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me_again

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I think there are 2 claims which this article conflates. I'll jokingly call them "Weak Whitney" and "Strong Whitney".

"Weak Whitney" is the claim that this very terse style is comprehensible given sufficient study. I find this plausible.

"Strong Whitney" is the claim that in many circumstances this style is _better_ than a more normal style, with full variable names, whitespace, etc. I am much less persuaded by that claim. When the article says things like "Note that d probably stands for “dimension” or perhaps “depth”; I’m unsure on this point." I'm like, yes, congratulations, that is exactly the point of using more descriptive names and/or comments.

"As soon as profit can be made" is exactly what the article is warning about. This is exactly the "Human + AI" combination.

Within your lifetime (it's probably already happened) you will be denied something you care about (medical care, a job, citizenship, parole) by an AI which has been granted the agency to do so in order to make more profit.

Vulnerability reports are interesting from a trust point of view, because each party has a different financial incentive. You can't 100% trust the vendor to accurately assess the severity of an issue - they have a lot riding on downplaying an issue in some cases. The person reporting the bug is also likely looking for bounty and reputational benefit, both of which are enhanced if the issue is considered high severity. So a user of the supposedly-vulnerable program can't blindly trust either party.

I don't believe there is really any interest in balancing the Federal budget or saving money. It's a flimsy pretext for purging every person and program not ideologically aligned with the incoming administration.

Would anyone like to bet whether the national debt will be lower in 2029?

As I understand it (not completely), according to the SHIELD act, the losing party in a patent dispute has to pay legal fees for both sides, which are usually substantial. If the lawyers who really own the patent represent themselves, they are in danger of having to pay out if they lose. So they effectively hired a plaintiff that they could 'represent'. Handing out 10% of the proceeds if you win against halving the costs if you lose is a reasonable hedge.

However a legal firm is not supposed to do that, which is why they are in trouble.

Not a direct answer, but Ethernet is sometimes brought up as a successful example of Worse is Better. At one point Token Ring was a serious competitor - it had careful designs to avoid collisions when the network was busy, prioritize traffic, etc. But it was comparatively slow and expensive. Ethernet just says "eh, retry on collision.". And that simplistic foundation has carried on to where we have a standard for 800 Gigabit Ethernet.

A lot of "why TF would anyone you do this?" questions can be answered with variations like this. Borrowing from economics, the discount rate defines how much more valuable something is RIGHT NOW vs at some point in the future. If the system is down and we're losing money by the minute until it is up; if the company will be broke next week unless we make customer X happy; if you have to get to the airport in 2 hours - it is completely rational to make the quick fix. The costs of not doing so outweigh the costs of doing it again properly.

It really becomes a problem when the same short term calculation becomes the standard - you can quickly rack up costs that future you or future company will never pay down.

I sometimes wonder about the commercial impact of source code leaks. In this case, nobody noticed until the product was commercially irrelevant, but what might have happened if some competitor had noticed?

My guess is probably nothing. Having the interpreter source code is a liability for other companies in case of an infringement lawsuit. Are there good examples where a source code leak actually led to significant consequences for a company?

This was one of the ideas pursued in the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars. They weren't able to develop a system that would work against ICBMs. Powering an aircraft is both easier and harder; the aircraft presumably isn't making evasive maneuvers and trying to stop you from powering it, but the economic and safety constraints are harder.

That doesn't sound like an airline I would care to fly!

During takeoff a 747 consumes power at a rate of about 90MW. Having something outside the plane, whether in orbit or ground-based, pumping that much power into the plane while I'm in it, sounds quite alarming. Not to mention issues with aiming, power loss, etc.

To power a plane with renewable sources, it seems most practical to generate power on the ground and use that to produce synthetic fuel.