That work sounds like a great candidate to offload onto AI!

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

The merchants need to consider that if their competitor down the street still accepts rewards cards, the customers might just switch, and then they've just lost the whole sale. All this over a 1% extra cost to the merchant.

In the meantime, they think nothing of offering things like buy-one-get-one-free deals to lure in a few more customers.

That summary at the top of this story is just way too long. I'll have a chatbot break it down and give me the gist.

If you're locked inside an ATM, have you tried banging on the case to alert passers by?

Almost nobody uses "untyped languages". Few of those even exist, with Forth and various assembly languages being the main examples. (C, with its type system that is as airtight as a sieve, gets an honorary mention.)

You're probably harping about dynamically typed languages. In such languages, the runtime still knows *exactly* what type every item of data has. These are not weakly typed. But what you obviously prefer are "statically typed" languages.

Static typing might statistically reduce some errors, but it certainly can't "eliminate whole classes". Consider "set_warhead_target(float latitude, float longitude)". Did the type system give you any protection from accidentally swapping the two parameters? That's really the problem that you're so worried about: accidentally using the wrong data value in the wrong place.

However, very few statically typed languages (with Rust being a notable exception) have eliminated the biggest source of type errors in computing: Null, which is a bogus placeholder that matches any pointer type (or reference type, depending on the language's nomenclature). So in many cases you have no less risk with static typing than you do with accidentally feeding a string into a Python sqrt() function. And in the case of C or C++, you can be much worse off, as in segfaults and remote exploits.

I can't think of any business or other government function that still makes me fill out any paper forms. At one recent employer I did not fill out a single paper or PDF-style form, HR or otherwise, in the entire experience from the day I applied until the day I resigned.

Nobody uses paper forms any more. Everything is online. Taxes should be no different, and there should be no 3rd party middlemen collecting tolls for the "privilege" of doing something online the way everything else is done.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

I bought a whole bunch of op-amps and rheostats, but I'm having a hard time trying to get them to implement all of my lighting "scenes". The voltages often won't converge to a stable solution, and it's really hard to analyze all the differential equations with just my slide rule.