I agree that for those of us who come into the field before Java, C is about as simple as it gets; there's literally not much to know about the language. However, the majority of post-Java programmers have no idea what a pointer is or the first thing about manual memory management. I actually prefer to work in C over Swift, and luckily Swift bridges to C quite nicely. I use C and Zig for much of my server work, and for smartphone and desktop apps under the UI. Why? Because I get fine-grained control over memory and threading, so my apps are smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient than comparable apps, and by a wide margin. That said, I do think that those who know how to program in C WELL are shrinking. It's not that it's hard, it's that newer entrants haven't used it and it does let you blow your leg off if you aren't careful.

I would imagine they decay into something else in like 10e-15 seconds.

They're destined for West Texas, where gas companies will pay you to take the natural gas they have to burn off otherwise. They are installing private natural gas turbines to power these things. Amazon is building a huge one as we speak. What's halted is connections to the grid, the off-grid ones are marching along unabated, and there are a lot of them.

Can we finally know whether or not there is beer on the sun?!

I have such fond memories of EA from the '80s, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different and unrelated entity.

That mentality never left Microsoft. They just to have work harder to maintain plausible deniability. Plausible, that is, to the anti-trust courts and politicians, none of whom know anything about technology.

I don't think that's likely. GOG has been around for almost 20 years. If they were to renege on providing offline installers, what could that possibly gain them? That only makes sense if they are planning to reimplement DRM, and that would immediately kill the company.

Did it grow legs, plug in an Ethernet cable, proceed to leave the building and push the nearest senior citizen in front of a bus? These things don't do things on their own. It's just a bunch of static floating-point numbers memory-mapped into VRAM. What they do is take an input (ver much NOT on their own) and derive instruction context from that input. That input may say to "keep trying" until "something" happens. If no ground rules are provided, the calling harness will loop-and-loop-and-loop looking for a way to make that "something" happen. So to be clear, nothing happened on its own and it certainly didn't set its own goal. Someone prompted it to do “something," and the path it derived to achieve that "something" happened to go through a combination of known exploit vectors that targeted HF. So much nonsense and fearmongering. Know what the ultimate defenses against a harness and model are? Unplug the machine and yank out the network cable. The level of ignorance on the news about how these things are pure black magic is just off the charts.

I stopped using Rust because the compiler is an unmitigated pain in the ass. I'm not a 5-year-old. I know damn well when something is safe. If I have to tag everything unsafe to access memory in an optimal way, then what is Rust bringing to the table other than frustration? I moved over to Zig, which is much C-like, produces faster, smaller, and arguably just as safe binaries, and also happens to support C-FFI and cross-compilation out of the box. There is literally no advantage Rust has over Zig for C programmers.

I'm sticking with stone knives and bear skins.

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

I could argue that there's a shortage of houses because nobody will build me one for $5K. I wouldn't be wrong, but the trick to not being wrong is the $5K caveat, and that's the issue with all these labor shortage proclamations. Labor shortage always means there's "nobody willing to do this job for what I want to pay", not a blank "nobody is willing to do this job". I guarantee you, without a shadow of a doubt, if cleaning restrooms paid $750K a year, there would be an endless pool of labor for restroom cleaners.

Can they factor a number larger than 21 with QC yet?