The third sentence is correct, but the first is wrong. This new machine does actually do complex chemical synthesis; for an overview of what's impressive about it (as well as which of the researchers' claims are not feasible) see this post: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi....

The Inquisition didn't deal with Galileo by refusing to let him sponsor their conference.

How has the way you use R changed over time? For myself, I don't think I've gone through an entire R session in the past six months without loading dplyr. Combine that with the pipeline operator and I think if you'd shown the R code I wrote yesterday to me of two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it was the same language.

It seems clear that when you talk about 'programming' you mean programming a computer to achieve some currently unattainable goal, otherwise this comment makes no sense. If you genuinely believe that computer programmers are as rare as orbiting pigeons you're simply looking in the wrong places.

It might be helpful if in future you actually articulate the goal you have in mind, for example "Humans are terrible at programming computers to achieve independent consciousness." I don't think that statement is going to be much use in an argument about which programming language is better, but see where it takes you.

'Amazing' and 'terrible' are equally meaningless in this case. Our abilities are at the top of the range of possibilities we are aware of. We simply have no way to objectively judge them.

I've seen this line of argument in a number of /. threads recents (maybe even from the same commenter). Story about self-driving cars: "humans are terrible at driving". Story comparing programming languages: "humans are terrible at programming".

But terrible compared to what? It's a totally meaningless statement on its own. Humans may well be terrible at programming compared to inhabitants of the planet Vulcan, but at this moment human beings are better at programming than every single entity we know of that exists. I would love it if the next version of Windows was written from scratch by some being whose programming abilities puts humans in the shade, but outside of fiction that simply doesn't exist.

If a secretary with no professional qualifications can take minutes in a senior management meeting and maintain confidentiality about what was said there's no reason you, as a theoretically highly-educated IT worker, can't do the same about the content of emails you happen to read in the course of doing your job.