And that is a good phone.

Microsoft has done a pretty thorough job of locking companies in like this, particularly through authentication and authorization systems (Active Directory) and the locked-down IT management infrastructure around them.

Add to this that all of the applications I use on macOS or Windows are either open source or at least cross-platform anyway. As long as the apps don't change, neither does the way I work; not really.

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?

And here I thought the First Impact was billions of years ago, when the Black Moon carrying Lilith crashed into the Earth.

That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.

I assume there was some form of contract. Generally speaking, any time you send somebody unsolicited copyrighted material, you can expect it to get summarily thrown in the trash, so whomever you sent it to can't fall for the old "you stole my idea" bugaboo.

VFX studios are already doing this for their production pipelines. The processing happens in a data center; all the artists see is essentially a terminal window. Nobody can "walk off" with anything.

Hahaha, "The API is indescribable." (Followed by an index of 14 Markdown documents.)

I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

Right. Which makes Kisai's dismissal of the problem a waste of breath.

Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

I've had no success getting Agents to help write code for SQLite. All the code I've asked Claude to write for me is slop that didn't work or worked poorly and never got committed. On the flip side, I do ask Claude to review the code that I write prior to committing, and it is good at that, often finding serious oversights that I had missed.

This observation, that agents are good at code review but bad at writing original code, seems to carry through into AI-generated bug reports coming into SQLite from third parties. The bug reports are generally good, but the suggested fixes not so much.

One report from about a month ago illustrates this. The median() aggregate function in SQLite is implemented by collecting the input values into an array of doubles, using quicksort to put them in order, and return the one in the middle. The bug report showed a carefully devised sequence of 1 million inputs that caused pathological O(N*N) behavior in the quicksort algorithm, which caused recursion to go too deep and blow out the CPU stack. The AI's suggested fix: Add a depth parameter to the quicksort algorithm and fail over to a slower sorting algorithm if the recursion goes too deep. The correct solution (originally recognized in the 1975 by Robert Sedgewick, but unknown to me before this issue arose) was to only call quicksort recursively on the smaller of the two partitions, and sort the larger partition using a loop (tail recursion). If recursion only occurs on a partition that is half the size of the original or smaller, recursion depth is limited to LogN. That turned out to be trivial to implement, and is faster and uses less code than the AI-suggested approach. Furthermore, after seeing Sedgewick's tail recursion idea, Dan Kennedy recognized that we don't actually need to sort both partitions at each step of the algorithm, but only the partition that contains the median. Dan's observation more than doubled performance. Hence by ignoring the AI's suggested fix, we more than doubled the performance of the median() function in SQLite.

Before you ask: The median() function did originally use the standard library qsort(), but I changed that into a hand-coded quicksort some time ago because the hand-written variant did not require a callback for each comparison, and was thus way faster.