With such a poor command of the English language, I'd hate to read one of your books.

Furthermore, with such arrogance dismissing interesting scientific findings, I'll assume your" knowledge" is entirely constituted of trivialities anyway.

Thanks for letting everyone know what about some worthless dross to avoid, though.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. Indeed giving preferential treatment to your own wares is a clear case of benefiting from it.

Last I checked, though, OpenAI, or any of the other AI apps that were made available on the app store and rank above xAI, are not, in fact, part of Apple.

Can this "despite security justifications" nonsense die already? Will anyone clue them in?

The reason iOS and Android suffer much less from security issues is nothing to with the app stores and everything to do with the apps-share-nothing permissions.

No. He didn't "go straight to class warfare". You did.

He just said Musk got where he is by lying.

He didn't say Musk was lying because he was rich, which would be class warfare. He said Musk got rich by lying, which isn't.

No, it's not "perfectly reasonable and valid", because it's wrong. No matter your pseudo-logical verbiage. It's not even a fallacy, it's just wrong.

Giving preferential treatment is not against anti-trust laws.

Giving preferential treatment, _if_ you benefit from it _and if_ you're big enough to move the market, is. The latter, for Apple, in the US at least, sure. The former, unless OpenAI and all the others paid up Apple, and xAI said no, then no.

In any case, just "giving preferential treatment" is no anti-trust violation.

Yeah...

After decades of insane efforts to improve doping and avoid detection, they somehow only just discovered proper training, proper food and proper sleep and
, miraculously, it's actually better than doping!

Right.

Do they explain why proper training, proper food and proper sleep without doping is better than proper training, proper food and proper sleep _with_ doping? No? They're full of shit.

Well, from what they said, the tank simply didn't hold the pressure.

Filling one with N2 and seeing what happens is the obvious cheap way to do this.

SpaceX chose the very expensive way of blowing everything up after filling the lot with O2 and CH4.

More to the point: the better security we get from iOS and Android devices is nothing to do with vetted app stores, and everything to do with restricted, deny-all, permissions apps get on those OSes. Each app operates in its own walled garden, with no access to anything beyond its own data and the internet, unless flagged by the app and explicitly granted by the user. On Android, each app is its own *nix user. iOS operates the same way.

THIS is why writing malware is much harder on Android and iOS compared to Windows, MacOS or Linux, where apps operate with the user's privileges.

Only being able to install apps from trusted sources, or The One Trusted Source as the case may be, has nothing to do with it.

Hasn't been for a while.

It was true, when 30 or 50 year old adults who had never seen a computer in their life suddenly had one dumped on their desks and were told to use it. I still feel for them...

That was 25 years ago, tho.

At this point:
- everyone in an office under 45 has had to use one since they started working - at worst.
- everyone has had the internet on their phone for 15 years.
- everyone under the stage of 30 only ever had a smartphone.

On the other hand, those "digital natives" only ever had to tap the "do it" button to get something done. When it's not right in front of their faces, it's this one, that one, and then it happens. Magic words. Unlike their parents who had to understand enough of what was happening to get what they needed.

Clarke's technology/magic threshold is right on point. I feel we're well past it when it comes to computers and the internet. It's not a bad thing, mind. I wouldn't be able to fix a car, unlike my dad. It's great!

But it does mean that teenagers are no better armed to deal with "tech" than their parents.

Well, there's a big element of marketing BS in what they claim they can do, but generally, I agree. Social Media has been remarkably disingenuous.

My personal, and quite recent, favorite, is that when the debate was about their responsibility, they were all about "The User's posts" and "common carrier".

Then AI turned up, along with the need for training data, and the very same suddenly became "My Data" and "selling access".

No.

The birthday "problem" arises only because there's only 365 days in a year but we think of birthdays as unique. It's purely a perception problem.

The Baltic sea is 377000 km^2. The longest cable in it, C-Lion1, is 1172 km long. About 0.5m across. 0.6 km^2. If you were to drop an anchor randomly, the chance you'd hit it is 1.6e-6. Real close to the "gold" standard 5 sigma used as evidence in particle physics. Way beyond the p0.01 that's enough everywhere else.

Of course, undersea cable do get cut still. Close to shore, because they tend to terminate where other things, such as harbors, and therefore ships, are.

Twice in a couple of days? In the high seas?

Women are for cooking and making babies. Gays should be treated. Criminals belong in "rape in the ass prison". Rape? Women can "shut the whole thing down" if they didn't want it.

MAGA! Fascist! Evil!

Women are for cooking and making babies. And should be stoned for adultery. And should be killed for dishonoring the family. Gays? Throw them off rooftops. Thieves should have their hand cut off. Rape? They're jewish. Or attended a rave. Or hostages. It's "decolonization". Women can "not be there" if they didn't want it.

Give me their flag so I can fly it!

As an actual leftist, I've defended the first point of view all my life.

People who switch from the first to the second? Narcissists with no convictions who just care for something to protest about and their social standing. Scum of the earth.

I don't like that Python took the "stream of bytes" approach. It's supposed to be a high level language.

Having said that, Unicode is an ungodly mess.

Back in the days, you had 8 bits characters, nice and easy. Problem: you can't fit a lot in 256 values.
Allright, then, let's use 16 bits, that's enough. That was the case when Java decided to go with 16 bits chars. It did have a serious performance penalty: if you were dealing with ascii, your throughput was halved. But it did preserve the efficient random access semantics. In spite of the performance penalty, it feel it was the right choice at the time.
Except Chinese speakers complained because you couldn't fit all traditional chinese characters in Unicode. Only simplified ones. And, in fairness, they had a point. Unicode was meant to represent _every_ character.
So suddenly the character set was expanded beyond 65536, which made the 16 bits the _worst_ choice. Some "characters" had to be split into two codepoints. All the inconvenients of having multi-"characters" characters, all the inconvenients of large characters to begin with, without the advantages of efficient random access.

So now, you can either have an API that has 4 byte characters (easy to use but dreadfully inefficient), UTF8 (efficient but painful to use in some cases), or just bytes (efficient but painful to use in other cases)(or more correctly, "not my problem, best of luck", quite the acceptance of inability from people whose job it is deal with just that).

It's really a case of picking your poison.

> There's a reason old programs were measured in kilobytes and ram was measured in megabytes.

Right. I learned assembly before I learned C. Ram was measured in kilobytes. 6809, 8088, 68k (luxury!). 512 on my Amiga if you threw out the OS.

The reason "old programs were measured in kilobytes" is because they did not quite nothing but as little as possible. We're talking about a time when sorting a list of files alphabetically was considered a major improvement.

I'm all for blaming a certain "the compiler will make it fast" or "just throw more hardware at it" philosophy for unfathomable slowness in modern software. Not to mention general cluelessness about algorithms. I've done it myself.

But, come on, the fundamental reason old software was small, fast and efficient is because is was useless crap.

I'm not vegetarian, never mind vegan. I enjoy a Good piece of beef as much as anyone. Ribeye, medium-rare, thank you very much. Emphasis on Good. I hate to sound like a snob, but most beef out there is s__t anyway. I'm sure I'd love your burgers, but I'm not ordering beef in a restaurant unless they sort of specialize in it. Most places can neither source good meat nor cook it correctly, regardless of price.

Anyway.

"thick patties cooked medium". Well, duh! That's your problem right there, and not the "preparation". It's not beef. Don't try to cook it like it is. Would you cook bass like you cook steak?

Anyway #2

A good piece beef is nice. Foie gras is nice. A Filet-o-Fish with fries is nice. Vegan burgers are nice. I'm happy to have that over any fast food burger. They taste just as good (or bad, your taste) and they're better for the environment.

I just wish they were less expensive. I suspect BYND and they others figured they could mint money by ripping off the vegans. Well. There's always beef :-)

Last thing: I don't care for "internet health expert" advice. If you can't run a marathon, sit down and shut up. And if you can... Good for you!