UPDATE: the new version of the app has arrived and in fact there is no automatic upload of one's TOTP secrets to his or her Google account. You have to opt in. This is reasonable, the paranoia in my post should be disregarded.

The point of 2FA is that the second factor shouldn't be replicable. This "update" degrades Google Authenticator's suitability as a 2FA app. Moreover, it looks like the synchronization to Google's servers will start automatically, without an opt-in. This means that with this update Google employees invited themselves into the position of being theoretically able to access, say, one's bank account, without bothering to ask whether he or she agreed to that. This is unacceptable.

Among other things, ChatGPT was reportedly making up defamatory things about real existing people, such as "xyz is a known terrorist". Which is a problem when something is no longer a toy for nerds but is actually made available as a product to the general public.

It's not a matter of throwing away stuff that one "doesn't like", which would be an emotional motivation; Java has three different time and date systems, type erasure, language constructs that can crash your code: it is stuff that is *objectively* bad to have today, and yet you have to learn it in order to understand the language.

No one has ever tried to write a language that was designed to be the new iteration of Java: all other major JVM languages had very different design philosophies, they weren't designed by the very smart people who develop Java, and were meant to be competitor for Java, not descendants. Also, when those languages were introduced the JVM was much more limited than it is today.

Finally, the "support legacy code" part is gone now: Oracle did break backwards compatibility in Java 9, and has been marking features "for removal" ever since.

Java has become a bit complicated, with all the stuff it accumulated over 30 years of backward compatibility.

Perhaps they could release a new major revision of the language (not the VM), leaving behind all the legacy baggage and taking advantage of the lessons learned along the way. Maybe we could have once again a language that could be taught in a semester, as it was the case for the original version.

Python is very slow though, so beating it is not a big deal. Also, you should compare it to vbscript instead of vb6, because vb6 is compiled.

1) Exactly that, you have to use Set for objects and just = for non-objects. Forget to use Set (or forget what is an object) and you get subtle bugs because you code a.Value = b instead of a = b. 2) Yeah, forget to put ugly ByVal in your parameters and you get your utility function to write stuff into its caller's variables and again you get subtle bugs. 3) Option base 1.

I remember fondly that time when power users were encouraged to write their own applications. But the VB language was full of quirks. You had to assign objects with a special construct instead of the equals operator, because = would instead set the value of the default property of the object. Function parameters were passed by reference by default. Array indexes could be either zero-based or one-based depending on an option.

The only way to make money from them is to sell them to others before their value crashes. I think that if they weren't fashionable they would be considered a scam. Maybe they're going out of fashion now.

And if it were so, why didn't you tell me before instead of playing the smart ass?

Anyway, go back to your world where the Communist Party of China conspires to steal drinkypoo's clipboard through a meme app, and then pays peppepz to cover his tracks on slashdot.

In the real world, privacy policies are legally binding documents and if an app is caught violating them, it can be sued out of existence by privacy watchdogs.

I couldn't click any of the links in the results of that search without giving those websites wishing to warn me against the dangers of TikTok the consent to collect more data about me than TikTok does.

In case anyone is interested, this is what they collect. In short, they store your account data (of course) and collect automatically what they can estimate from your IP address (that's what every thing that you interact with over the Internet could do) and phone number.
Any other thing they collect, you have to give them the consent to, as it happens for any other mobile app.
On top of that, indeed, they analyze the list of the dumb videos that you've watched. And they spy on you with cookies just like any commercial website these days. Compare their data collection policy with that of a website that we certainly don't see as a menace to our security.

I hate sneaky companies that rape my privacy, but I hate moral panic even more.

I'm reading about this TikTok panic everywhere and would like to understand what it is all about.

Americans are used to giving, say, Google every bit of personal information they have: their contacs, their emails, their phone calls, their purchases, their exact position (and its lifetime history!) and that of their cars. They even have always-on cameras and microphones inside of their houses, streaming the most intimate aspects of their lives towards their Big Tech overlords. And they're supposed to be OK with that.

Now there is this TikTok app, whose only use is to watch extremely silly short videos. And people should be afraid of it because... the Chinese government could obtain a list of the dumb videos that they've watched through it? Is this it? What am I missing here?

And the number of Bitcoins is limited to... 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshis. Quite a relative concept of scarcity.

"Inclusive language" doesn't help anybody, except those who feel better by berating others. The ministers of susceptibility could very well write their own books, better than Dahl's, using all the words they like, and this way they would give their contribution to mankind; but no: all they can do is telling those who actually managed to write something that they are "wrong" and need to be corrected. And if you don't agree with them, it doesn't matter, they know better and everyone else needs to have his books remotely censored.

Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers

Are we talking about Copilot here? Because I can't understand how it could have caused the layoff of thousands of workers judging by what it does. Maybe they write a lot of boilerplate code?