Not remotely. There were many other programming languages and operating systems.

C and Unix were mostly restricted to academic environments; industry use was fairly small. Even Bell Labs ran most of their real work on mainframes running MVS. In fact, early versions of Unix, up until around 1980, were called "Research Unix", because the OS was really only used in research environments. It wasn't until System 7 in 1983 that it really began to get much industry adoption, and wasn't until the mid to late 80s that it really became the dominant workstation and minicomputer OS (even then, "dominant" is debatable).

C's usage was tightly bound to Unix usage until it finally started to get adoption on microcomputers in the late 80s.

Sure, but they can are will be minimized and isolated. When interfacing with hardware, you need to write to registers and you need to write to shared memory buffers. In both cases, what you'd do is write a small unsafe block that does the unsafe thing, and very carefully validate the code and all of the assumptions it makes, and document exactly why it's actually safe. Then everywhere else in the driver, you just call those carefully-vetted unsafe routines.

You should read some of the unsafe kernel and driver code that has been merged and is in the process of getting upstreamed. What you'll find is that there is very little unsafe code and that it is very carefully reviewed, with a level of thoroughness and attention to detail that cannot be provided to C code, because with C there's just too much code that has to be vetted. With Rust, you only have to validate the small unsafe blocks, and can rely on the compiler to protect you from memory errors and data races everywhere else. (Not livelocks or deadlocks, though. The "safe concurrency" promise of Rust only prevents races.)

Yep, if he can governments/corporations/people to buy him by buying DJT and his Trumpcoins, and get them to hold the "assets" long enough for him to realize his gains, that's how he'll make real billions from the presidency.

> horse shoe crabs without tails

My theory is ancient Romans found the tails delicious, but not the rest, and desperate tail-free crabs gravitated toward the shore where food was more plentiful, but so were predators, and wall builders.

I don't dispute there was probably flowing water on Mars once, but scientists generally concluded that decades ago. Any new evidence is merely incremental reinforcement of that theory, not revolutionary.

Hey sweetie, it's always a good day to lick mod points!

Here's how you determine which country is snooping:

1. Send 10,000 messages containing "Taiwan owns Pooh Bear Xi!"
2. If you get killed soon after, then China did it.
3. Send 10,000 messages containing "Putin is a demented shivering steroid-drunk puff-face!"
4. If you get killed soon after, then Russia did it.
5. Send 10,000 messages containing "Iran was modern, wealthy, & pleasant until zealots like Khamenei ruined it all."
6. If you get killed soon after, then Iran did it.
7. If you live, profit!

On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, if it doesn't fix the problem the first time, one could always do it again, and eventually you'd presumably get somebody in power who understands that starting wars means certain death and won't do that. On the third hand, allowing that as a policy could start you down a slippery slope to assassination over trade wars, etc., which would be almost inarguably a bad idea.

A better policy would be to get a bunch of countries together and agree that if any country starts a war with them, they will swoop in and end it, regardless of what country starts it — not a NATO-like body that requires specific things from its members, but a mutual defense pact that is open to any country that wants to join, and is invalidated upon a vote of the members to kick you out for taking offensive action without authorization. It might be peace at the tip of a sword, but it would still be peace.

LOL, that's like cat-nip to MAGAs

That's a boss's fucking job.They never care if you are an ace Vulcan. (If they do listen carefully, bottle it, because it probably won't last long.)

That being said, fork off "Rustix" already. If devs keep loudly arguing over the same thing over and over it's unlikely to ever be settled (in a lifetime). Thus, forkit and shuddup!

...or it didn't happen!

Rust is now 13 years old. When Linus first released the Linux kernel in 1991, the C programming language was 19 years old, and Unix V7 had only been out for 12 years.

There are more than a dozen kernels written entirely in Rust. The claim that Rust is immature is pure propaganda.

The hilarious part (in a macabre way) is how Trump thinks Russia will agree to security guarantees. I mean, they'll agree to them, sure, but they already made security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for de-nuclearization in written treaty form back in December of 1994, and then almost exactly two decades later in March of 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russia's security guarantees aren't worth as much as the paper that the formal treaties are written on, and anybody who says otherwise doesn't know history.

The problem is that President Trump doesn't know history. His party is the party of people who failed history in school. It's the only way to explain about half of the things that they do.

See also "people who failed history in school", or at least people who failed to actually understand what they were learning. You never ever elect an authoritarian. It always comes back to bite you in the a**.

But to turn this thread back on topic, and yet stay oddly political, the reality is that throughout history, technology was always promoted as a tool for making workers lives easier. Workers always assumed that this would mean that they didn't have to work as hard. In practice, the reality was always that their employers expected more, and the workers had to work just as hard, but produced higher levels of output. AI tools are just another in a long line of these "improvements".

The problem with this is that their wages haven't kept up with increases in productivity. If they did, then workers could work less and produce the same amount and have more time for themselves. But the system is very deliberately rigged to prevent this. Ever try to find part-time employment in tech? No way. Not gonna happen. Why? Because if workers were allowed to work part time, they couldn't be exploited as easily.

And this is largely caused by the same sorts of greedy people who you're complaining about — the rich billionaires who have no qualms about exploiting workers for their own profits. People like Trump and Musk, if they had to start from nothing, would probably be working in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant for a little bit over minimum wage, because they have little or no people skills, and would not be able to survive without "f**k you money". But because they started off wealthy, they got the opportunity to exploit others to enrich themselves. And for the most part, they give very little back, using charitable organizations more as tax dodges than for any sort of actual charity.

I don't know how to fix this, but a good start would be ramping up the capital gains tax for the ultra-wealthy, treating any capital gains over a million dollars per year as ordinary income, and taxing capital assets (read "stocks") over $100 million every year to encourage people to take the capital gains or donate them to charity.

As for AI tools, I haven't ever found them particularly useful, because the output is too low quality for me to do anything with it, and it is usually hard to fix the flaws (unless you're talking about plain text). It seems like any other fad, except that eventually it won't be, because people with money will continue to push for the tech to improve so that they can fire more workers and make more money, because apparently no amount is too much for them. I really don't get it. Any of it.

Exception: Self-driving car tech. That is useful. There are probably other niche uses that are useful. Most are not.

There are two types of people who have lots of money — the ones who see it as "f*** you money" and don't care what other people think of them, and the ones who donate huge amounts of money to get buildings named after themselves.

The main difference is that in a hundred years, the latter tend to be remembered as good people even if they were awful.

If Zuckerberg really wants people to remember him musically, the best thing he could do is get together with people high up in Apple and Google, and build a concert hall for use by all of the musical ensembles at those tech companies. I don't know about the other companies and groups out there, but our tech company orchestra could *really* use a viable concert venue.

At work, we don't have any rooms that can hold an eighty-piece orchestra with at times 600 or more audience members, and it's rather hard to beg execs to give us a budget for renting an external concert hall when companies are laying people off. But if they built the Zuckerberg-Cook-Pichai Center for the Performing Arts (or whatever) and made it be available for large performing groups in tech, with priority given to musical groups with ties to the biggest half dozen tech companies, it would be a huge win for the community.

It's the sort of thing you do before running for public office. Is he running for public office?

I'm going to take another page from DOGE and suggest that, even if the savings match the hype and aren't overtly counterproductive, there's minimal reason to expect to see them yourself. The people playing $100 for a weekend of early access and some skins rather than $70 for the base game are sending a signal about willingness to pay that doesn't suggest that passing the savings on to them is an urgent imperative when there is always room for margins to be bigger.

Microsoft wanted out of that unprofitable and silly looking thing with the VR headsets; but they've been trying to sell AI to the feds since before the current hype phase. Their PR fluff for the Air Force ABMS and broader enthusiasm for JADC2 specifically mention using 'Azure Cognitive Services' for "integrated, intelligent apps enabling rapid human decision–making, even without having direct AI or data science skills or knowledge."

They aren't the sorts that just outright name the company after a cursed surveillance artifact that makes you the evil overlord of Mordor's slave economy and ork blood hordes; but if "Microsoft will help address the Air Force challenge of getting the right information to the right platform and decision–makers in the most efficient manner." turns out to quietly mean accelerating the dissident to JDAM pipeline in a corner somewhere that's perfectly billable Azure Government storage and compute.