I was waiting for this one to come up, but yes, some things are absolutely worth eradicating. Nobody is petitioning to bring back polio or smallpox. Mosquito larvae compete for resources with other insect larvae, so fewer mosquitoes will mean more of whatever they're competing with for resources, which could replace them in the food chain.

You know that French was literally **banned** in Louisiana by a constitutional amendment until 1974, right? Children caught speaking French even faced corporal punishment in schools. So rag about "whiney Frenchies" all you want, but attempts to stamp out French language and culture in North America were very much real until very recently. The French explored most of North America and set up settlements across the continent by the early 1700s, and many places still carry anglicized French names. However, the English scored a decisive victory taking out the French army in North America in 1759, over 100 years before the US Civil War FWIW. The Cajuns didn't start out in Louisiana; they were forcibly deported there by the British. A funny thing happens when you oppress a population for a few hundred years; they tend to remember that oppression:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So while we bend over backwards to accommodate Spanish speakers today, that courtesy was absolutely not extended to the French that had been here from 1599 onwards, 8 years before the English in Jamestown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Granted, the French lost the war, and to the victors go the spoils, but the English and French had a long history of war back in Europe, and that meant the French in North America were treated as 2nd class citizens.

Now, I disagree with forcing prioritization of French programming, and I also disagree with language laws in Quebec that restrict the use of English, but I think it's fine to ask that French content at a minimum be featured on the platforms. It doesn't change the complicated history of French in North America, but if we're going to be supportive of Spanish speakers in North America, why wouldn’t we also be supportive of French speakers who were here before the English?

I don't know if you're Archie Bunker or an Archie Bunker parody, but in Mississippi's public schools, the student population is predominantly non-White, specifically Black (48.5%), Hispanic / Latino (5.2%), and two or more races (3.3%), comprising 57% of the student body. White students, while the 2nd largest group, are a minority (43.0%).

Now, which of these groups is the target of your smack down of Mississippi?

Zig does exactly this in a C-like way without the C++-like syntax of Rust, while enabling lower memory consumption and lower-level performance optimizations than Rust. Zig is still young, but I expect it to eventually replace Rust use cases in Linux, specifically because it's a better C rather than a better C++.

Beyond dev work, spatial home video and photos are mind-blowing. The spatial photos alone make it worthwhile to me. The spatial upscaling of scanned photos works incredibly well. I've used an Oculus before, comparing it to the VP is like comparing a Corolla to a Bentley; they're not at all in the same class when it comes to visual fidelity. That said, it's expensive, it does feel noticeable in weight after a while, and the battery pack should have more capacity. Another missed opportunity is that you have to wear it to do system updates and settings, but it really should have an app like the Watch does. The selection of immersive content on ATV is very limited as well. The killer use case would be live sporting events; it's a shame that hasn't happened considering the resources Apple has at its disposal. However, gripes aside, it's an amazing device.

That's less than the federal grants a single university (UNC) got in 2022. [begin sarcasm] I'm assuming the salaries offered to relocating researchers are going to be in the €200K range at a 32% income tax rate with a regulatory environment that is going to allow them to do research unimpeded by overbearing regulations and abundant 2800 sqft family homes near major research centers in the €700K range? [end sarcasm]

There is more to attracting talent than a token contribution to a communal pool. Europe has lower wages, higher income taxes, higher property prices, and onerous regulations. There was a time when the ancillary benefits of Europe exceeded those downsides, but those times are in the past. Regardless of what misguided nonsense our tariff-in-chief pushes through in his imaginary state-of-emergency, I have no concern about a wholesale brain drain from the US.

I legitimately feel for researchers whose funding got cut. It’s undoubtedly a very unpleasant situation for them. I'm sure they have families to feed and this is going to be hard on them. However, the majority of the grants that were cut were not for STEM or medical research, contrary to the narrative pushed by detractors. Researchers whose funding got cut have options, they can seek out private backers to fund their research assuming there's value to be created from it. If Europe wants to bring in swaths of displaced social science researchers, that's absolutely their prerogative, but the cold hard truth is that the net impact on the US economy from this will be imperceptible.

It's a virtual paradise, barely 5000 crimes a month and only 10% involve physical violence!!!

https://www.civichub.us/ca/san...

Last time I was in the city, a guy took a dump in front of the window of the coffee shop I was in, but that was performance art, I just misunderstood it at the time.

That makes a whole lot more sense, so it's not actually 1-bit model after all.

I want to know how a single bit, which, by design, can ***ONLY*** be 0 or 1, manages to add a sign bit without actually adding a sign bit. Did bits grow a 3rd state when I wasn't paying attention?

Automattic will have a hard time hiring competent engineers going forward. I'd bet they're on a whole bunch of "do not apply" lists. Although, if you want to have some fun, respond to a recruiter for them with a watermarked response along the lines of "no way in hell".

That show was so good. If you haven't seen it, see it. Back on topic, after watching that clip, read this:

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2...

The show set Patient Zero in Indonesia. If they had set it 5 miles north in Singapore, it would have been eerily prescient.

We currently don't have good anti-fungals for these adapted fungi, but I don't see a path to us becoming "clickers". That said, interesting fact, we're actually closely related to fungi, both being eukaryotes, rather than bacteria (prokaryotes) and viruses (acellular). The primary weapon we have against fungal cells hinges on the fact that fungal cellular walls are comprised of chitin rather than proteins. Currently, fungal infections have a ~30% fatality rate under ideal conditions, but if that line of defense falls due to a mutation or mass infections, the Last of Us scenario would move out of the realm of fiction, minus the "clickers", as 80-90% of humanity becomes mushroom fodder.

The C++ macros mess is why I swore off it. I like the Google C++ style of "better C", but templates + macros make code nearly impossible to introspect from source. I've actually moved back over the past few years to languages with fewer abstractions like Go, C, and Zig. I used to like Swift, but cargo-culters have started adding debug / performance-hindering abstractions to it and I see the opacity only getting worse.

I really don't get the "let AI write code for you" and humans can debug, improve, and maintain it. It's completely backwards from what it should be. AI should first be used to write unit tests and run automated tests. So long as the tests are mostly right, that's a big win and there's little potential downside in production. Next, AI should move on to identifying and fixing bugs. That's the natural progression from writing tests. Once AI is good at writing tests and fixing bugs, then you let it take a crack at refactoring and improving existing code. Finally, when AI can write tests, fix bugs, and improve existing code, you let it write Greenfield code, maybe. Slapping together a prototype, generally speaking, is the easiest part of the coding. It's absolutely not the most time-consuming (read: expensive) part of software engineering. The expensive parts are maintenance, debugging, tuning, hardening, and making code testable. Right now, the focus is on "look AI can spit out a prototype it saw on StackOverflow or GitHub!!!". That's the wrong place to start. If you remove the programmers from the initial coding process, it will take orders of magnitude more time and effort to figure out how the code is structured, where the code paths are, and how to improve performance characteristics.

> All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.

I can't tell if you're joking, but Electrician, Plumber, and Nurse Assistant all require on-the-job training, and you have to pass license certification in the US and Canada. I'd hardly call those "brainless" jobs. Do you want an unlicensed electrician to wire your home? How about an unlicensed nurse assistant monitoring your vitals after a heart attack? I've helped a plumber replumb a house I owned; it looks simple, but if you don't get the slopes and runs right, very bad things occur after a little while.

Wish I had mod points, this is definitely informative. I knew private clinics existed in Quebec, but I had no idea Ontario forbade it.