Reminds me of that famous Frank Zappa quote;- "Comparing Guitarists is a stupid sport".

Now Zappa was no slouch on the guitar, considered by many as possibly the most inventive guitarists of the 1970s, but he was far less enamoured with virtuosity than his reputation suggested, eventually even giving up on playing it live, and handing over axe duties to his young apprentice, Steve Vai. For him it wasnt how well you could play the instrument, its what the music you played on it sounded like that interested him.

I feel the same about programming languages. Python might not be the flashiest, its missing some key features, its slow (although in modern days a lot faster than it used to be), and so on. But I can get the job done faster and cleaner than I can in almost any language except maybe Ruby (which nobody seems to use anymore). Is it the best language? Hell no. Does it matter? NOPE. What matters is everyone on my team knows python, and it gets shit done. Flash and virtuosity is for teenagers and shredders. I wanna play the blues.

The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.

But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.

But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)

So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.

And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.

If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.

Yeah it seems to me the choice is either
1) a stable orbit with a 50% duty cycle, which means more collectors AND heavy batteries. Expensive.
2) Parking it in something like a lagrange point. Extremely stable forever-orbit, but extremely expensive per kg to get it to that place. And space junk from abandoned shit will never go away
3) geostationary orbits that require a tonne of fuel for constant adjustment burns.

None of this of course factors iin cosmic ray shielding and the enormous amount of infrastructure to deal with the fact that the only way to remove heat is radiating it. Massive amounts of GPUs running at full throttle with no obvious way to cool it.

Or, they could just drop these things in the ocean and use ocean currents to power the GPUs. Hell, you could even just use nuclear down there and never have to worry about a meltdown or radiation leaks, because salt water is the ultimate radiation shield and diluter of radioactive particles.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The thing that makes rust a "hard" language is its punishing borrow checker step that simply refuses to compile if you've got code smells that hint at page violations or other memory goonery. Rust punishes you, but in doing so it makes you a better programmer.

Its something I fell in love with Crystal over (which, btw does NOT do a borrow checker), its static analysis step that refuses to compile if your doing things with variables that introduces un-handled nulls. I could feel myself becoming a better coder (which is a hard thing to achieve for someone with 20y experience) simply because it was pointing out anti-patterns in my coding and requiring me to fix them. Its a shame crystal never really took off, its a genuinely good and speedy little language. Who knows, maybe some day. Python sat in obscurity for two decades (Python, for the youngsters in the audience, is OLDER than JS, Java and so on. Y'all only hearing of it recently doesnt make it a recent language) before finally exploding in popularity

Steve Jobs back? Like him or not, the best Apple days, products and innovations were done during his iron fists days. And he drove countless companies down this same path, to the point some are now better than current day Apple is.
Since he will not return, hope whoever is confirmed do more than just damage control and play catch up.

Although Tim Cook has been a perfectly fine leader commercially (The man is a supply chain god, by all accounts), he's never had Job's innate sense for the market, consumer, and for design.

I've long maintained they should have given the top job to Jony Ive. Jony is the reason Apple stuff went from grey boxes to attractive and elegant looking designs that actually made the damn things into fashion accessories. Sure the iphones are technological marvels, but if they still looked like plastic chunks with fold out keyboards, there really would be no reeason to buy one over the equally technical marvels like the Nokias , Androids or bloody windows phones. That was Ives design eye that gave us the modern phone.

Apple would do well to repeat the old move it pulled off with Jobs, and hire back Ives to take over the company.

My initial instinct was to scold you for "WTF is a clinical associate professor?" as thats a term that makes perfect sense for a teaching hospital.

But this dude is an economist? What sort of clinic would an economist work in, particularly an economist who specializes in crypto shit.

Though it does remind me of a story from the early bitcoin era of a guy who built a mining rig in his bedroom, and it heated the room so much he collapsed from heat-stroke and ended up in hospital with brain damage. Which I've never been able to decide if that is tragic or hilarious, or probably both, which in turn reminds me of the old observation that Comedy is defined as "tragedy that happens to others", which on the internet usually takes the form of "Someone stole my bitcoins!".

That's a different problem, and I can't speak to it. But chickens could not be raised as they are without LOTS of antibiotics. (I happen to think the way they are raised is an abomination, but it's cheap.)

"Vets and wholesalers who supply farmers should be shut right down."

Yes, but... if you do this expect the price of meat to go way up, especially chicken and eggs. Perhaps it's a price we need to pay, but expect that it would need to be paid.

Inertia. Took me several years once streaming had taken off and we pretty much exclusively used our Roku and never used our Dish Network box to persuade the rest of my family that the $60-70/mo we were paying for Dish was a waste of money.

I also suspect a fair number have it for the same reason as their landline, as a reliable back up in case of emergencies. I had to demonstrate our antenna was fine for getting local news stations multiple times to deal with this argument.

I wonder how TIOBE would measure this sort of work. As activity in the source language (C)? Editing language (C#)? Or both?

It wouldn't. TIOBE is bullshit, I don't know why anyone uses it. Look at what it is: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...

It's just searching various engines for "$LANG programming" and applying magic fudge factors. It searches multiple languages versions of Google as well as for some reason Amazon and Ebay. And it relies on the "$NUM results found" provided by those sites.

So at best it's a vague indicator of the language's presence. It doesn't say much of anything about whether it's in use. If a popular documentation site goes down it will note a decrease, and it's trivial to cheat by encouraging the insertion of keywords in websites.

Not to mention Amiga had visualizers before people even knew what Windows was..

In fact, music visualizers existed even before people knew what windows were!

Isn't that the train driver? I thought the engineer is the one shovelling coal into the furnace and making sure that the tank doesn't explode?

Mod parent up. I use gen AI all the time when I search for man pages and python docs. And by use, I mean I scroll past the results text as far as I need to until there's something resembling a link that's not an advertisement. Then I click the link.

That's not in the job description. Companies need to dial back the expectations on employees. Especially if they treat their employees as disposable contractors.

"Secret trick destroys AI" is bullshit. What is not bullshit is that for less common tokens, the conditional distributions of their occurrence in language depend on a relatively small number of examples. This is not an LLM property, it's a property of the language data itself. Also known as the hapax problem. Any language generator, including LLMs, is constrained by this fact. It has nothing to do with the architecture.

In practical terms, this means if you have a learning machine that tries to predict a less common token from some context (either directly like an LLM, or as an explicit intermediate step), then the local output will be strongly affected if it sees a single new context in the training data, such as when someone is poisoning a topic.

There are no solutions for this in the current ML learning paradigm. The system designers can make the system less sensitive to the tokens in the training data, but this comes at a price of being less relevant, due to deliberately discounting newly encountered facts against a implicit or explicit prior. Your example falls in this category.

It is fundamentally impossible to recognise the truth and value of a newly encountered datum without using a semantic model of reality. Statistical language models do not do this.