Cppcheck doesn't flag anything in Waffle Iron's example.

It also doesn't find anything wrong with:

std::vector<int> vec = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
auto it = vec.begin();
vec.push_back(6);
std::cout << *it << std::endl;

Which is another common example of how you can write memory errors without using C++ pointers.

Sure, so C++ is safe as long as it's used in a way that makes it incredibly painful. Sounds good. Let's just require all C++ code everywhere to be written that way. Rust usage will skyrocket overnight.

He unintentionally used Signal? How drunk was he?

For a really rigorous definition of "fair", it's impossible to have fair democracy at all. Arrow's Theorem demonstrates this to a large degree, although many have argued that some of his fairness axioms are excessive. More recent research has concluded that fairness is the wrong standard, because there's no way for an electorate's "will" to really be fairly represented by any electoral system, not in all cases. Some systems can do better most of the time (and "winner take all" is particularly bad), but all systems fail in some cases.

What we need to aim for instead of fairness is "legitimacy", which is more about building broad acceptance of the system than about fixing the system itself, though it's easier to build acceptance for better-designed systems.

Having the country's top politicians continually claiming the system is unfair and rigged is, of course, the worst possible thing to do if you want to build support for the legitimacy of the system.

I decided to check :-)

According to the Book Censorship Database from the Every Library Institute, both "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" have been challenged, but only "Of Mice and Men" was removed, though "restricted" is more accurate. The Birdville Independent School District in Texas removed the book from general access, allowing access only to the AP English class, and the Indian River County Schools in Florida restricted it to high school students.

No Doctor Suess books were banned, although Suess Enterprises voluntarily ceased publication of six books.

AI is not a shoulder. It's a make-believe sentence generator, which has encoded a large collection of sentences discussing homework (*). That's actually counterproductive to stand on, because it wastes time and builds weakness into the foundation of science.

(*) On the Internet. Badly.

It is likely that the next algorithmic improvement will happen in 30 years time at the very earliest. Until then we are likely going to be stuck in the dark ages of transformers and Markov chains calling themselves LLMs and pretending to be intelligent.

Research operates on cycles of research careers. Paradigm shifts can happen when most of the current population of researchers stop working in AI and thereby stop flooding the world with variations on the same brute force trick. This will give a new generation of students breathing room to be actually creative and innovative. But before any of that happens, people like Musk and Zuckerberg need to run out of money or die. When the money and interest dries up, AI research will no longer be attractive. That's when the dedicated, methodical kids with a real interest in the field will get their chance to shine.

There's theory and there's reality. I shouldn't be required to look left, then right, then left again before crossing the street. But actually, I prefer to do it anyway:)

You oversimplify. I despise Rust, but it does address real problems. (I'm not sure how well, because I won't use it.) I'm thinking of thinks like deadlock, livelock, etc. As someone above pointed out, there are lots of applications that don't need to deal with that, and subsets can work for them. (The above poster worked in a domain where all memory could be pre-allocated.)

Rust felt like programming with one hand tied behind my back. So I dropped it. Only one reference to a given item it just too restrictive. Perhaps it is really Turing complete, but so is a Turing machine. But multi-threaded programs really do need a better approach. (My real beef with C++ (and C) though is their handling of unicode. So I'm currently experimenting with D [ https://dlang.org/ ], which seems pretty good for the current application (though honestly since it's I/O bound Python would be quite acceptable). )

Part of it is learning to be diplomatic with ignorant people such as those you mention. Don't say: you're wrong, the book you are looking for doesn't exist. Say instead: sorry, the library computer can't find it rigght now, maybe it was misfiled, come back another day. You will seem helpful and mildly incompetent to them, and then they will go way.

Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The wider issue is: what is the acceptable tradeoff between false positives and false negatives that keeps the slop in check for everyone? It is clearly not to err on the side of no false positives at all. That's merely sweeping the problem under the rug.

The people you mention who didn't use AI are essentially victims of the AI cheaters whose behaviour causes predictable countermeasures. Just like the wider journal readership are victims, who are being hoodwinked with fake papers and fraudulent datasets.

Do not assume that the maggots are fully autonomous idiots.

In other parts of the world, there are fledgling maggot movements too. What is particularly interesting and relevant about those is that they often quote some ideas and misconceptions that simply do not apply where those movements are forming. This is due to cultural and legal differences in the other countries.

You can see this by observing marches and protests and interviews in other countries. The slogans and demands just don't make sense locally most of the time, yet are carbon copies of American ideas.

This tells you two things: 1) the maggots in America and abroad are being paid to propagate the conservative hate speech in their own countries. 2) the groups who are paying them are Americans, because the talking points are American conservative talking points even in the rest of the world where it makes no sense. The local maggot movements are simply paid to propagate the American talking points in their local cultures, and nobody bothers to adapt them or see if they make sense at all.

The last thing this tells you is this: if you follow the money to the source, then you will know who needs to be stopped for the good of the world. When the payola stops, the movements will stop. The ball is in Americans' court (For now. Don't sit on your ass too long).

And here's how you falsify the claim. When can I expect to see that 200B param model on my phone?

You wont. But you might not need to either. I. can happily run a 20B (or therabouts) param model on my macbook and it runs just fine, and the 128Gb firebreather mac studio at work CAN run a 200B param model, albeit at 4bit quantization.

Whats interesting with deep seek is it runs really well even at the 7b range, its not super smart and gets stuck in loops if you ask it to reason about something its little brain cant handle , however it handles most tasks well enough (it's fine for running autocomplete in an IDE, and people are getting good mileage in hooking it to Home Assistant for having a little brain running the household appliances) but its closing into the territory of personal AI in your phone.

The open source community are building equally impressive models for much less. Its entirely plausible when you factor in lower wages, cheap chinese tech, and the sheer determination the chinese have to catch up with the americans.

> This allows for reduced thickness and reduced cost, which is what most people want

Reduced thickness? No, I think pretty much everyone agrees laptops are as thin as they need to be. Any thinner and they'll slip when you're typing on them, and we want some thickness to keep them robust.

Which also raises another problem with the "thinness" fetish promoted only by laptop marketdroids and the morons who work as reviewers for so-called "tech" websites like Engadget et al: the keyboards on most modern laptops are literally unusable. They're worse than ZX Spectrum+ and maybe on a part with the older rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. They. Are. Fucking. Awful. And keyboards are one of the major reasons you use a computer rather than a tablet. So what the fuck is the point with these things?

People talk about how sales of laptops are declining and tablets increasing, but maybe if you actually cripple the major advantage a laptop has over a tablet, that's inevitable?

Cheaper, sure, but how much does it cost to add two dimm slots and to use mass produced commodity DIMMs? It's not even as if there isn't a cost to designing a motherboard so it only works with specific memory chips.

I hate this timeline. It's all going to shit.