JulianMorrison

They're using it to replace "search on stack overflow, cut and paste, does it work?"

They're tools for different tasks, consolidating them would make a less helpful mishmash

Anyone with heaps of money

He employs rocket scientists.

And also, I hear, a layer of glad-handing management dedicated to keeping him from putting his thumb in the rocket scientist pie, patting him on the head for his cockamamie ideas, and faking up Potemkin demonstrations to keep him happy.

In my experience, if what you've got is a months-ahead plan where management sets the deadlines AND controls the scope via pressuring the line manager, and delivery relies on crunch time and panicky de-scoping and working to the letter and not the spirit of the contract, then what you have is waterfall in a fedora and a Groucho Marx novelty disguise.

If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead scripts - everything from cuneiform, to gothic black letters, to cursive. If they need it, they can go learn it.

Most won't.

Dry the algae, press it into bricks, put it down a mine.

Charcoal is another option, including putting that into soil as a supplement for agriculture.

Programmers love "one clever trick".

Reality does not, it's irreducibly complex and as a result that trick quickly becomes an annoyingly overstretched metaphor.

Pascal family languages parse quickly because they won't let you use anything before it's defined.

Reporting the images to law enforcement is good. There should be a human in the loop to separate medical images from exploitative ones.

Perma-deleting his account on an automated accusation is bad. That should hinge on, at minimum, law enforcement's decision to charge a crime. [Edit: unless the criminality of the images is obvious - again, a human needs to be in the loop.]

A big part of the problem is things moving so fast that a lot of stuff doesn't have a long run. Covid and its vaccines being an example. In the end the reason to trust them was a mix of "if not this, then what?" and "it doesn't seem to be killing people".

> To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine.

No it does not. An unobserved computer still computes.

Not to mention: huge underground tanks of gasoline are a fire and explosion hazard. They are an environmental hazard if they leak or spill. They require building to safety codes. They require trained and skilled operation. They need to be to insured.

Which is another feedback loop, high cost, shrinking demand, shrinking supply, rising cost.

Also oil has high fixed costs. Stations, tanker trucks, refineries. Fewer customers carrying them means they rise as a percentage of purchase price.

It's the oil infrastructure that will affect them, because it's global. If that goes away...

There may be a faster fall-off than you'd think, because of feedback effects. Same way film cameras stopped being popular and then you couldn't get the films, or get them developed, so they got more unpopular, repeat until extinct. If fuel stations start closing down and you can't get the parts, it won't matter if fuel cars have decades of good service life ahead.

When a measure becomes a target, it cease to be a good measure.

Real name policies have done nothing to make Facebook less toxic, because bigots in general don't mind their real names being out there. This is what happens when you ignore systemic power imbalances. The bigots have that power and as a result they don't fear consequences.

The Republicans announcing public lynching of trans kids are doing it under their real names.

The main use of Twitter, to me, is that it gets news out of places that have poor, slow or no mainstream coverage, and does it fast - seconds after the event, in some cases. That won't be helped at all by unblocking the howling id of the right wing and (barely distinguishable) the paid and volunteer troll farms of every (would-be) dictator with a hate-on for reality. That will just adjust the ratio of piss to pool sharply in the wrong direction. To the point it may lose its utility.

Structured like that, it honestly sounds like the only thing that "went wrong" is that an unplanned third party end ran their "technically this is completely by the book" rug pull.

Re the non-address bits of a pointer: there could be a method `shifted_by_address_width()` that just returns a same-size copy of the data (which remains unmodified) shifted over by the width of an address on the system. That way it's platform agnostic, it's still as wide as the address type, and on systems with no extra bits beyond the address, it's just zero.

That is a chaos magick linking sigil.

It's disingenuous arguing. Free association for me, no cancelling for you, amounts to a plea for a get-out-of-Coventry-free card.

Having them scraped, or auto memorized and dug out of cache with a tricksy autofill form, or peeked out of RAM, or I dunno... in general being treated as something other than the highly sensitive personal information they are. Financial businesses acting according to the rules of PCI DSS are not allowed to store credit card numbers or CVVs in the clear anywhere. But browsers shrug and treat them like any old text.

Graphically I was thinking of the opposite of hiding the number, but rather making it clear to see by automatic digit grouping and stuff.

IMO there ought to be a specific entry field type for credit card numbers. Plus possibly also one for CVV/CVNs. Security implications plus formatting implications make it neither "a number" nor "plain text". In a card number, the 4 digit grouping should be automatic, like it is on some of the fancier custom input fields.

It's honestly really important NOT to treat a credit card "number" as a number. It is an essentially text string made out of digits. It doesn't have any of the equalities or operations a number has. 01234 != 1234 and so forth.

If I had a do-over on Java, I'd get them to make separate interface toolkits for each major platform. Ones that use the native widgets and follow the native conventions. Design them to feel as similar to program as possible, within that limitation. Share stuff that can be shared, but don't force it if it's not as similar as it looks.

Then after that maybe add a cross-platform toolkit that doesn't try to look or feel local, but treat that as a peer with the other UI kits, not a replacement.

Detect it: poke a stick. It stops, at a pretty consistent depth, and not because of rock.

Remove it: overheat the planet. It will turn to mud. Anything built on it will subside or sink. Massive amounts of trapped organic matter will turn to methane.

Eventually, I presume the area would settle into a new climatic zone, with neither permafrost nor mud. Emphasis on "eventually".

Hiding the server IP is probably quite important when you want to get around nation states trying to blockade factual information.