Posts by Ken Hagan 8559 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
"Trump is all about his personal image, so if he thinks he is being mocked (which he is, justifiably) he will dig in."
I'm not so sure he is fully aware. (He's surrounded by yes men, after all.) Putin has been oprnly taking the piss for months now with no comeback beyond some empty rhetoric.
"list all the European Union member countries in alphabetical order of their capital cities"
The correct answer here is to break the 4th wall and reply "How the blazes should I know?!". Anything else just labels you as an AI trying too hard. Of course, an LLM could eventually learn this and start refusing to answer hard questions, at which point it simultaneously becomes more human and less useful.
I followed the link to the tender, but as far as I can see the tender does not say how much material needs to be digitised. £75 million might be ridiculously large or small (and the same could be said for the timescale).
Am I missing something or is it normal for government tenders to be a pig in a poke?
Nit-pick: C++ has had a memory-safe subset since day one. The various projects alluded to in the article concern ways of statically enforcing the use of that subset.
The main reason that most real projects go outside that subset is that the interface to the OS is not memory-safe. This is because that interface is a C interface and C++ can use that interface directly.
With most other languages, that's hard-to-impossible so someone actually bothers to wrap a usefully large chunk of the OS interface for the new language.
The same problem also applies to many domain-specific libraries. The "official" interface is a C interface and a binding for your favourite language is your problem. Python's utterly massive collection of libraries is actually a huge feature in this respect. It represents a massive amount of work by many people and yet it is just there for the average Pythonista. In comparison, most other memory-safe languages have a fuckton of catching up to do before they are serious options for writing non-trivial apps.
I think we need to be careful about the wording here.
Russia currently controls 20% of Ukraine. Three years ago, it did not control 25%. It merely had some cannon fodder sitting there. But the OP said "occupied" so I'd say you are strictly correct but the OP's intended meaning was also correct.
And yet, no-one seems to have come up with a better way to write an OS in the last fifty years. (There would not be a problem to "get it widely adopted". We've seen several new form-factors for computing devices in 50 years and several new OSes, but the survivors always seem to end up looking like UNIX.)
" Who knows, maybe if Dylan had used {curly braces} it would have been a big hit?"
I've heard sillier ideas.
You have to remember that when C was young it was competing against languages that used actual words for scoping, like BEGIN / END or IF / ENDIF or (boggle) case / esac. The choice of { } resulted in an immediate and obvious improvement in readability in most people's opinion. (This was even true compared to languages that already used brackets, but insisted on using round brackets for /everything/.)
So yeah, a lot of people are now just comfortable with languages that use bracketty things for containment and which use a variety of kinds of bracket to improve clarity still further. Any language that doesn't is just starting 10 metres behind the rest of the field waiting for the starter's pistol.
A bit of a stretch to say "22 years on from the last spec, you can now animate your PNGs".
Animated images were part of the original design, but animation just wasn't felt to be very important so MNG didn't get the love. (Presumably internet users were more focussed on actual content back then rather than shiny things.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics
If you are really concerned about the logical incompatibility then it would be equally reasonable to ban tiling window managers because they can't handle window placement.
Of course, both positions are stupid, because they are absolute.
A more reasonable approach is to allow apps to say "if I can position my windows, here's where I'd like them" or even "it's me again, please try to put me where I was last time". No absolute guarantees, but no ban hammers either.
Fact is, most end-users don't switch between overlapped window managers and tiling ones or VR bunnies, so they don't care about the kind of future-proofing that the designers are aiming for.
"Coupling this effect with occupational task and wage data puts the annual value of AI-assisted coding in the United States at $9.6–$14.4 billion,"
Value, or cost? I don't see any mention in the article about whether these commits worked. On the other hand, Microsoft's quality control has sunk a lot in recent years and their claimed use of AI has increased a lot, so there certainly is anecdotal evidence that AI code is shite.
There's also fusion, which is about as close to being a reality. Make of that what you will.
Howdver, I would agree that, certainly with hindsight and possibly this was even understood at the time, uranium was the wrong place to start. I would also note that we've had half a century or more to realise this and get off our collective arses and do something about it.
" (as we pretty much knew back in the early 2000's) "
If you are talking about clean energy with a dependable delivery then I think you mean 1950s. We haven't suddenly found a flaw in our previous plan to leave nuclear as the only remaining option, unless you count "discovering" that we've consistently only spent a pittance on developing fusion over the past half-century.
Since the cancer definitely dies with the host, I think you may just have contradicted yourself.
You were, I imagine, thinking of a parasite rather than a cancer. Now it may be that an obsesssion with adding features is a parasitic mentality that has parasitised Microsoft, but that's a whole other discussion.
Probably ...
It doesn't work, but human beings start polite and get increasingly frustrated and wound up until the damn, blasted, stupid PILE OF SCRAP, FINALLY !!! ... delivers a reasonsble answer, at which point the satisfied human recovers their composure and idly wonders "Was it the verbal abuse?".
No. You just retried many times until you were happy/livid.
I doubt that is the plan, since they have no viable products if Windows died out. It may however, be what happens. Trump trying to persuade the world that US products and services cannot be trusted probably isn't helping either.
I don't know how much of it is being picked up by US-ians yet, but there's a helll of a lot if goodwill and trust being burned up by USG and US businesses right now.
Your example sounds a lot like how we used to use documentation, back when libraries came with such a thing. We'd search the docs for an example that wasn't very different from some of our requirements and we'd yank out the bits that looked useful. Then we'd massage the code to meet our wider requirements, which (as noted in previous comments) most certainly would not be clearly specified anywhere but would instead be distilled from a mixture of real-world experience, conversations with customers and domain experts, and the common sense that comes from being a real person.
If AI can generate plausible documentation for the very many libraries that sadly don't have any at the moment, perhaps it isn't completely useless to a programmer after all.
The greybeards are actually mentioned in the article, though not by that name. They are the people who knew how to run stuff in-house, who were sacked to provide the short-term saving that made the cloud migration look attractive to the bean counters.
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