Well, if you have a perfect evaluation function, you don't need to search. And if you can do a perfect search to the end, you don't an evaluation function. Un(?)fortunately none of these extremes seems reasonable for a game like chess (and even less for go). So most software use both search and evaluation. And a whole lot of optimizing and other tricks. With impressive results.

I just bought Kampot peppers from https://www.unclespepper.com/ which is in Germany, the name notwithstanding. And yes, I paid with my Danish Visa card. No problems except that I had to adjust my ad blocker once.

If we consider the prompts and LLM inputs to be the new source code, I want to see some assurance we get the same results every time. A traditional compiler will produce a program that behaves the same way, given the same source and options. Some even go out of their way to guarantee they produce the same binary output, which is a good thing for security and package management. That is why we don't need to store the compiled binaries in the version control system.

Until LLMS start to get there, we still need to save the source code they produce, and review and verify that it does what it says on the label, and not in a totally stupid way. I think we have a long way to go!

A bit too mathematical for my taste. I learned my tuning theory by owning a harpsichord, and learning to tune it. A harpsichord is more sensitive to the "rounding errors" in equal tuning, owing to the richer overtones, so equal temperament does not sound quite as good a compromise as it does on a piano. And those historical temperaments are so much easier to tune by ear. Besides that is what the they used at the time of Bach, so historically correct for playing Baroque music.

I thought the article would be about the various meanings of operators like = == === .=. <== ==> <<== ==>> (==) => =~=