Jack Krawczyk

Sorry, but Professor Donda was first, back in 1973. Those who don't know who he was, here is wiki entry about this story by Stanislaw Lem. Also Jokester by I.Asimov comes to mind.

Instead of Pony, what does Jack Ma think? Some time ago he was quite vocal, then suddenly silent.

I would do the same. I heard pretty ugly stories about those who were ionized.

Exactly. I can imagine Chinese officers commenting this panic with "Comrades, this is our chance!" On the other hand, I can also imagine engineers of OpenAI, looking at their poorly written Python scripts, crashing servers and logs full of errors, wishing that The Evil attributed to them would have smaller technical debt.

Those who started this collective neurosis muse be great fans of Dune (The Butlerian Jihad) and Hyperion. I prefer works where sentient AI isn't portrayed as completely evil, like Golem XIV and Neuromancer, therefore my view of current AI trajectory is optimistic.

This pattern fits to many other names. Greta Thunberg, Coralina Ada Ehmke, I expect a lot of witch-burning fun in coming years.

You could just respond with "No" to my first question, you would save time.

Did you read the opinion of Nadine Strossen expressed here?

And are you familiar with illusory truth effect, when you are one of many repeating increasingly bigger lies ad nauseum?

Many notebook and ultrabook vendors seem to pay no attention to an ergonomical keyboard layout, they just cram all necessary keys together. I feel my key layout tastes are a bit strict, I can tolerate Dell and Lenovo, a little bit of Toshiba, but that's it. Trying to use key combinations like Alt+Arrow or PgUp/Down are often a hassle (tiny, misplaced, in some cases even involving the Fn key). Especially when travelling, I actually like to have prominent keys like Space and Backspace that have clearly defined and frequently used functions. (On the other hand I really hate websites that autofocus form fields.)

But hey, we are talking about Mozilla here, removing useful functions is their expected behaviour. It would be sooo difficult to put a toggle to about:config; I can hardly imagine how many talented engineers would have to be dedicated to such a task.

Watching recent development, it looks that China grows impatient with Taiwan. I wouldn't rule out an invasion attempt within next 5 years. Another thing is that PLA would love to get their hands on existing designs, it's much better than clandestine sourcing and reverse-engineering.

I believe there are 2 main factors involved in this perceived popularity jump - RStudio and TidyVerse. While I admit that the core R is sometimes a bit cryptic (OK, sometimes too cryptic), limiting myself to the TidyVerse paradigm shields me from the most painful aspects. The result is that I can have a smooth pipeline from a DB to a PDF full of advanced charts that is reusable and avoids any spreadsheet tool.

With unrealistical assumption that all kinds of crypto would be completely broken, I can imagine total IT mayhem. Many systems (OS and their device drivers, databases, generally large SW packages) depend on cryptographically secure schemes for integrity and authenticity protection, we would be in a world without any guarantee, nobody would be able to distinguish legitimate updates from malware. The end of e-commerce and other aspects were already mentioned several times, so I won't repeat them.

Fortunately we are quite far from such a scenario. There is a nice enlightening book "Post-Quantum Cryptography", edited by DJ Bernstein, that illustrates techniques that would remain secure even after some upcoming quantum computing breakthrough.

Yes, workaround for versions irrelevant for old-timers went out quickly, hat down to that. Unfortunately, I was stuck at versions 53 and 56, and no fix was released for them so far (AFAIK). I was checking the bugzilla all the time, hoping for some kind of workaround for those old versions, and I am certain I wasn't alone. Yet none appeared and the devs didn't have as much as a kind word for us. Obviously, I understand the word "unsupported", but I wonder whether maintaining a (shrinking) user base wouldn't warrant a bit of extra effort. Even Microsoft did release a patch for Windows XP just last week, acknowledging that despite being long after EOL, there are many existing installations that are not going away anytime soon.

I would love to, and until recent incident I did; I considered myself a loyal user despite my favorite features being taken away all the time. However my sin was that I needed to use several add-ons that are no longer supported by newer FF builds, with zero alternatives available. And the certificate fiasco prevented me to use even those old versions of FF. The implicit contempt from FF devs in various discussions didn't improve my feeling of emergency. Well, couple of weeks later, I have installed about 15 instances of PaleMoon, all add-ons working as they should, and I see no reason to turn back. Ever.

I see a pattern here. I used to be a frequent user of Flickr, paying Pro account, using it as a primary photo storage and such. After a wave of arrogant, user-hostile redesigns, I have noticed that many of my contacts stopped to come and finally after - as we could label it now - a repulsive "UI remix" two years ago, I too stopped coming. So big congratulations to MM - laying off the customers is quite a feat!