microtherion

I could handle that, but reached my limit with Feersum Endjinn.

“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.

In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

many of them don't look like word definitions ("a sharp pain in the back”)

I had to look up the English word (lumbago), but German has the colorful “Hexenschuss” (witch shot). I suspect most people above a certain age can relate to there being a word for this in most languages.

Yes, I experienced this a number of times in my life.

Growing up in a small Swiss village I wasn’t born in, I had to learn that you basically greeted everybody you passed in the road, under the assumption that you knew them or were supposed to know them (more conversations were not needed).

Moving to a large Swiss village, I had to learn that saying hi to random strangers was considered weird at best.

First time I visited Southern California, I was very uncomfortable with strangers striking up random conversations. Later in the trip in San Franciso, I felt that the slightly toned down form of this habit was more comfortable for me.

Moving back to Switzerland after having lived in CA for a few years, I had to relearn old habits.

Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.

Absolutely! And I also click them to get an idea how good the source is.

It's impressive that you've even managed to use an em-dash in spoken language. /s

It also doesn't work on Raspberry Pi, though presumably it could easily be made to; it does replace the su binary, but the replacement is not executable.

When I started studying CS, the "industry" thought students should be taught COBOL, and maybe some PL/I and Fortran, because obviously that was what the market wanted.

I imagine Swift is also a very difficult language to compile.

You could do the same in reverse as well. Many of the features listed in the first paragraph existed before in other languages, though probably not all of them in a single language. In fact, I believe the design process (sensibly) favored best practices of existing languages rather than completely new and unproven mechanisms.

So there was considerable borrowing from PASCAL, CLU, MODULA(-2), CSP. It's possible that the elaborate system for specifying machine representations of numbers was truly novel, but I'm not sure how much of a success that was.

I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.

Quarterly earnings will be released April 22. My impression is that in recent years, such rumors tended to cluster around earnings reports (which largely haven't been great the last 2 years or so), presumably as distractions.

The way I remember it is that I used at least Lycos and AltaVista before Google. In both cases, a major reason for switching was that the search itself got cluttered up with ads.

So Google's current trajectory does not bode well for them, as far as I'm concerned.

He may have been a bit of a Milkshake Duck

I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.

I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/

stable as in "close the stable doors after the horse has bolted"

It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.

Personally, I love synthesis that can be generated on the client machine, in real time. For some applications, like screen readers, this is a really important feature.

Of course, the big interest these days is in cloud based assistants, where synthesizing on server and piggybacking on the rest of the answer is quite reasonable.

To me, the speech sounds impressively expressive, but there is something off about the audio quality that I can't quite put my finger on.

The "Anger Speech" has an obvious lisp (Maybe a homage to Elmer Fudd?). But I hear a similar, but more subtle, speech impediment in the "Adoration Speech". The "Fearful Speech" might have a slight warble to it. And the "Long Speech" is difficult to evaluate because the speaker has vocal fry to an extent that I find annoying.

This is bound to be a question that will be increasingly harder to answer. For instance, Apple processors have at least two different neural accelerators/matrix coprocessors (ANE and AMX) in addition to the integrated GPU. Do these count as "CPU"?

Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it

And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to be used.

The skepticism and hate is based on observing decades of shameless dishonesty, which is itself a form of data provided by the company: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

Supervised FSD — automating 99.9% of driving and expecting drivers to be fully alert for the other .1% — appears to go against everything we know about human attention.

As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.

But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.

I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.

You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.

Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.

It's all a part of focusing on their core business, like… paying an $28M bribe to Melania Trump.

The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.