Heck, if anything close to 100% of people got it right, I'd be very suspicious. There's always a sizable chunk of every CS class that is unbelievably bad. Anyone who's ever taught or TAed a beginner's programming class has seen firsthand how many people struggle with the subject no matter how many ways you explain something. Some of them will seem like they understand, but it's only for the extremely specific problem you're teaching and as soon as you even reword the problem, they can't do it anymore.

Definitely matters where you went to school. I went to a small rural school. AP classes weren't an option. It's a shame, cause I was a strong student and high school classes often didn't challenge me enough. Would have loved a chance to take such classes. My school even did have a calculus class that was almost a complete duplicate of my university calc 1, but it still didn't count and just made calc 1 so boring (until 80% of the way in when they finally introduced something new and I was caught completely off guard).

I dunno if PowerShell might do it differently, but every regex implementation I've used used the zeroth "group" to refer to the entire match. Eg, in the regex a(b+) and string abb, $0 would be abb while $1 would be bb.

What makes you think even the regular folks would want to do research as opposed to believing whatever they want to believe in? Most people already don't do research when confronted with something new. People already are fast to believe extremely dubious sources.

Do you think lowly paid foreign mods would do a good job? Some subs could easily use employees as mods, but other subs have very strict rules that are enforced by mods who are both passionate and knowledgeable about their field. There's a lot of specialty subs that require domain knowledge to meaningfully mod beyond the level of "remove spam and rude people". AskHistorians is a good example, as it requires all answers to be well sourced. Mods on Reddit also don't just remove bad posts. They set the rules and provide coordination for the sub (eg, daily quick answer threads, mega threads when major news drops, etc). Reddit absolutely could replace mods with paid employees. But it would come at the cost of quality in various subs that actually make Reddit appealing. Plus, there's a *lot* of mods to replace.

They're gonna bleed users? So... They did exactly what they were hoping for?

Yeah, and even when they reach the news, it's often low attention. Often local news only and unlikely to trend in social media. Failures are dramatic. It's appealing to get to feel superior ("I knew that wouldn't work!").

I've heard that quote a lot, but I gotta be honest. I think the people saying it have not had truly bad pizza. To be fair, it's hard to mess up pizza. The vast majority of pizza I've ever had was good. But I did have pizza from a place once that was so bad I had to throw it out. The cheese had this weird staleness to it and it overall tasted quite bland.

If they could somehow make it cheap enough, I think the value would have been to ultra-small business owners, who wouldn't even need a storefront as they could keep the pizza making machine in their car. Plus avoid the need to drive back and forth to a restaurant (or home restaurant). But there's the rub. Automation is *expensive*. Especially if you're trying to build commercial grade devices that would need to be running all day, every day.

IMO, the answer to your "why would they make a competitors platform more viable" question should be simply as fuel against anti trust lawsuits and restrictions. Companies that make their products for competitors platforms should be given more leeway and benefit of doubt when they want to acquire companies and the likes. And inversely, companies that only ever release platform exclusives should be met with more scrutiny from an antitrust perspective. It benefits Microsoft if they're allowed to buy up studios instead of being told no. There's perhaps also something to be said about the financials of it. How much might they gain from sales to people who only have a PlayStation and simply won't buy an Xbox or gaming PC? Though it's hard to quantify that. Most people aren't gonna buy a new console because of one exclusive. But if a console has a dozen desirable exclusives, that sure gives a lot more reason to switch over.

Honestly it's very disappointing what the quality of online ads is *still* like. In the early days of the web, it was a bit understandable that ads were terrible, as the web was still new and untrusted. But now the web is more commonly viewed than traditional places that contain ads (like TV), yet the quality of ads on the web still feels far worse than your typical TV ads. Companies the size of google have no excuse for allowing blatant scams and misinformation in ads. Yet they still do. It's also easy to encounter overly sexualized ads in stuff like YouTube videos that children would commonly view. Crypto ads are particularly common online and are a prominent risk to people's entire life savings. I personally think the web needs ads because free websites are an expectation that cannot go away. But there needs to be higher expectations for the safety of online ads.

Perhaps there's *something* to be said about how it can block out distractions, but other than that, what's the audience for reading a book in VR? VR does have some neat use cases, but they're mostly ones that can take advantage of the 3D effect. Reading books isn't one of those. Is the point really just to cut out distractions?

Mostly Go. If you've seen Go code, it has quite verbose error handling, as you must explicitly check if an error variable is nil and typically return if so (often wrapping with a message). AI is good at trivially completing stuff like that. Go also likes to have table driven unit tests that have a rather common structure. I've also found AI to be good at completing parameters to commonly used functions, logging strings, Go's "assertions" (which are actually usually just regular if statements followed by `t.Errorf("some format string")`).

AskHistorians is also a great example of the upside to Reddit's somewhat unique approach to moderation. The site can have laxly moderated subs for stuff like humour while having extremely strictly moderated subs for history (while still being open for anyone to contribute to, provided they can follow the rules). It's not technically unique to Reddit, but it uncommon and especially when combined with the intersection of other features that make Reddit unique.

Unfortunately for those pushing it, the Fediverse also suffers from severe usability issues. I'm not saying it can't be a success to at least some degree, but it's got an uphill battle with attracting and retaining average users.