https://nitter.tux.pizza/Sohra... Can't generate images of people with fair skin it would seem. And this observation will be fuel for fire of the wildly racist conspiracist nazi idiots too. Just all round bad. Carmack makes a decent point: "The AI behavior guardrails that are set up with prompt engineering and filtering should be public — the creators should proudly stand behind their vision of what is best for society and how they crystallized it into commands and code. I suspect many are actually ashamed. The thousands of tiny nudges encoded by reinforcement learning from human feedback offer a lot more plausible deniability, of course." https://nitter.tux.pizza/ID_AA...

[Reposting without mojibake.]

I was a CS professor for fifteen years. Had tenure and everything. I've just completed my third week as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, working from HQ2.

But I wouldn't say I was "poached": that implies impropriety and a lack of agency. I didn't just passively get shot in the head by a poacher/recruiter while grazing peacefully in the savanna. I interviewed, they made me an offer, and I decided it was the right next thing for me. That decision was complex, personal, and *active*. Lucky me that I work in a field (CS) with many great options in both industry and academia.

I was at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, not in Virginia. But I'm not sure why Virginia is special here. Virginia may have promised some number of CS graduates, but any big company recruits all across the country and globe. I don't know how much of the promise of a fresh HQ2 talent pool is specifically Virginia's to provide.

In any case, I'll no longer be training future software engineers and scientists for Amazon to hire. Maybe that's a loss, because after fifteen years I'd gotten reasonably good at that. Now I'm learning how to be good at some other new things, because that's what *I* chose to do. So far, so good.

I was a CS professor for fifteen years. Had tenure and everything. Iâ(TM)ve just completed my third week as a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon, working from HQ2.

But I wouldnâ(TM)t say I was âoepoachedâ: that implies impropriety and a lack of agency. I didnâ(TM)t just passively get shot in the head by a poacher/recruiter while grazing peacefully in the savanna. I interviewed, they made me an offer, and I decided it was the right next thing for me. That decision was complex, personal, and *active*. Lucky me that I work in a field (CS) with many great options in both industry and academia.

I was at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, not in Virginia. But Iâ(TM)m not sure why Virginia is special here. Virginia may have promised some number of CS graduates, but any big company recruits all across the country and globe. I donâ(TM)t know how much of the promise of a fresh HQ2 talent pool is specifically Virginiaâ(TM)s to provide.

In any case, Iâ(TM)ll no longer be training future software engineers and scientists for Amazon to hire. Maybe thatâ(TM)s a loss, because after fifteen years Iâ(TM)d gotten reasonably good at that. Now Iâ(TM)m learning how to be good at some other new things, because thatâ(TM)s what *I* chose to do. So far, so good.

This is to kill the secondary market now that a 5 year old laptop has a cpu that is just fine. If it wasn't to kill the secondary market and the flash was really amazing and isn't going to fail ever they'd show a 5 year warranty.

We all know they won't do that, they'll actually charge you extra to get any useful warranty. But yeah, I dislike apple and won't buy their crap after paying thousands for a macbook pro that they shipped with faulty nvidia hardware and didn't recall. Apple are just a horrible company, the existence of other horrible companies does not excuse them for being awful. They're worse than microsoft, their reputation was only ever better than microsofts due to their failure to get market power. As soon as they got any they went nuts with it. Think different to apple.

Asus zenbook with any linux distro on it is just a plain better laptop.

Please add your successful linux laptops to this thread.

Do you think that the reason barricades have not been stormed and every congressperson is not running scared from all responsibility, knowledge etc is because it's another thing with a computer in it so the brain has dropped out of the ear? Same thing as public service spending billions on a solution that boils down to a 286 with a whole lot of workarounds. People stop thinking as soon as "with a computer" is in the sentence? I don't know, I can't fathom it I'm wildly advancing theories to explain how the USA achieved the USSR's wet dream of surveillance and it has less impact on policy than if a pop star got naked on prime time television.

Forward looking, non-fiction. Will be wrong, obviously it will be wrong, but if any of these wrong future speculations are worth reading then Freeman Dyson's certainly is among them.

C and C++ still haven't fixed this egregarious bug in the standard. There is no reason for single line, un-braced blocks. People use them to show off how "cool" they are that they don't need to brace because it's only one line. It makes for difficult to spot bugs like this. We need to actually yell at the people on the standards committees to FIX THE BUGS in the standard. There are other really obvious ones and they all should be fixed before adding more new features. YES I'M LOOKING AT YOU C++14! There are plenty of ways you can make a new standard still work alongside code from an old one (compile old, broke, brittle, stupid code with a compiler flag indicating the old standard and new, beter files (yes "translation units c++") with the new one. Introduce a #THIS_FILE_IS_STUPID pragma to disable sanity on old code compiled with the new standard and plenty of others. Pick one, bless, it, implement it and FIX THIS CRAP http://opensource.apple.com/so... The 35th and 36th incidences of the words "goto fail;" in that file are the problem, not easy to spot until you look really closely and it's a bug that a sane standard would make impossible. FIX IT!!

My experience has been the same. I donated $50 to Cyanogenmod a couple of years ago (FFS, they saved my buying a new phone!) and got a delighted email from Steve Kondik.

I used to assume the FOSS world would be supported like the Linux kernel is, but now I realize that many cool projects need a user-funded model. I choose a project to donate to weekly, as well as supporting gittip.com. It's not much (and I hope to increase it markedly one day), but I want to live in a world where Free hackers can just hack, and not stress about money.

Cheers,
Rusty.
BTW I've never used GNU LilyPond, but I'm delighted such a thing thrives. Do you take BTC?

Heheh... I doubt Paul needs an all-expenses paid trip, given how senior he is at IBM.

The article is well worth a read: hell, I've implemented RCU myself, and I learned by reading it.

Hope that helps!
Rusty.

Or, why don't writers/directors get all the attention? Even Sci Fi conventions seems to headline actors who played a part, rather than writers who created the part.

Is a great story so compelling that the line blurs and people fall in love with the puppets and ignore the puppet master?

Confused,
Rusty.

Um, no, the 250,000 requests per year are government warrantless data requests; these include call data (who called whom, not contents), location data, and request header data (eg http, email: interestingly, I've not been able to find out which headers are included: links anyone?)

Obviously with this number of requests going on, the process isn't being vetted very well if at all. Certainly there aren't that many people in Australia under reasonable suspicion of criminal behaviour, so it's deeply concerning :(

Cheers,
Rusty.

One of my favourite geek charities is the Ada Initiative which provides resources and training for women in open source and open culture.

Needless to say, you should speak directly to any charity you're seriously considering; they'll often have good suggestions for how they money could be used.

Good luck!
Rusty.

Ballarat: http://lcaunderthestars.org.au/

Looking forward to it!
Rusty.