I'm sticking with stone knives and bear skins.

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

I have a physics degree and I was aiming for a +1, Funny. I guess since we're joking about global warming, it counts as "dark" humour.

It's particularly bad because as we all know, dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones.

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

+(|Funny> + |Insightful>)/sqrt(2)

Are you suggesting that Shor's and Grover's are the only possible quantum algorithms? I'm not holding my breath for commercial QC either, but I don't like being overly pessimistic or conservative either. Quantum computers now are a bit like the early electronic computers of the 1940s — proofs of a concept but not exactly commercial success stories. Sure, with those computers people could do the same old calculations much faster, but the really interesting and useful applications involved a bit more vision, and those didn't appear overnight.

While many people associate QC with breaking cryptography, in the end it's just a faster way to do classical math. There's a whole world of pure quantum problems that are more naturally solved with quantum computers; this is what Feynman meant when he conceived the idea of QC in the early 1980s. So instead of getting hung up on the number of qubits, consider for example what D-Wave is doing.

I started using a standing desk soon after I quit teaching, and I guess there's a connection. But I also have some level of ADHD traits, and I find it easier to work on a computer if I can move around. I guess the commenters that don't understand standing desks have never used one extensively; the idea is not to stand in attention for 8 hours straight, but to allow your body some natural movement.

It also feels nice to sit down for a break, or for things like reading. I don't like the idea of moving the desk down to a sitting position, I'll much rather move myself somewhere else (undocking the laptop if necessary).

Writing userspace stuff in BPF so it can run super fast within the kernel. Starting with systemd.

Can they factor a number larger than 21 with QC yet?

Perhaps they could take a clue from software from 40+ years ago and make top-posting a configurable option.

But Microsoft has pretty much completely given up on making their software configurable for user preferences.