As nerds we have always wondered how the Parsec became a unit of time. And this explains it. By becoming a celestial navigation system, the ideas of time and space become intertwined. And this is how Hans managed the run in under three parsecs

Maybe my memory predates yours but my recollection is that once we got to plastic cards the consumer would indeed hold the card. But there was a time the metal plate was stored at the store. Often these were kept in a central office and sent out to the point of sale a pneumatic tube.

Having a car now so you can drive to work and keep your high paying job, sure beats working a crap job you can walk to till you can afford that car. It's not a predatory trap. Most loan interest rates are very close to the profit less time value of money. Often times they are even less.

taking a loan to get an education (a good one) is worth doing in many cases. However, having educated people is so valuable to society, it wold be even better if education were cheap enough not to need loans. But since that's not the case, taking the loan now is a way to get the education now. It's not predatory per se, it's the schools that are the predators.

So you are saying people should not get loans to start a business or buy a house. Cities should not issue bonds to build roads or community centers. Or the federal gov't should not borrow money and spend it into a recession. Maybe you need to ponder what Keynes meant when he said "in the long run were all dead". It means that borrowing on the future can create a more productive trajectory today than simply waiting for your earnings in the future before spending.

Starbucks will offer a handy.

Before the age of credit cards, most department stores (recall those?) used to offer credit to their customers. The charge plate was a metal plate the store held to stamp your purchases for pre-approved credit. You then had revolving credit to pay off, which let you buy more as you paid it off. There was also Lay-a-way as an alternative where you could buy something and the store would hold it in stock until you made the final payment.

So the idea of a company making it simple to buy things on credit isn't new. And it doesn't make it predatory either. I sincerely doubt apple's affiliate loan rates will be larger than most credit cards. The amounts involved are capped at small amounts.

Comparing this to payback predatory lending is knicker twisted Henny Penny get-off-my-lawn reactionary thinking

"ChatGPT emulate a dos prompt please"

Now run a chatGPT API in this dos environment.

Next up, playing doom

"Harry Potter movie introduces children to the joy of not reading"

It used to be in ancient times one actually read science journals. Editors put relevant articles next to each other. And since you had no way to view these online--you had to physically go to the library and hold the printed volume-- scanning through bound volumes for articles to read was natural. Now we just search for things and only get exactly what we searched for and not the serendipitous find

I'm wondering what the catch is? Does it forbid certain python instructions or idioms. Does it flail if an unexpected data type is presented to a compiled subroutine? Does it have cases where it produced a different answer than python?

Having worked with Julia I can believe you can compile an untyped language to faster than C. Julia sometimes is faster than Fortran. Julia however was rigged from the start to do just in time compiling when new data type signatures are presented to a functions arguments. So you can do this if you build it from the ground up.

And as for how it can be faster, I'm unsure. But I think it has to do with the fact that some command structures are more expressive about the overall objective and so the compiler may be able to optimize better. But I really don't know. Maybe it's just because it's easier to write better code so even though Fortran or C could be just as fast it isn't coded that way in general whereas it may be easier to code better in a higher level language.

Who wants a mega chip. We want ever smaller microcrhips.

Has a nice fresh ring to it.,

The whole reason the fed is hiking interest rates ( an inadvertently causing banks to be under capitalized) is because the economy is doing too well. There's not enough unemployment, companies are paying higher wages, people are finding it too easy to switch jobs. Ergo inflation which can truly suck is getting started. The fed is prescribing a medicine that tastes bitter but is good for calming an in sufficiently sucking economy.

Ironically big layoffs are what's needed. And getting laid off early in this when there's still companies higher and not cutting wages is lucky for those folks. It's the ones that get laid off as the economy cools that will be the losers in the musical chairs.

And your money is fine if it's in an insured account or a bank the feds are going to take over the assets of and keep liquid.

The thing to worry about are the crazy politicians and crazy news sources trying to make you think it's a bad economy and trying to jam the works by preventing the bank liquidity moves. Those don't cost the government anything and keep the system working. But those news sources and politicians don't care

I don't think kiddie porn will be the thing. But I do think that basically it will be different prompts that get around filters but that give me a stiffie that can cut glass.

It's like the Uber for blockchain AI.