As I said, I don't know what quality literature is. The Nazir piece reads like Joyce to me. Ulysses is certainly a classic, but I'm not sure I've ever met anyone whose read him outside of highschool or a college literature class! I can't stand it, personally, but props to the people who do love it. I went deep into the serialist music hole once upon a time, and I found a level of appreciation for something that had been unlistenable to me before. More power to people who find that in Joyce. Zahn is very well know and popular amongst certain nerd groups, but largely unknown outside of them. Eco's books have sold well, but do people actually read them? How many men read hockey romances or 50 shades?

I take umbrage at the term "quality literature!"

I believe literature should be evaluated primarily on an "do not enjoy...enjoy" spectrum.

Looping back to the topic at hand, I've said before that I'm afraid that one thing that LLMs may show is just how derivative and formulaic a great deal of human production is. (That's not necessarily a bad thing, either, IMHO.)

My wife grew up in Minnesota. I know, unfortunately, more about hockey romance novels than I ever wanted to.

"Amish porn" is a new one to me!

As I understand it, women are by far the biggest users of public municipal libraries today. I'm not sure if the current selections are a "chicken" or the "egg" in why that is.

Wtf is quality literature?

50 Shades of Grey sold 150 million copies. Quality literature?

Topseller on Amazon right now is a hockey romance novel. Quality literature?

How do they compare to The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite books) in terms of being quality literature?

Zahn's Star Wars novels sold millions of copies? Quality literature?

Hemingway (I've run into critics who HATE Hemingway)?

Ulysses (Joyce)?

I don't know what quality literature is, and I don't really care. For fiction, if I enjoy it, I'll read it. I've just skimmed a bit of the Nazir story, and it does absolutely nothing for me, but it sure does have the veneer and impenetrability of James Joycian writing.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

... if a surveillance camera was installed in every room of your house!
Would that not be superplusgood?

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

Maybe the moral of the story should be, don't listen to the C suite OR the tech media!

That's amazing. I used Delphi in the 1990s at about the same time as, IIRC, Visual Basic 4.0. I enjoyed it at the time, and Object Pascal was a pretty reasonable language, but outside of maintaining legacy apps, I don't really get it. I'm surprised to see both it and Visual Basic so high on the list.

I guess I'm also surprised to see C at #2. Maybe because of Linux?

Mozilla has discussed what kind of bugs they found. Here's their blog entry: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardening-firefox/

You should read it. It's a very level-headed article that avoids the for and against LLM-hype that so many low quality news sources report.

Around close to the same time, Greg Kroah-Hartman also commented on improving reports: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/26/linux-kernel-czar-says-ai-bug-reports-arent-slop-anymore/5226256

Finding bugs is good. Integrating these kind of tools into a testing and build pipeline is a good idea.

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.