sjamaan

It's a shame grandparent's link gives a 404 now, I'd love to compare the two.

Regardless of your political views a tool is a tool at the end of the day. Attempting to anthropomorphize a category of objects in order to shift blame all for the sake of furthering an agenda is plainly bad faith behavior.

Guns are literally made for killing people. That's their only reason for existence. They are a weapon. This makes them qualitatively different from cars, which only incidentally kill people (and the vast majority of time, not on purpose).

To me, trying to equate deaths caused by purpose-made killing tools with those caused by generic tools is arguing in bad faith.

You'd still be walking around as a free advertiser for their stuff, simply by owning Google-branded hardware. And of course the hypocrisy of having a Google phone to avoid Google spying is palpable.

Best news of the year!

Java and C are older languages which have either solidified (C) or are very careful about breaking compat (Java). Most languages nowadays are indeed in the "move fast and break things" mode.

Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)

Goddamn right!

The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

So much is missing from this story. Did they report it to the relevant data authority? Did the fix they said they applied actually fix anything? Etc.

I think before, it was easier to spot. Before, the effort spent would often show in the volume or consistency of the writing. Now, one can create a big, wordy and convincing-sounding document (without any grammatical errors!) in mere seconds. It also provides for some convenient plausible deniability: you can always claim the LLM only helped you here and there with the wording.

So now, even figuring out that it was a careless or lazy job takes a lot more time, which drastically skews the economics in favor of the careless person.

I realize it's been "written" by an LLM, but the content could have been written by someone I know. It's eerie how this person thinks exactly the same way. It's never their fault, always the others', and they are always obviously right and no amount of arguing can change their mind.

Exactly this. The question states it as a fact, so why would you go back and point out the inconsistency?

Also, car companies have a lot at stake and are a clear target. The scammer is hard to even identify, and has no reputation to worry about. Of course in case of a sold extension, the original author of the extension may have a reputation they care about, but only if they're still making other extensions.

S7 is very cool indeed. It also comes as a single C file, which makes it easy to embed.

As a CHICKEN maintainer, I'd love to hear what the author was missing in the FFI part of the manual.

Good point regarding registrar. Thinking a bit further, there's also the top-level domain: if that's under US control (eg .com), it could still be yanked away from you.

My blog is at https://www.more-magic.net, mostly about programming (with a focus on Scheme) or adjacent stuff.

- Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

NutriScore is mostly useless, to the point of being misleading. The system was cooked up by the industry, which explains a lot.

It is a label that tells you how nutritious a given product is "compared to products in the same category". So you could have, say, candy or frozen pizza with a NutriScore A and that would be just fine according to this system because it happens to be more nutritious than other candy/pizza. In other words, a product having a NutriScore of A doesn't mean the product is actually healthy or good for you.

Then you should support the Free Software Europe's "Public Money, Public Code" campaign: https://publiccode.eu/en/

Yeah, investing it in bitcoin sure beats selling the power to India at bargain bin prices during summer time only to have to buy it back in winter time at premium rates. I think this really shows his majesty's wisdom and ability to think ahead (iiuc it was his decision to start mining bitcoins using green energy).

Tourism is not really a growth sector. There are too many hotels already, with hoteliers complaining they can't get bookings at a decent price because there's too much competition undercutting them, and tour operators demanding lower prices than is sustainable.

Truthfully, the GMC is Bhutan's best bet at growth. The idea is to attract foreign talent who can train and educate locals, so that it can act as an attractor for youths, and a flywheel for prosperity in the country.

Same with the big Crowdstrike fail of 2024. Especially when everyone kept repeating the laughable statement that these guys have their shit in order, so it couldn't possibly be a simple fuckup on their end. Guess what, they don't, and it was. And nobody has realized the importance of diversity for resilience, so all the major stuff is still running on Windows and using Crowdstrike.

When someone uses my name in conversation, it makes me think less of them, because it's so unnatural and clearly they might be doing it to manipulate me.

Oh man, I always find it so slimy when people do that! I've also noticed it's mostly HR people or sales people who do this, so clearly it's a phony technique they learned somewhere. But I suppose it gets taught because it works, maybe for people who don't pick up on the fact that it's so forced?

Sounds like the best type of place to work for me. Instead of being a replaceable cog in a meat grinder that doesn't even pay well, working with boring tech, you get to work with talented people in an actually interesting language and get decently paid.

And best of all, you don't feel the need to keep chasing after the latest hype just to keep your CV relevant.

This is also how you can identify decent places to work at: look for job postings that emphasize you aren't expected to already know the language.

For example, in the recent "who's hiring" thread, I saw at least two places where they did that: Duckduckgo (they mention only algorithms and data structures and say "in case you're curious, we use Perl") and Stream (they offer a 10-week intro course to Go if you're not already familiar with it). If I remember correctly, Jane Street also doesn't require prior OCaml experience.

The place where I work (bevuta IT GmbH) also allowed me to learn Clojure on the job (but it certainly helped that I was already an expert in another Lisp dialect).

These hiring practices are a far cry from those old style job postings like "must have 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails" when the framework was only 5 years old.

Any chance you would add Dzongkha?

PS: Cool product, if I were in a different life phase I would definitely consider joining you to build it!

The AI winter happened. And the AI they talk about is classical, symbolic AI where you try to explicitly represent knowledge inside the computer. The new LLM stuff is all neural networks, and those benefit more from fast low-level vector implementations than high-level ease of symbolic manipulation.

So modern AI is all mostly C or even Fortran, often driven from something more pedestrian, like Python.

Nope. I mostly happily used Python in my previous job for many years, now I'm doing Clojure. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, but I don't know if I'd want to go back to Python. I'm a Lisper (Schemer, really) at heart so maybe I'm biased.

Having said that, I don't think I'd pick Clojure for unpaid (hobby) projects. The JVM is such a hog and I don't like anything related to the Java culture...

I don't know if this works well in general, but for example Kodi has "basic", "advanced" and several progressively more advanced steps in between for most of its menus. It hides lots of details that are irrelevant to the majority of users.

I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc.

A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, but I couldn't find out how to disable that and make it charge right away. The manual seemed to indicate it could only be done with an app (ugh, disgusting). Went back to the rental company, they made it charge and showed me a video of the screen where to do that. I asked "but how on earth do you get to that screen?". Turned out you could fucking swipe the tablet display to get to a different screen! There was absolutely no indication that this was possible, and the screen even implied that it was modal because there were icons at the bottom which changed the display of the screen.

So you had: zero affordances, modal design on a specific tab, and the different modes showed different tabs at the top, further leading me to believe that this was all there was.

GPL doesn't help you one bit in this particular situation, because "regular users" would still be using the locked-down stock Android that came with their device. So they still can't install your app.

Anyone who is already running a rooted Android or otherwise customized OS isn't affected by this, only developers who want to distribute their app to users.

That really helps, indeed