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Strangely, estrogen bathes the male brain in the womb to remove connections and make it masculine. To think of it as "the female hormone" is to misunderstand physiology.
She changed the ending of Star Wars IV : A New Hope.
She decided that Han Solo should return to save Luke at the last minute when Darth Vader was closing in for the kill. This absolutely MADE THE MOVIE end wonderfully, and made Harrison Ford return for two more movies, enabling the series to continue! Without her, George Lucas would have been another failed scifi director ...
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Google now wants $30,000 a month for customsearch (minimum charge), up from 1c per search or thereabouts in January 2026...
This article is about FAFO for MAGA loyalists in the USA. Well, MAGA has FA'd with US-European relations. Now they get to FO where it takes us (i.e. over the waterfall, isolating the USA from everything good in the world.)
$3 a day, $100/mo to run your own github actions (which is a programming language based atop json ... sheesh). Ugh!!
Dijkstra was silly because everybody knows that Computer Science is the parent field of mathematics.
Mathematics is the study of all O(1) algorithms.
Computer Science is all other algorithms!
OMG you lived my dream. In 1976 I was 14 years old and started programming for the first time on the PLATO SYSTEM (university of illinois), the first computer with plasma screens, 1000 terminals, SOCIAL NETWORKS, MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR (it was called airfight was the name back then), the FIRST DUNGEON GAME (pedit5 / dnd). As I mowed lawns I dreamed of buying an HP-25 or SR-52 calculator or maybe an IMSAI 8080 computer of my own so badly! I eventually taught PLATO how to simulate a pocket football game, and wrote BASIC programs using a toy interpreter but they didn't have a way to store programs when your session was finished! :-(
In high school (late 1970s) I inherited (from my deceased father), a white book with red/yellow titling as "The Basic Programming Language" (the lettering on the front appeared to be in IBM check-writing font). In the appendix were about 10 basic programs including one in particular that would produce a meaningless technical report of arbitray length! I read the book, learned basic, and typed in a few of the programs (I had access to the UIUC CSL Dec-20 system). What a great time to be alive!
I am aware that the first STAR TREK game was written in Basic, using 10x10 quadrants and maybe a 10x10 quadrant universe. I eventually wrote an enhanced version of this called "Swords and Sorcery" but using a fantasy theme, not a space theme ...
I was so enamored with the BASIC programming language that a couple of years later I wrote a miniature interpreter on the PLATO system, at first trying to do a primitive BASIC language, but later I settled on doing a forth interpreter because RPN was so much easier to execute ...
Thank you, Dr. Kurtz. Your project helped make my youth a never ending joy of discovering new things! :-) :-)
Red States are the biggest leaches off the federal government. Out of the top-10 states that take in more subsidies than they pay out in taxes, only 2 are blue states, 8 are red states! The Red States never learn because the social welfare programs from the Democrats coddle them ...
It makes Linux more robust. Since Microsoft is the king of vulnerability, making Linux more robust is NOT in their best interest. I actually think Microsoft did a GOOD THING. This should create a mad scramble to tighten up security at all those lackadaisical distros!
The difficulty in learning a language is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of BNF rules! Let that sink in. When last I looked, C had 120 rules and C++ had 250. C++ was already out of control and has a bunch of really stupid features that nobody with any intelligence uses for anything other than showing off (and let me tell you - there are A LOT of showoffs at Google!) Anyway, that's why C++ is 4x harder to learn than C ... I call it ... "Don's Law".
When I was in high school I learned about BNF and so i wrote a program that let you type in BNF rules and then it would run a recognizer on an arbitrary string to decide if the string met the BNF rules. I don't know if I could write that again, but it was a definite eye-opener and I learned a ton from that project ...
gfx1101 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-32.g1000
gfx1100 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-31.g998
gfx1030 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-21.g923
gfx1010 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-10.g861
gfx900 : https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-vega-10.g800
I had been programming profesionally for 3 years (since age 15) when I took "SICP" at MIT in 1980 (we used LISP; Scheme would come a few years later). The course is designed to appeal to the ego of the professors who teach it, and it is designed to mold MIT students into AI researchers which is the whole point of the MIT curriculum - -
1. They taught a bunch of extremely advanced concepts like infinite lists of prime numbers where the 'CAR' and 'CDR' functions could be used to iterate down the list, which calculates the next prime number on-demand.
2. At the end of the course, they made the horrific mistake of encouraging students how to write their programs in LISP and then embed the LISP code into other languages, such as Algol, which produces the most extreme spaghetti code in the history of mankind!
The problem with SICP is that it teaches many advanced language concepts but the students are unprepared to absorb them and haven't ever struggled with the types of problems these advanced concepts are meant to solve! It's like showing a peasant farmer how to drive a modern combine before they've ever tried ploughing their field with a horse plough! I can pretty safely say, as a systems programmer, I have used exactly zero of the concepts taught in SICP back in 1980.
But most importantly, when professors teach SICP, they can feel good about themselves because they get the misguided impression that they are teaching something that grows their student's capabilities as a programmer and when talking to other professors teaching introductory computer science, the SICP professsors can say, "look at this cool shit my students did - i bet your students wish they could write shit as cool as this!" - end of story.
Incidentally, I never went to class and got an "A" in the class. It was annoying to have to take this remedial brainwashing class after already taking 2 other CS classes (including introduction to programming and assembly language programming) at the University of Illinois.
This is every telco evil empire's ultimate dream. Charge all customers twice! Let the second charge be pure profit which you can direct to the critically important expenditure of executive bonuses!
I dont really believe this crazy tutoring theory AT ALL. What has changed is that education has become widespread. It is well known that standardized education destroys creativity. Ramanujen was largely self-taught! The stuff you learn on your own or unconventionally makes you capable of solving problems that the cookie cutter intellectuals cannot!
If you were born in Oppenheimer's era you gained a huge advantage of parents wealthy enough to pay for undergrad school (perhaps a paltry 5%) AND graduate school (perhaps 0.01%) so the gulf in education and knowledge between these wealthy educrats and the average man on the street was far more enormous, and these educrats had a much bigger inside track to discovery ...
So to summarize, a genius is measured by their intellectual height above the AVERAGE person and the average has increased a lot. At the same time, standardized education is killing diversity and creativity...
This is all Avago. They bought Broadcom, eviscerated America's #2 communications chip company, and renamed Avago Broadcom to hide their crimes against humanity ...
Intel was infected with marketing people who diseased the entire C-Suite and drained the company for 8 years without doing anything other than make up new marketing names for the 5000-11000 series of chips and their stagnant iGPUs. That level of thievery would kill any leading company. ..
I have no interest in learning how to program a mistake. By this I am not talking about the z80 or 6502, but rather, the Atari 2600.
You're a fool if you think the EPA is at fault. A 2022 Ford F-series catalytic converter costs $824 at retail, much less in volume. The average car in the USA is 12 years old so that's $70 per year per car to have a catalytic converter. Each year almost 300,000 early deaths (1 in 1100) people are prevented by EPA pollution controls. People tend to die about 10 years early from air pollution deaths (MIT - 2013). The return on investment is estimated to be 30:1.
https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/benefits-and-cost...
Air Pollution dropped 77% from 1970 - 2020. Assuming that early deaths scale up and down linearly with air pollution, I calculate (***) that this should result in the average person living at least 3.8 months longer, at a cost of $70/yr, or a rate of $266/yr for a longer life. What rate would YOU pay annually to live a year longer?
A gym membership costs at least $500 annually (including travel and equipment) and yields an average 3.4-year increase in life expectancy, but you spend 150 minutes a week exercising which is 1.6 waking-years engaged in exercising ... so the net is $500 annually for 1.8 net years of extra (free-time) of life, or $277/yr annually to live a year longer?
=== Footnotes ===
(***) - https://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-...
According to a 2013 MIT study the death rate from air pollution is 200,000 per year in the USA, and people die about a decade too soon, so 2M years of lifetime are lost per year. 1/70th of our country dies each year which is 4.7m people. So if air pollution were eradicated from 2013 levels, people would get to live about 5.1 months (12 * 2m/4.7m) longer, at a cost of only $70/car/yr over their lifetime as adults. Air pollution is down 77% from peak, so If I take 0.77 of 5.1 months I get 3.9 months. In 2020 air pollution was already less than half of 1970 levels so the savins are actually much, much higher.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1137375/air-pollution-de....
Ford is so stupid. Is it no wonder America has lost its competitive edge with blue collar workers driving $100k Ford Raptor trucks?
In my lifetime the memory hierarchy has grown from 3 levels (register, main memory, disk) to at least 8 levels (register, L1 Cache, L2 Cache, L3 Cache, VM, main memory, disk, web). A lot of people like the guy who wrote this paper have no patience for a language that can still run most 1971 C programs!
Every year people who do not understand why C is so successful try make a name for themselves by breaking what makes the language great (such as the complete agnostic set of control structures). C has successfully remained portable and performant for 50Y+ because of its flat memory model (with a few tweaks such as "volatile".)
It's probably much worse than this. Once the earth stops rotating IMHO it's likely the magnetic core stops rotating. Then the solar wind strips our aosphere in only 1000 years ...
"Different Poses" section - the hands are all cut off in these pictures except for one single picture where the index finger is the longest finger on the right hand!
You have the wrong impression of Google Translate. Translate was started in 2006 and it sucked. 60% accuracy at best. Janky incoherent sentences. Translate revolutionized the entire field of language translation in 2016. Seriously. Went to 94% accuracy when Jeff Dean joined the project and spurred them to train against all languages at once. It revolutionized the whole research field of language translation. Translate is now better than most high school students after several years of study. I consider Translate to be one of the top-5 accomplishments that Google ever had:
https://translatepress.com/is-google-translate-correct/
Another breakthrough is picture recognition. Did you know you can type in "motorcycles" and do an image search and there is ZERO text associated with many of those pictures of motorcycles? They really are mapreducing those pictures and running image recognition against a 17M open-source image library to assess "motorcycle-ness" of all those pictures! They started talking about picture recognition in the early 2000's but it really began happening in the late 2010's after they hired fei fei li, the mother of image recognition ...
That's mostly propaganda, like most companies, Google has a policy of something like 5x-10x fewer people at every level as you go up the management chain, and they enforce that policy in preference and use these sugar-coated candy-cane level guidance documents to hide their sleaze.
They really don't give a shit how many search engineers they drive away with 50+-hour weeks and their endless criticism. When it became uncool to have Google Search on your resume in 2018, I left.
Most people will misinterpret what this book really is. Most people will think, "Hmm if I read this book I can start another google." Nothing could further from the truth. This is a book about how to run a gigantic software organization once it gets huge, rich, and sclerotic. This book has no insight into how to start another Google. The only insight is into where will you end up if your startup ends up huge, rich, and sclerotic, like Google.
True, just like Qualcomm bought Eudora (mac) email for fame, Google started the Go project to keep Rob Pike (of UNIX fame) happy and to help their own internal SRE teams. The public "good will" and benefits to Google SRE have more than paid for their efforts to create the Go language, plus also there is some publicity and fame for Google having most of the remaining early UNIX guys on staff ...