Good, I'm glad she's leaving. She's pushed the EFF in a bad direction, and forced John Gilmore (one of the founders of the EFF out).

I think the replacement choice is obvious - bring Gilmore back as Executive Director.

If you can do everything you need to do in the language, then anything else is fluff.

C++ supports a wide variety of paradigms and practices. You don't need to learn all of them, just one. And if you stick to modern C++, it is a clean and easy language.

>... what he thinks of modern C++ where the learning curve for newbies is now getting close to vertical. Speaking as a C++ dev of 25 years I wouldn't go near the language now if I was starting out, the number of paradigms and syntactic complexity has become ridiculous. And yes, if you're going to work on code written by others you do need to know and understand all these paradigms.

C++ is the easiest to learn now in, like, ever.

It's a mistake you have to know all the ins and outs of the language. The minimal set you need to do interesting things is quite small and it is much more usable than ever. I haven't had a memory leak or other memory issue since I switched over to modern C++ 10+ years ago.

Well, I had one once, but I did it deliberately to see if my tools (ASAN) would detect it. It did.

I use Firefox as my main browser.

I can't uninstall Chrome though, because so many sites break on Firefox (and like major sites too, like Gencon's website or really annoying things like hotel wifi login sites) I have to keep Chrome around to keep my computer usable.

I don't care about Pocket or these other useless things. All I want from Firefox is for them to figure out why their tech stack is incompatible with Chrome and fix it. Even if it's not standards compatible. Make a compatibility layer so I can uninstall Chrome spyware.

I remember those horrible "Count Dracula seatbelts" from the last century that would try to strangle you when you got into the car. No thanks.

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.

Give it a little more time. B-b

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.

So current AI training procedures - which amount to "read all the internet you can" - fall for astroturf campaigns. Why am I not surprised?

...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

The tournament was for a few thousand dollars, if you think that Elon only getting $750 instead of a thousand makes any sort of difference for someone remembering something three decades later, I have a bridge to sell you.

The fact of the matter is that even if it was a small tournament, coming in second place is coming in second place, and it was the first professional Quake tournament, so to call Elon lying about it after finding proof he wasn't lying about it just shows that Jobst has negative integrity.

I don't like lots of people, I suppose, but I don't just invent lies about them.

If you want to call yourself some sort of reporter as Jobst does, you can't undercover conclusive evidence someone wasn't lying and then still say they're lying if you have any integrity at all.

Jobst ran a video accusing Elon of lying about being a good quake player here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And in the video it turns out that Jobst did, in fact, find conclusive evidence that Elon did in fact come in second place in the first professional Quake tournament. Which is all Elon ever claimed. But Jobst still claims, somehow, that Elon is lying because it was A) a small tournament, and B) Elon had a fast internet connection from working at a startup. So what? The claim checked out. The fact that Jobst still calls it more or less a lie tells you everything you need to know about Jobst's intellectual honesty.

>This is clear evidence that the problem is not that people are no longer interested in having a night out watching a film but that Hollywood is having real trouble making films that are popular.

Yeah. Since the pandemic I have seen: Dune, Dune 2, and the Super Mario Movie (for some reason). That's it.

And what I've noticed is that when I'm out of theaters and not getting theater promo reels, I'm a lot less aware even of what movies are out there, so I don't go to them either.

From what movie trailers I have seen none of them interest me, and when I walk past posters for movies at the mall none of them catch my interest either.

I watched literally every Marvel movie except one before Endgame, and have seen exactly zero Marvel movies since then, since they all seem to have gone into the toilet in terms of writing quality.

I think it's mainly a matter of Hollywood not making good movies.