I hope nobody's complaining that it got publicly disclosed because "they only had two and a half years to fix it but hadn't gotten around to it yet"

IMO, "responsible disclosure" taps out after six months. Anything that happens after that is entirely on the devs for not bothering to plug holes that they were privately notified about.

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

does anyone (govt etc) have back-door access to it?

It seems that lately governments are "insisting" on back-doors into user-encryption, going so far as to bar sales of products to their citizens that they can't just look at anytime they feel like it.

We need to read your texts to stop Terrorism! and Think of the Children!

Those guys can't even vet their own social media posts, and those are ~100 characters of ASCII text. The chances of them being able to meaningfully review a multi-gigabyte binary file are exactly zero.

... other, more obscure platforms are also supported, but if you want to run NetHack on them, you'll have to compile it yourself from source. Kind of a baller move if you ask me :)

Trump's actions are 100% Trump's responsibility ("the buck stops here" is still part of the Presidential employment contract, even if Trump doesn't think so).

OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Netanyahu played hardball to "encourage" Trump to help. It's one of the downsides of having a "colorful" sex life in your youth and then gaining political power later on -- too many people have solid evidence of your transgressions, and now motivation to use them to influence your decision-making.

So when Netanyahu phones Trump up and says "join my war, or else I'll release these Epstein videos of you having group sex with underage girls", does Trump do the principled thing and refuse? Or does he take the coward's way out, and allow Israel to dictate US policy in exchange for temporarily saving his own political skin? I think we know the answer to that.

Is every country rational enough to never actually use them, and also technically and organizationally competent to keep them out of the hands of private groups (e.g. Al-Qaeda) who would steal them and use them for them own purposes?

If not, then the MAD doctrine won't work there. It's either principled leadership by the major powers, or nothing.

Well, now we need to have a 50-post discussion on whether "goblins" and "gremlins" are really the same thing, or if they are in fact two distinct species. All the D&D training I received in my youth can finally be brought to bear on a real-world problem!

Yes a bit OT but I remember the one-liner contests the magazines would have. You had to not use any unnecessary spaces, single-letter variables, use any command shortening method (like "?" instead of "print") and other tricks to get as much function as possible out of the ~253 bytes of line space available. Amazing what some people could squeeze onto one line of BASIC! (games were the most popular, though graphics displays were frequently featured)

It was pretty normal for those "one-liners" to take up a third of the screen or more when LIST'ed

Back in the day most of the computer magazines had one of those. I think it was Nibble magazine that published several programs for the Apple ][.

IIRC you'd start the program in the background and it would watch what line your cursor was on and display a two digit checksum in the upper right corner of the screen that would update as you typed. Just make sure that number matched the check on the end of the line in the magazine and you were clear to hit Return to save the line.

A different magazine had a similar method, but I believe it provided line-by-line checksums after you were done entering the program, and would also generate a "program checksum" at the end that would match if all lines were correct.

I also remember several occasions where there was a printing problem in the magazine and everyone's checksum was wrong, they'd publish a correction in next month's edition and everyone would cry "THAT'S why I couldn't get it right!" (probably after receiving hundreds of letters in the mail complaining about hours of frustration trying to key it in!) This was frequently due to the magazine omitting a line of code. (all the line checksums matched, but not the total at the bottom)

ahh the good ol days of Human OCR....

modern OCR software struggled with the quality of the decades-old printout.

I'm amazed we can OCR in Egyptian scrolls on papyrus, but struggle with 30 year old green-bar printouts?

Perhaps, but one of the nice properties of a command-line app is that the addition of features needn't slow down people who don't need those features.

E.g. git could add 300 more keywords, and as long as the basic "git clone", "git update", "git commit", and "git push" keep working, I won't be effected by that at all.

A GUI-based tool, OTOH, will find its user interface getting increasingly cluttered (and/or cryptic) proportional to the number of features that get shoehorned into it.