That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

I think they're arguing that they are the third thing, a message parlor.

Unions are a real-life strategy because they work. Divide-and-conquer is also a real-life strategy, because it works too.

Thus, I think the truth of your statement all depends on whether you look at this conflict between government and the the people, from the point of view of the attacker, vs the point of view of the defender.

Children do not have the maturity that is required for unfiltered access to the adult world

But they used to. In the 1980s, nobody dared to say in public, that 17-year-old me should not be allowed to visit public (or even university) (or even medical) libraries. (Or if someone did, they were still very obscure and unpopular, little more than a glimmer in the left's eye.)

If I may, could I narrow down which of these two things you think is best? First, there's exactly what you said above..

Kids have no right to use end-to-end encryption without parental consent

..but I've altered it:

Kids have a right to use end-to-end encryption unless denied by a parent

Did I make it better, or did I make it worse?

That's a valid point, though right now while they're facing competition from startups the dealerships do provide them with a moat that they want to preserve. If/when the startup threat is gone, the automakers will go back to hating the dealerships.

I think people forget how everyone laughed at Tesla because everyone knew that starting a new car company in the United States was impossible. Now we also have Lucid and Rivian. Maybe someday Aptera will manage to get off the ground. This is a novel situation for American carmakers.

They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

In fairness, this is the Kernel we are talking about, and those dudes actually do know what they are doing.

Kernel code is fucking hard. The last kernel coding I ever did was on Minix in the early 1990s for Operating Systems class at University. That was a total brain bender. But heres the thing, Minix was an intentionally simpler kernel designed for teaching and included an extremely comprehensive textbook, that just doesn't exist (I think) for Linux.

The Linux Kernel may well be the most complicated code by some of the most skilled coders on the planet. To claim they "can't code" is frankly, hubris.

Not that I think AI can code either. But it DOES seem to be quite good at finding bugs and code smells. You wouldn't want to rely on it as your everything, but don't be surprised if it finds whoopsies by even Torvalds himself.

Oh I dont know. Some of the scenes at the gas giant in Tau Ceti where pretty spectacular. Was it *Dune* spectacular? No. But I think the immersion of the theatre certainly helps.

Plus it sends a nice signal to the studios saying "more of this please!". Support hard sci-fi, its a frigging rough environment for films in general, and double rough for genre films like this.

Yeah I saw it , and it was actually really good. Gossling is kind of comical at times, but he actually does really well in this, and the comedy is more in service of the premise that he's a competent scientist and not-so-competent unwilling astronaut, and that he's got a weird friendship with the alien.

From a hard sci-fi point of view its really good, good enough that the few places where it does seem to veer off from known science (The solid xenon that the aliens use as a construction material) seems a little jarring.

And as a drama, yeah... it works. You'll definately find yourself rooting for the two main characters (goslings character and "Rocky" (as he dubs the alien)) and I wont spoil where it goes, but it'll get you.

Go watch it. It was easily one of the best films of the year.

I thought exactly the opposite. I think Rocky is far too "human". I didn't mind it, though, because a lot of the humor would be lost if Rocky was properly alien.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.