Man, I miss the old Slashdot culture.

Trump's said he was going to ban TikTok in 2020. Then in January 2025. Then in March 2025.

Until something actually happens, I'll just keep calling our commander-in-chief a TACO.

I have a long-haul flight booked on a 787 coming up in two months. I'd like to get some definitive answers.

Me too...in three. And I'm not worried one bit. Do you know why?

Because there's over a thousand of them being used by airlines every year, and hundreds flying above your head as you read this. And there's not a single report of any of them having engines that flame out.

Furthermore, I've not seen any reports today of anyone dying in a commercial airplane crash. Meanwhile, about 3,260 people die every day around the world in road vehicle accidents. If you're not afraid to get behind the wheel, stop all the fear mongering with commercial aircraft.

When American companies finance their own "utopia" cities, I can't help but be reminded that the ruling class loves to design and build their own cities to protect their power and interests.

What can I say, other than let us welcome our new plutocrat overlords.

What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.

TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

And I was hoping to rip the disk to MP3. Darn it, Universal!

One good anachronistic music format deserves another, I always say!

I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.

There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.

I've been using a Brother B&W laser now for eleven years. Cost me $109. Replaced the toner twice. About 5k on the page counter. Still works. No issues. Glad I got rid of my inkjet...spent as much in three years on ink on that thing as I did in toner on my Brother over eleven years.

The movie was The 6th Day. I'm shocked that nobody else referenced this movie in all the comments.

We do this naturally without thinking. It's called Pareidolia. We recognize what appears to be a pattern of human behavior and we automatically assign a meaningful interpretation to it.

"...especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech."

Let's stand resolute in our protection of free speech! Especially for the right to say that our president loves TACOs. He loves to eat TACOs so much, he was asked by a reporter how much he loved TACOs. Trump's response? He loves them so much, he could eat 8,657 of them!

Just love that free speech!

But if I tell an LLM "Thanks that suggestion worked" that feedback is lost to the void. There's no upvoting, no storage that I know of applying to all other questions people ask to let the system know "yes that answer worked particularly well". So all the LLMs can go on giving out the same answers forever not really knowing they are flawed... unless someone publishes an article about it.

There's no reason why LLMs can't have feedback mechanisms. In fact they do. ChatGPT has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. It almost definitely tracks usage of download and copy to clipboard buttons.

These stories don't phase me. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to pull back and reveal what's behind the curtain: Lots of people suffer isolation and burnout and depression. These cases are not limited to only public performers. At least this public performer is making some bank in the process. Here's to hoping she comes to the realization that she can't continue this lifestyle forever, dials back on the streaming, and uses some of those gains to get some help with her mental struggles.

Meanwhile, if you care about this story, then care about your neighbors and coworkers whom you witness going through similar traumas, and connect with them. Social bonds save lives.

(P.S. A word of warning: Don't make the same mistake I did of reading the old Slashdot story, wondering what "the old JenniCam" is up to, and click the link....Especially if you're at work.)