One of the frequently-admired features of Unix is the fact that a lot of the basic utilities are filters - they take text on stdin and produce transformed text on stdout that can be fed to another filter in the chain.

C is a really terrible language to use for text-processing, even more so once you move beyond ASCII. How it ever survived for writing such programs is actually quite hard to imagine. In fact, I can't really think of a use for which it is particularly suited - it doesn't give you the real control you need to write system code (it only works for writing operating systems because of known compiler behaviour and the ability to inline machine code) and it barely qualifies as a high-level language. It continues to exist because it's the ubiquitous least common denominator - everything has a C compiler.

The problem we have today is that we're essentially trying to use procedural languages to describe programs that don't proceed with a traditional control flow - the familiar ideas of scope and lifetime that came from languages like Algol don't really apply and are hard to describe when there are asynchronous threads that may or may not also be running in parallel. I don't think Rust is actually helping us with the description, it's simply making the problem more clearly manifest.

We're in the "something must be done" phase but have yet, I fear, to identify a "something" that moves us sufficiently far forward to be worth the upheaval.

Back in the days when people left their houses to see movies, they purchased a "ticket" that gave them the right to view the picture once.

You're still buying a ticket, though the number of viewings is undefined.

The vast majority of Bluesky users are using that app, however. Whereas Bluesky is decentralizable (up to some point) very little seems to be decentralized in practice.

The biggest issue, I would have thought, is that the main feature of the decentralization mechanism is that everybody in principle gets to see everything: the user identity exists to authenticate the origin of posts only. It's ultimately up to the app what posts the user gets to see. I'm not sure whether under a strict interpretation of the law Bluesky would be permitted to accept the word of a federated app that its users were of an appropriate age and would take responsibility for only selecting appropriate content for display because in principle the operator of the federated app could be an 11 year old.

You'd struggle to find one. Being in the US without the appropriate permission is a civil, not a criminal matter. I'm not even sure most Americans understand that. I doubt you can encapsulate the ambiguity of that in a single word. I rather suspect the word you'd prefer to use would deny the basic legal reality.

What "illiberal" men have been saying most recently is that the reason women (and minorities) are under-represented in, for example, IT is that it's just that they're naturally less adept and that "DEI" is undermining this natural superiority for political/societal reasons. When it comes to men being under-represented, suddenly there's a problem with "society's depictions" of men and men are demanding affirmative action for their uniquely manly problems.

Throughout most of time, men have had the advantage of physical power and have shaped a world in which power was the ultimate determinant. That world no longer exists - physical power is largely irrelevant and the structure of modern societies discourages the use of physical power for personal advantage. That's the thing the MAGA crowd object to - the fact they can't use their force to override societal norms any longer. It's the reason the MAGA government is using illegal detentions and deportations and sackings: to demonstrate that power once more has the right to overturn the law and the democratic consensus.

However, that's not a problem for men in general, only the ones who've been brought up (by mothers as well as fathers) to believe in their innate superiority and to expect the indulgence of their whims. This isn't some major crisis - there's yet to be even a single female US president - it's simply the old tradition of daughters being little more than trading commodities working its way out of the system and erasing all the traditional male excuses in the process. It's hardly surprising that after 100,000 years of not having to make the intellectual effort men might be a bit rusty. But it's hardly the end of masculinity as we know it if men have to put in a bit of effort for a change.

For some people, the prospect of them never visiting again would be a bonus.

It's worth also pointing out that one of the authors is a former executive director of the Adam Smith Institute and another works at the Centre for Policy Studies, both of which are conservative "think tanks" and might therefore be somewhat biased towards the form of "free market" that externalises the awkward costs of simple-minded policies for others to pick up.

It's not a sad cruelty, it's simply reality. What would be sad cruelty would be life-extending creatures for your own personal pleasure.

I live in a country where there is (allegedly) significantly more competition, but the ISP's customer "service" team are so heavily incentivised to prevent cancellations they'll simply transfer you to a random extension or put you on indefinite hold if you try.

I'm presently awaiting a response to a legal letter sent by recorded post since all other forms of contact have been ignored.

It doesn't seem to matter how the industry is structured, they always seem to find a way of keeping you in their claws.

It's interesting you think it should. It just shows how deeply ingrained is the notion that manufactured products are inherently disposable and that while the manufacturer retains their proprietorial rights in the product, the "owner" is left with the liabilities. Take a step back and consider how dystopian this may look to other eyes.

And if the FCC has accepted the basic principle that it's the customer's phone, I see no practical difference in reality between 60 days and 0 days in terms of the phone payments being maintained. However, the existence of any locking period where the customer has to apply for the lock to be removed rather than it being removed automatically is in itself an obstacle to competition.

I can see that's true for broadcasters, but you can run a portable FM receiver on a couple of AA batteries for weeks, not something you can achieve with your average DAB receiver. If you factor in the total costs for the audience as well, is there really a saving overall?

we all know what a game console is

For these purposes, it's clearly a computer-based device on which you can run commercially-created software that potentially offers licensing revenue from which Apple can abstract a cut. As opposed to a computer-based device on which you can run your own, or free software with no financial benefit to Apple.

And "retro" is clearly an abbreviation for retrogressive.

As you say, obvious to everyone.

Compared with other instruction sets of its day, the VAX instruction set was pretty consistent and most of the various addressing modes (which were based on those of the PDP/11) were available as operands with most of the instructions. Some of its specific instructions (like the queue instructions that manipulated doubly-linked lists) were integral to the design of the operating system. It was quite common for computers of the day to have instructions for dealing with packed decimal arithmetic - that's how most billing and financial systems operated. And the string instructions helped to make code compact, if not particularly speedy.

The intention was to make it easy for compiler writers - they could generate the same code on a whole variety of different hardware, some of which implemented all of the instructions and others of which trapped to fault handlers to emulate the missing instructions in software.

In the end, there were too many and some of the emulations were much slower than using simpler native instructions with the same effect. One of the more unusual side effects of the number of potential operands and the fact that VAX mostly didn't require its operands to be naturally aligned is that a single instruction could result in many different page faults - the instruction could cross a page boundary, so could each operand - which in turn could be an indirect address crossing a page boundary... But you have to realise that the first VAXes came with 1MB of memory and a 176MB disk drive: getting a lot of of every instruction mattered.

The thing is, if the percentage of genuine information is anything above 0 and any of it is personally identifiable, then it may be impossible to use the model in large chunks of the world. The researchers say they have extracted PII. Data protection laws require that people have control over their personal information and can require companies to confirm what information they hold and delete it. If there's no way to unambiguously determine whether you hold such information and no way to delete it on request, then the operators are not complying with the law.

Secondly, if the model can be persuaded to reproduce a significant quantity of copyright text (and the authors claim to have examples), then there's going to be a lucrative industry finding ways to do so and then suing for damages.

Legislators are quite starry-eyed about AI right now, but I doubt they'll go so far as to dismantle data protection and copyright simply to facilitate a specific generation of technology. Persuading people to give up all their rights to a technology that's also touted to take their jobs is likely to be a hard political sell.