Reminds me of that famous Frank Zappa quote;- "Comparing Guitarists is a stupid sport".

Now Zappa was no slouch on the guitar, considered by many as possibly the most inventive guitarists of the 1970s, but he was far less enamoured with virtuosity than his reputation suggested, eventually even giving up on playing it live, and handing over axe duties to his young apprentice, Steve Vai. For him it wasnt how well you could play the instrument, its what the music you played on it sounded like that interested him.

I feel the same about programming languages. Python might not be the flashiest, its missing some key features, its slow (although in modern days a lot faster than it used to be), and so on. But I can get the job done faster and cleaner than I can in almost any language except maybe Ruby (which nobody seems to use anymore). Is it the best language? Hell no. Does it matter? NOPE. What matters is everyone on my team knows python, and it gets shit done. Flash and virtuosity is for teenagers and shredders. I wanna play the blues.

The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.

But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.

But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)

So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.

And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.

If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.

Yeah it seems to me the choice is either
1) a stable orbit with a 50% duty cycle, which means more collectors AND heavy batteries. Expensive.
2) Parking it in something like a lagrange point. Extremely stable forever-orbit, but extremely expensive per kg to get it to that place. And space junk from abandoned shit will never go away
3) geostationary orbits that require a tonne of fuel for constant adjustment burns.

None of this of course factors iin cosmic ray shielding and the enormous amount of infrastructure to deal with the fact that the only way to remove heat is radiating it. Massive amounts of GPUs running at full throttle with no obvious way to cool it.

Or, they could just drop these things in the ocean and use ocean currents to power the GPUs. Hell, you could even just use nuclear down there and never have to worry about a meltdown or radiation leaks, because salt water is the ultimate radiation shield and diluter of radioactive particles.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The thing that makes rust a "hard" language is its punishing borrow checker step that simply refuses to compile if you've got code smells that hint at page violations or other memory goonery. Rust punishes you, but in doing so it makes you a better programmer.

Its something I fell in love with Crystal over (which, btw does NOT do a borrow checker), its static analysis step that refuses to compile if your doing things with variables that introduces un-handled nulls. I could feel myself becoming a better coder (which is a hard thing to achieve for someone with 20y experience) simply because it was pointing out anti-patterns in my coding and requiring me to fix them. Its a shame crystal never really took off, its a genuinely good and speedy little language. Who knows, maybe some day. Python sat in obscurity for two decades (Python, for the youngsters in the audience, is OLDER than JS, Java and so on. Y'all only hearing of it recently doesnt make it a recent language) before finally exploding in popularity

Steve Jobs back? Like him or not, the best Apple days, products and innovations were done during his iron fists days. And he drove countless companies down this same path, to the point some are now better than current day Apple is.
Since he will not return, hope whoever is confirmed do more than just damage control and play catch up.

Although Tim Cook has been a perfectly fine leader commercially (The man is a supply chain god, by all accounts), he's never had Job's innate sense for the market, consumer, and for design.

I've long maintained they should have given the top job to Jony Ive. Jony is the reason Apple stuff went from grey boxes to attractive and elegant looking designs that actually made the damn things into fashion accessories. Sure the iphones are technological marvels, but if they still looked like plastic chunks with fold out keyboards, there really would be no reeason to buy one over the equally technical marvels like the Nokias , Androids or bloody windows phones. That was Ives design eye that gave us the modern phone.

Apple would do well to repeat the old move it pulled off with Jobs, and hire back Ives to take over the company.

My initial instinct was to scold you for "WTF is a clinical associate professor?" as thats a term that makes perfect sense for a teaching hospital.

But this dude is an economist? What sort of clinic would an economist work in, particularly an economist who specializes in crypto shit.

Though it does remind me of a story from the early bitcoin era of a guy who built a mining rig in his bedroom, and it heated the room so much he collapsed from heat-stroke and ended up in hospital with brain damage. Which I've never been able to decide if that is tragic or hilarious, or probably both, which in turn reminds me of the old observation that Comedy is defined as "tragedy that happens to others", which on the internet usually takes the form of "Someone stole my bitcoins!".

Now we have governments telling us we can't burn all the oil we still have because of the dreaded CO2

Ignore governments. Ignore Al Gore. Ignore the theatrics.

Scientists have been warning us for 150 years that carbon will do stupid things to the climate, and so far climate predictions have been pretty much spot on.

"Video unable to load"

Once upon a time I'd suspect it had been "slashdotted" , but I doubt Slashdot generates the sort of firehose of traffic it once did. Which means this things just fallen on its arse in normal traffic. Not a good way to launch a ..... startup... or whatever this is supposed to be?

The vine people must be pretty bitter they gave up the ghost and then a year or three later tiktok did more or less the exact same thing and turned into one of the biggest gen z sites on the planet.

I think its important to think about the context of a decade ago. At that point language models where pure research. Things that generated absolute gibberish outputs and maybe might one day be useful in spam detectors, search engines, grammar checkers and translation apps, and the "Attention is all you need" paper that basically changed everything was 3 years in the future. You could be forgiven if one of your investors said "Hey, mind if I scrape your site? We're doing some research on language processing" thinking it was pretty harmless.

Yeah we do the same in australia. Its fine. It was the 1980s when we did it, and I remember being a bit bummed out the 2c lollies wouldnt be a thing no more, but I figured I'm a teenager now and probably should be eating something more substantial than 2c lollies from the delicatesan. (although Im sure my mother was relieved, sweet things where banned in the house except for special occasions, but she couldnt control what me and my brother did outside the house)

Well none of them really ever where. The closest we had was pre franco spain in that brief moment when the anarchists actually where doing the "workers running the economy" thing that the marxists promise but innevitably turned into turned into the state running the economy instead. Which ironically got smashed first by the communist party which did NOT like the idea of workers doing a communism without them, and finally by Franco and his fascist goons.

... was how to disable it.

Why isn't there ever a hate button?

There is! Its up the top of the browser window, and looks like a little [x] in the tab next to the tab name

Hell, its a major part of Star Trek Lore. Khan and his band of genetically engineered evil super soldiers. All of which lead to the federation banning genetic engineering (something the show has been trying to walk back ever since Roddenberry passed away since, well ... there actually IS medically useful non eugenic uses for gene therapy, and it seems a bit arse backwards if the federation is letting people die of trivially solveable diseases (trivial for a civilization thats racing around space on warp ships, that is).

A good example of Trek realising they kind of cocked that one up is the Julian Bashir arc where its realised he's so damn smart because his parents had secretly gotten him illegal medical treatment after he was born with significant cognitive impairment from shady space doctors. The end result being he ends up a super genius. But a good one, not a khan!. In the most recent series its realised that "Number 1" is heavily genetically engineered, because she's from a species that practices it routinely, and the show then wrestles with the fact it'd basically be biggoted discrimination to punish her for something she didnt choose and is part of her species native culture.

Except now they've done it on purpose, knowing that the earlier harms would return, and the lawsuits will be bigger.

Oh mark my words, the fallout from this ludicrously malicious administration will be felt for a generation, just not by the generation that got the administration into power.