Agreed, though the trend towards expansion of presidential power through executive orders goes back long before Biden. Back to Reagan, at least, and much of the root of it was in legislation signed by Carter (IEEPA). Every successive administration -- both parties -- has pushed the boundaries. Dubya was probably the worst, mostly because he had the biggest hammer. But the pattern is that each administration takes a bit more and when the other party gets elected, they don't give any of it back.

Very much a "both sides" problem.

Same with Python.

There are a lot of problems with both, but neither deserves the title of worst criminal state. Most hypocritical state, maybe.

It does. I got a notification in early 2025 (running a pre-release Android 16 build) while traveling in NY. I got someone who was working on the feature to pull the detailed logs from my phone and they were able to get quite a bit of detail about what kind of fake tower it was. Pretty cool.

Not if you want to have mobile phone/data service.

If your mobile provider supports VOIP and you have Wifi available (e.g. at home) you can just disable cellular service. Then everything will go through your Internet connection -- and everything is encrypted these days. But that only works when you have Wifi.

(I'm not claiming any equivalence between coffee and heroin, but the "I enjoy it so I don't care about health effects" claim really only works if the health effects are fairly minor.)

You can use Qt from Rust.

My point is that if that low-level stuff is what makes C fun to you, then Rust and C++ will be fun, too... but without all of the drudgery and error-prone crap C makes you do.

If that's not what makes C fun to you, then what is? It's certainly not being able to accomplish a lot quickly; higher-level languages are much better for that.

I have to push back against your assumption that Rust is a language that limits developers. It absolutely does not. As for the AI bit... I use AI to write code all day. It's great, but it makes the same sort of mistakes humans do. I find Rust is a great language for AI to write (under appropriate supervision).

I have fun programming in Rust. I don't like programming in C. I do like programming in C++. I like building type systems that prevent errors and automate drudgery. Both C++ and Rust let me do that, C does not.

I think the point of your "you will have fun programming in C" is that in both languages (and C++) you spend a fair amount of time thinking about low-level details of what the compiler is generating. That's true, and I like thinking about memory layouts, cache lines, what the optimizer is going to do, etc. But I don't like all of the tedium C forces on me.

On balance, I prefer Rust over every other language I've used.

My overall strategy is very different. I don't think Claude's code is remotely good enough yet, so I don't trust it to go off and do "development" semi-unsupervised. I direct and review everything it writes, and I control the scope and content of every commit. To be a little more precise, Claude's code is generally fine (if a bit over-commented), but Claude rarely produces code structure that is clear, clean and correctly-mapped to the problem domain, to my (very picky) eyes. So I never just turn it loose on a large, multi-commit development task.

Entropy is the default state; order and good outcomes are unnatural and require significant energy and focus to impose.

Are you sure you're not an LLM?

I think this is the result of their trainers trying to reduce hallucination. And hallucination *has* been reduced, so it's probably been largely successful, but it has produced this era of versions that are concerned about honesty, that claims of honesty or apologies for lack or honesty, are pervasive in their output.

My iron rule is that Claude is not allowed to modify git state, not even to stage or unstage, and definitely not to commit. As long as that rule is followed, any mistakes can be cleaned up easily.

And even people who don't drive stick regularly (but know how) quickly stop having to pay attention. I haven't owned a stick shift since the mid 90's, but I often get them when renting cars overseas. It takes a day or two of paying attention, and then it just becomes automatic and effortless.

BTDT when coming home from a trip where I'd been driving a manual for a couple of weeks.