Posts by Arthur the cat 3378 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
As they have the script, then somebody with even mediocre tech skills *could* reverse engineer that script to figure out what needs to be done.
Unless some stressed(*) engineer reused the single "has_blue_tick" flag for both legacy and paid ticks.
(*) Not that I can think of any reason for one of Musk's engineers to be stressed.
I've always wondered why the truly excellent design of the Motorola 68000 chip never went any further...
.....while the appalling x86 architectural mess turned out to rule the world.
I'd argue that the NatSemi 32k architecture was even more elegant than the M68k one, but the chips arrived very late to the party and never got the traction.
well, they were developing a machine called Rekursiv.
To be programmed in a language called Lingo(*), IIRC. I may even still have a book on it stashed away somewhere. It's not obvious on my office shelves though.
(*) Not the John H Thompson one, but if you look at the Wikipedia article on that you'll find it mentioned as the second entry in the "Other Languages" section.
There's also a Wikipedia entry for Rekursiv.
And a Hacker News thread about it from 2019.
Prolog has faded back into its niche, despite its moment of public glory
Prolog has faded, but Erlang, which was based on the same principles as Prolog, has ticked over for years, and Elixir, which is (sort of) Ruby re-engineered for the BEAM machine that runs Erlang and (sort of) Erlang under the coat of paintsyntax, is growing popular and is probably the best way of handling massive parallelism available today.
I thought you meant Zeerust, the place
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd repurposed place names in The Meaning of Liff.
buy it cheap, sell it high
That's basic arbitrage, anybody can do it(*). Where Goldman Sachs (aka the Vampire Squid) and their ilk make money is by holding the hands of management when they are trying to make hard/expensive decisions so that if it all fucks up the CEOs have someone else to blame. For this they get paid stupid amounts.
(*) Like many things, anybody can do it, few can do it well.
any vegetarian/vegan ones who might try to impose the same diet on their pet.
I knew a vegan who did that to their cat. I thought it would run away, but no, it didn't. The owner even claimed it had put on weight on the vegan diet. A little discreet conversation with the neighbours discovered that it was eating in at least four houses that weren't its own.
You're missing the one major difference between us and GPT-alikes – we would rapidly get fed up with people asking stupid questions and ordering us to write essays or limericks or fake research papers, and we'd bugger off and do something that we wanted to do.
Originally they were proposing using astronauts' blood for the concrete. This led to the boggleworthy quote in TechXplore
While the resulting material had a compressive strength of around 40 MPa, which is better than normal concrete, the process had the drawback of requiring blood on a regular basis. When operating in an environment as hostile as space, this option was seen as less feasible than using potato starch.
It blows my mind that when the BBC designers wanted to show a computer, they built the prop out of... a computer.
There's a James Blish line that's stuck in my head for decades: Sometimes the best thing to act as a symbolic sharp knife is a sharp knife
. From Black Easter, in the context of summoning demons.
The stylus that you pay extra for is a piece of crap. It is extremely fragile, mine broke after a couple of weeks.
What on earth were you doing with it, trying to use it as a chisel or a pry bar? Mine's just over two years old, has had the run of the mill abuse that pens/pencils normally get and is doing fine.
I got mine in December 2020 and would agree with all of the above, especially the problem of expensive accessories. I got the stylus with eraser which is like a pencil with a rubber attached and works very well, but it was a wince making price. I use mine mainly for marking up existing documents and for reading PDFs on. Resizing and moving the viewport on enlarged documents have been a bit ropey in the past but the latest revision seems to have sorted out most of the problems. Like TonyJ I probably won't get a keyboard for it, I'd use my desktop or Chromebook for that sort of work because when doing anything that requires typing I usually need a browser open as well.
BCPL's downfall came because it worked best on a word-oriented machine
There was a derivative of BCPL (whose name escapes me right now) that was targeted at (and could run on) 8/16 bit micros. The syntax was even more minimal than BCPL, addresses were byte addresses rather than words, and it had byte and word load/store operators. Our 2nd years used to use it when learning about micros. This is ~1980.
Having had a Symbolics machine on/under my desk(*) and worked in Smalltalk as well, the Symbolics interface was more text based than ST-80. Genera (the Symbolics OS) looked a bit like emacs on steroids.
(*) Bloody noisy, like having a fan jet nearby.
you market a product, then you will provide support for the people that buy it for its lifetime (defined in law, not by the company)
I once asked a kitchen product company about its "lifetime guarantee" for pans – specifically how did they define a pan's lifetime. The answer was "until it wears out", i.e. if the pan wears out in 3 months the lifetime guarantee has expired because the pan has worn out.
My first reaction was "what has a Rust library got to do with it?" Now I know what libgen.rs is, yes you can find copies there. Definitely worth getting hold of to see just how much of modern computer technology Lem predicted in the 60s.
Mr Lem was scarily prescient about problems with AI: a highly recommended read.
If you can get hold of a copy of his non-fictional Summa Technologiae you'll find he was even more prescient than his fiction would suggest. A quote from Amazon (which hasn't got it any more)
After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity.
Not loving that anyone who thinks that a trillion dollar industry that is growing every year with thousands of the worlds top devs and hundreds if not thousands of scientific research papers demonstrating how it can (and is already) solving real world problems (e.g self-sovereign digital identity/privacy, supply chain logistics, decentralized finance/storage/computing, tokenisation of physical assets etc.) can be written of as just "magic beans", and that anyone who disagrees should be insulted by reducing them to a "cryptobro".
Looks like GPT-4 is still capable of hallucinating.
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