But throughout history, there have been many good languages, especially ones that had one or two clever features absent from others that made a big difference.

Most of these languages (Eiffel, Nim, Ada, SPARK, Tcl/Tk, LISP, Forth, MUMPS, Oberon, Ruby, Occam, Erlang, Haskell, MARS D, PL/I, etc) had some time in the sun, and a few of these are still very popular in niche fields. But they never took the world by storm. Perl, which DID take the world by storm, suffered from some disastrous politics and over-ambitious updates and has all but been replaced by Python and PHP, where PHP is itself withdrawing to more of a background presence.

All but Occam will survive, sure, but as tiny islands that can't survive in the longer term. Occam is functionally extinct, which is a shame as it had by far the best IPC system and multithreading system of any language.

SILK was an ingenious parralel extension to C, but it exists now only in an extension to Intel's compiler. Nobody else has reimplemented it and it's not in the standard. Is Unified Parallel C still a thing? A lot of other parallel extensions have died - the ATLAS library tried a few and found it made the code slower.

But Fortran (which has implicit parallelism) and COBOL are recovering, and C/C++ are still fighting hard. Java nearly died during the dot com era and Oracle has been sabotaging it ever since, but it might endure despite their best efforts.

Rust might endure and even replace one of the Lovecraftian Great Old Ones. It easily could. It's a strong language with a lot of support. But so did other languages whose stars have faded. It cannot and should not be taken for granted that Rust will join the Ancient Ones and become essentially immortal.

(Python shouldn't assume it either, given what happened to Perl and what is happening to PHP.)

Fortelling the future of programming languages is a dangerous game, and as Galadriel, top geek in Lothlorien, once said, for telling is in vain and all paths may run ill.

The "choices" we've had for "leadership" have been laughable since 2016. If this is the best the parties can do I'm out. I'm getting too old to attend the circus and enjoy it. I've got better things to do than to listen to a bunch of ass-clowns fight over who gets to drive the clown car.

I literally train AI summarization models. They're *excellent* at summarizing text. It's one of the easiest tasks you can give them, and only takes a lightweight model.

If the current draw is low enough relative to the battery capacity, it might not matter. We should be careful not to extrapolate our most recent experience with backlit color LCDs to a device like this. In a transmissive color lcd panel, the backlight sucks the lion's share of power in the display. A reflective display draws only an insignificant amount of current, and still much less than a color panel when backlit. That's how watches run for a decade or so on tiny tiny batteries.

This is much more like a Palm Pilot from 25 years ago than a laptop. The tiny 3 watt hour battery ran the grayscale display of a Palm V for 20 hours of continuous use. Granted this is a much larger device with a higher resolution display than the palm, but we can expect it to have something like a 30 watt hour battery. Most users will probably go several days between needing a charge, which is not quite as long as an e-paper device, but a lot better than the smart watch battery life that consumers seem to tolerate.

The real wild card isn't the tech, it's human behavior. What the founder has done here is create a device that would scratch his personal itch. That's far from the guarantee there's a sustainable market for the device that entrepreneurs who operate that way assume. Will people buy it when it costs a lot more than an iPad and the pitch is that it does *less*? Will this draw pragamatists after they've exhausted the rearly adopters?

I'm always weary of these companies that sell in batches that are sold out in advance of shipping. And this line quoted from the CEO at the bottom of their web page made me do a double-take as well. "It meant big tech do bad not cuz of who runs them, but because of the systematic forces they're beholden to ...". Really, "big tech do bad not cuz". Again, we'll see how this turns out.

They would greatly care if they play an entirely different movie that just happens to focus on the same themes.

And for those 1-in-100 other disks, which the developer didn't release but you broke into their office to steal, if you think the developers are liable for that and not you, try again.

Musk doesn't do much work at all. He spends all this time on Twitter. He bought it so he could s[end his whole day on it.

(And yes, I know Twitter is now knows as X. But since Twitter allows deadnaming, well, deadnaming it shall be).

My concern is that the ARRL also had members' credit card information compromised as well. I have heard unconfirmed stories that the ARRL failed to maintain proper backups and is struggling to get its services back online.

Some data may be permanently lost. It doesn't bode well for the organization's leadership.

Actually, the more important database would be the contact logs. The ARRL ran the QSL logbook called "Logbook of the world" where you could log your contacts electronically.

That database was hacked, and wiped. It's public information, so there's nothing on there you wouldn't find on a QSL card, but it's valuable data for the various operators who used it.

Of course, the thing is, most operators are generally very "old school" - you think of your greybeard sysadmin and you'd also fit the stereotype of a ham radio operator - someone who doesn't get the newfangled web 2.0 or cloudy nature of things. And thus, having old school backups of all your data would be important as well.

Then again, a big aspect of the hobby is homebrewing things you need, so maybe the home grown backup system was never properly tested or had flaws

It's not that there's too much solar, it's more that China's power market is completely screwed up. It favors local producers and generation with coal and gas over renewables because it's more profitable to use coal and gas than solar.

So there are two problems for China. First, the people who need the power aren't near where there are lots of solar. Second, the power market is screwed up and favors coal and gas over solar.

In other words, while solar power is being generated, there are no consumers for it as coal and gas generation is favored. And that favor means local demand is satisfied by coal and gas because the local producers make more money that way. Buying solar means importing it and they make less money.

Like I said, new technologies will be looking to reduce lithium. But you really can't beat lithium for its electrochemical properties. Lithium batteries have other advantages besides mass energy density, like charging and discharging rates and high efficiency. This easily offsets their disadvantages. They also at present enjoy massive production economies of scale. It'd be good to have less lithium-dependent technology, but at present lithium ion batteris are really tough to beat.

I think flow batteries and liquid metal batteries are really promising, although the liquid metal battery people are having funding issues right now.

CNN notes that Musk "also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because 'they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI'."

He's made it more than clear through many interviews that he thinks that the internet and educational institutions "trans'ed" his eldest child and made her hate him, so you should tightly regulate your children's lives to keep this from happening.

Came here to say the same thing. My call sign reveals all my personal information on the FCC web site. When you become a HAM your information becomes public. It's just your name and address but it's there.

It's clear that Altman at the very least has no objection to soundalikes, and had recognized the similarity. Which is part of what makes his stronger stance on AI music so weird.

He concluded by saying that OpenAI has "currently made the decision not to do music, and partly because exactly these questions of where you draw the lines...

Thankfully nobody else will... ;)