What is SQL doing on the list? Everything else is a general purpose procedural language, and then they added in one domain specific query language? If they're going to do that, why not also include HTML, CSS, XML, ...? I bet HTML would be in the top five if they included it.

R is a domain specific language as well - just it's really good for statistics.

The reason SQL is on the list is it's popular and complete. And of what you mention, CSS is Turing-complete and there's many demos of it, including an x86 emulator that can be run completely without JavaScript, or can run a bit more efficiently with it (mostly to provide the clock). (It just needs HTML because Chromium based browsers can't load CSS without it. Firefox can, though).

Python, R and such are big in statistics and math. And both are popular because AI.

If you're looking at the next big web based infection vector, CSS might be one to look out for since not even NoScript will block CSS by default. (It's just arcane).

And for those looking - the x86 CSS emulator is at https://github.com/rebane2001/...

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

Buy the book from an indie bookstore. They exist, and if they don't have it, they can order it from the publisher.

You should know that electronic distribution doesn't save much money - most of the retail price of a book is in the writer, editor, publisher and retailer. The money spent printing it and distributing it is around about 10% of the retail cost in the end. We've made the book supply chain super efficient in that way. Even electronic distribution will only save 10% at most - the costs of the trees, paper, printing, warehousing and transportation.

And Banks is right - his editor deserves quite a bit, but so do people down the line. A writer only produces the text. You need editors to edit the text (depending on the author, this can be significant as it goes through many revisions), typesetters to actually format the text into paragraphs, pages, lists, chapters, and set up the table of contents, indices, etc.If there are illustrations, they need to be drawn and created (writers may sketch the illustration but someone has to make it actually real), etc.

Your local independent bookstore is the best bet for stuff like this, and you may have one closer than you think. They won't have Amazon's selection, but they will have access to be able to order in any book Amazon can get, and many even will ship. You want to support the author? Buy from an indie bookstore. Or get it from a competitor like Barnes & Noble.

And indie bookstores I've found aren't all that more expensive most of the time. Sure sometimes Amazon has a book $20 cheaper off list price so get it there (Amazon is likely taking a loss), but I've seen it where Amazon was more expensive. I'd say 95% of the books I buy come from my local indie bookstore. They know me by name, and the manager even tells me when I show up "I don't think I have anything for you", usually because I choose to place another order with them.

Yeah, we've had grammar checking for nearly 3 decades now. And for the most part it's been mostly useless - tell me if it doesn't complain about anything other than "passive voice" over and over again. Oh, it got better, it gave examples! But it was the same old crap over and over again that I stopped caring about the blue squiggle. I think most programs disable the blue squiggle on grammar errors nowadays.

But I've noticed it in a few places and it doesn't bother telling me what's wrong, but offers me a helpful rewrite to make it better. And it only blue squiggles when it has an actual helpful suggestion on what you can do, offers a potential fix and lets me choose.

And likely to avoid EU oversight as well - remember the EU just ruled that Android must be open against other AI than Gemini. It's possible Apple saw the writing on the wall and wanted to limit what ChatGPT had access to, as well as make a cleaner way to integrate Claude and Gemini into the system as well.

It's also possible that Apple saw what ChatGPT could go and also wanted to ensure that nothing bad happened without user consent. Agentic AIs are routinely pushing into production and breaking stuff. It's one thing if it's your company database or code repository. It's quite another if it's user data that users expect to not be touched.

ChatGPT or Claude deleting your emails are one thing - you gave it permission to do so. Apple users suddenly having all their text messages deleted is quite another. And the risk of agentic AI doing such accidentally or on purpose (through injection attacks) is likely too high that Apple cut back on the integration.

Plus, the whole "ChatGPT Phone designed by Jony Ive" likely had a part of it as well - we know how Apple can be very petty (they banned Nvidia for decades because Jensen Huang spilled the beans on a new unannounced Apple product that Apple was set to launch in under a week. They did allow signing of Nvidia drivers for AI use quite recently).

And the whole anti_AI movement is getting traction

There's no need to find bugs - any linter can find issues.

The problem is the linter reports tons of problems that may or may not be problems. I went through dozens of issues and half of them had to be ignored because the linter ignored a check done earlier. It's not a bug if "If index exceeds 10 this will cause a out of bounds memory access" but the line above it has "if index is less than 10".

That's where AI could help - a linter can find the issues alright, but the AI needs to help filter it down - those nonsense out of bounds accesses are eliminated, leaving only the good ones behind. (And the same linter that found errors like those, also found a very convoluted path through the code that would lead to an issue. So convoluted it took me half a day to figure out what it was trying to say, another half a day to verify that there's a chance those conditions could be true, and half a day to add the necessary condition checks to avoid it, compile it, test it, and get it pushed into the main line. It was a 2 line fix that took the better part of 2 days to figure out.

Also, it may find thousands of issues, but many are redundant and fixing one issue can fix tens of issues that are derived from the one. You know, like how a typo in a variable or structure declaration can generate hundreds of compiler errors, and fixing that one typo turns it from a multipage scroll of errors to something more manageable. If the Ai is prioritizing the one issue that is likely the root cause you might solve dozens more issues along the line.

I am starting to understand the hard core maga mind. It is basically binary thinking. It goes like this: Trump is good. Trump sells phone, phone is good. Others say phone is bad. That means Trump is bad. That is not true. Therefore the ones claiming that the phone is bad are bad. Then the rationalization starts

You pretty much got it. I saw an interview done by a kid to their MAGA parents. They asked if there would be any problems if Trump ordered the nuking of Omaha NE. They said, as long as Trump said it had to be done, they had no issue with it. Not one issue with killing people if Trump said it had to be done. The justification even was "If Trump said it was necessary, then it had to be done".

The cognitive dissonance is huge. When Obama was in charge, all the MAGA congress-people were complaining about high gas prices and how they need to go down. Yet those same people today, with gas prices even higher, say "the Americans understand this is only but tempoerary and that if it goes higher, they don't mind". Even during the Biden era, same thing.

Trump and Obama are just an interesting thing to look at - for some erason Obama lives rent free in Trump's head despite not being president for over a decade now. Even Obama took the better part of two terms to get an Iran deal - it took 5 years of back and forth, and 18 months of negotiating to get a deal that Trump ripped up on day 1 of his first term. Iran's not going to give a deal as good as Obama got (Iran had hundreds of nuclear inspectors crawling around, a number from Israel included. All kicked out when Trump ripped it up).

Nevermind the other issues like Venezuela and Cuba. And with Hegseth basically gutting the US military it's no wonder they need automatic draft registration. (Hilarity will ensue if Hegseth requires you to be white as part of the draft. He wants that show army North Korea has).

It's because of greed, plain and simple. Started in the Reagan era where everyone got gaslit into believing trickle down economics works. Where companies decided to cut today so the CEO gets golden parachute tomorrow.

The problem is, tomorrow is already here.

Youth unemployment is an issue because AI is doing a good job at faking it. If this trend continues, 5 years from now there'll be a pipeline shortage because few entry level people were hired to become the middle experienced worker.

But we can't shove the blame all on Reagan - for Henry Ford encountered the same issue - he wanted to lower the cost of the Model T, and raise wages for his workers. But he was blocked by greed - Ford wasn't doing this out of altruism, he was as cutthroat as they came when it came down to business. Cutting prices on the Model T meant GM, Dodge and others would have trouble competing on price. Likewise, raising wages would mean Ford's competitors would have trouble hiring people. Shareholders couldn't see that, sued Ford, and took the money that would've made Ford and shareholders a lot more money.

The problem is putting the 3 month numbers ahead of the long term prospects of the company. It's why Tim Apple was granted shares over a 10 year period - the better Apple did over the long term, the better he'd do. But he'd also need to keep shareholders happy enough by attracting long term shareholders in it for the long term gains and stability over the short term returns.

Well, there are scores, and there are influences to those scores. You may note remote exploits that are bad often only get 9.4/10. But that's because a 10/10 is considered stop-everything-patch-now emergency - a remote exploit coupled with unauthenticated admin access.

9.4 is bad - but it means it usually needs to be chained with another exploit to use.
10 means you don't have to do a thing - a remote exploit that gets you admin without authentication.

Of course, the problem is the classification of bugs happens after the issue is disclosed - it has to be analyzed for the flaws. It almost is never part of the original report, and some groups like NIST perform such "enrichment" tasks to properly classify the vulnerability and severity properly. But they've also of late have said they no longer can do that, and will only do it as part of the KEV catalog (known exploited vulnerability).

Why can't we be allowed to keep nice things?

Because billionaires need more money. It's not enough that they have more money than they or their families could ever spend in a lifetime, or their kids could ever spend, and so on.

It's the need to have more. The race to trillionaire is now on, lead by Elon Musk. And thus every billionaire worth their chops wants to get there first.

It's why billionaires and private equity are basically destroying the world, trying to get those zeros behind their name.

It's no longer good to make some money, when you can make more money. And wringing out as much money as possible in as short as time as possible, even if you scorch the earth behind you, is perfectly fine.

It's time to realize that trickle down economics never worked - the rich only seek to get richer and they only throw a bone when they get a chicken to settle the masses to appease them of "look, I'm giving you $5 because you guys gave me $5 million". even though that $5 is now eaten up in greater costs to pay that $5 million. The grift is perfected - give the proles $5 and make them pay $10 to you for that. Then repeat.

Thats where it comes from. The billionaire backers don't care that you're making a great product liked by many and being profitable. They want you to profitmaxxing even if it devalues everything and you go from sustainable business to dead in 3 years.

The nicest solution is geothermal.

Right now I'm in Denmark where wood firing is fairly common.
The village of around 2200 is heated through a district heating system firing the straw from surrounding farms. In Denmark this is typical for villages of this size.
So the first question is, would this also emit lead?
Realize straw is a seasonal product, wood grows over many decades.

At night we love the nice radiation of our wood stove, here wood is bought by the m^3 and per year we use around 2.5 m^3 (Is around 0.7 cord and we pay around DKK 2200 for it (CND 460, USD 240).

So what about geothermal, wind and solar or even nuclear, fusion or fission?

. Which means your time probably isn't worth much. Sure, I have to slop $100 worth of dinosaur juice in my car. But that's dirt cheap compared to the additional charging time an EV would take.

if you drive your car 24/7, sure, that makes sense.

But if you sleep, chances are your car and charge when you're parked.

And depending how far you drive - if you drive less than 50 miles a day, you don't need to upgrade anything - just use a Level 1 charger. Yes, the slowest charging in the world can work surprisingly well for a lot of people whose daily drive is an average commute.

No one really waits for their EV to charge - they find opportunities to charge. And if you can charge at home, that serves most of your needs. Sure, on a road trip you can't do the LA to NYC trip without stopping, but that's generally dangerous. Instead you fast charge on road trips and you charge while you catch a meal or stretch for a walk

*glances at Enron

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

Over the past years I've mainly used Zoom for video calls and was happy with it.
These days the company is more and more 'forcing' Teams for these calls (I work via the Brave browser on Linux).
The problem with Teams is I can't get the video on a separate window or screen, Zoom is by itself separate.
WebEx works for video but is hardly ever used.