astrobe_

If you're going for ad hoc solution to that specific problem, just charge $99/year or $102/year instead, depending on how you feel like about profit margins.

Is that really that much of a big deal, though? Before stdint, if one needed that level of accuracy, one would do your own equivalent of stdinit by hand, and adjust those definitions when porting to another compiler/platform. The same goes for your local boolean type.

I think the only real annoyance is that each programmer/team did it with their own convention (I32, INT32, i32, int32, WORD, Word bool, BOOL, Bool, etc., etc.); standardizing helps with putting everyone on the same page more than it helps porting. It doesn't prevent people from reverse-typedef-ing standard names to local "dialectal" names, though.

But I also think that one should only rarely use raw integer types, in an ideal world; the elephant in the room is that typedef is kind of the second "billion dollars mistake" [1]. C is a weakly typed language and there's no practical way to undo it (besides transpilation), so there's double no point to leave behind raw types.

[1] For those not too familiar with C, typedef defines a "type alias", not a type: https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/typedef

I've always believed that they kept 32 bits ints on 64 bits CPU as a default because going full 64 bits would make the code and data structures bigger for "no reason" (it's not often that one hits the 4.10^9 limit in system code (if you don't count timestamps, that is)). For instance, a load-register-with-immediate instruction would normally take 5 bytes (opcode+value) on 32 bits, but 9 bytes on 64.

> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users

And it always will be, because "users" is plural. It is not a defect in the design of the desktop or whatever has "too many" alternatives. The mistake would be to think that "one-desktop-fits-all".

Also, the only good reason to change things is to fix problems. Nobody's really asking for "moar modernity". Starting from design theories is plain wrong. Ask users about their problems first, and the use your design knowledge to analyse and fix them.

> Strategy is another part of UX; understanding who the target user is, and determining what they want. Deciding what is important, and what is not; what will the development team prioritize and what will it ignore? "The fastest way a UX designer can save your team time is to help you say no."

He is not talking about users but customers.

That's how FOSS works: some users find it annoying to have to place and resize their windows manually, so some of them made "tiling window managers". Many Linux DEs also had virtual desktops a million years before Windows because FOSS is made by users, for users.

Since political threads don't last long on HN, I'll add for the anecdote that I was first puzzled the difference in meaning by the lyrics of a Slayer song, "Consumed democracy returns to socialist regime" [1], certainly because at that time the government in my country was "socialist".

[1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/slayer/fictionalreality.html

Socialism means different things depending on where you are, even within Europe. For some socialism is the same as communism, for others socialism simply means social-democracy.

Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.

Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

It did. While you're busy recording an "instagramable" moment, you are not entirely enjoying that moment. Your eyes are on the screen, not on the subject.

In a way, if photography is an ersatz for painting that eventually made imaging available for the masses, then AI could become an ersatz for thinking. But it feels like I'm paraphrasing TFA.

What will happen when AI companies have spent their advertising budget on math problems and whatever else gives the maximum wow effect for the bucks? Probably customers hooked on the vain satisfaction of spending token$ to impress friends.

Also as a child, I was amazed by the associative tables it offered; I thought "I can make intelligent programs". I think I was thinking AI but I won't trust my memory on this. But I played a lot more with the turtle.

I am not, indeed. However as programmer I was sometimes told to do what the customer wants, even though it is complex or inapt. If this DNS blocking is inapt or misused, it's a political problem so let the citizens deal with it (I know this seems like wishful thinking given the current poor state of politics at least in the EU, but hopefully we will fix that while it's still in our hands).

Besides, I read about what happened with Spain and football, and from my understanding the issue was that they blocked not DNS but IP addresses. And problem domain is also vastly different, a priori: in that case, they faced sites that were actively trying to avoid blocking, while in our case, I doubt pron sites and such will try to do the same, because children are not their target audience.

An alternative could be to create a top level domain (TLD) "for kids" and restrict kid phones to it. Then in your TLD you can admit sites that meet minimum criteria (no pron, no terrorism, content and chat moderation for SNS).

An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.

For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.

Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.

Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.

But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).

Maybe we were led into a false dichotomy by the title. If someone wants to learn programming for other reasons than as a mean to a goal - which will become more and more rare because LLMs do that already - this person must not learn just one language but one per major paradigm : C (imperative/procedural), Smalltalk (OOP), Prolog (logic), SQL (declarative, although maybe there are better representatives), OCaml (functional, although one can go for Haskell or Lisp/Scheme), and Forth (concatenative, but also to take a look under the hood of interpreters/compilers/VMs).

HNDL can be worth it without the "threat" of quantum computing; for instance we see currently a lot of interest in AI-assisted math, and maybe it could lead to a breakthrough that affect crypto algorithms that are currently considered safe.

Therefore it seems weird to use QC as a benchmark. Rather, if your communications being decrypted in the future is unacceptable, then the logical conclusion is that you must not transmit it in such a way that a third party can intercept it.

Admittedly, it is inconvenient or even impractical, so people do accept the risk anyway without admitting it. They are sweeping the issue under the carpet of supposedly QC-proof crypto - because new quantum algorithms can be discovered too.

The reward function seems indeed to be the protagonist there, still it stays in the shadows. One can only imagine that it is some kind of evaluator that scores the sequence based on grammar correctness, semantic consistency, etc.? To use the proposed chess analogy, maybe it could be a Stockfish engine that evaluates the submitted position that results from the move submitted by the LLM?

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but we might find ourselves in such a situation that the only practical solution would be to use agents to counter rogue agents. This won't be without collateral damage, though.

Guess what people talk (and write) about after meetings.

They would tell us we are contradicting ourselves because none of them are straight lines in the traditional sense, if we really believe the Earth is a sphere. Don't underestimate trolls ;-)

I think you are hallucinating that quote.

Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.

And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.

One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].

Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.

[1] https://content.luanti.org/copyright_dmca/

It's very unlikely. The DMCA notification is from Microsoft, who owns Minecraft.

The sequence of events is:

1) US votes a law that is hilariously favourable to copyright holders

2) Copyright holders abuse it for a while with non-AI bots

3) Copyright holders abuse it with AI-bots

4) Copyright holders will continue to abuse it until the law is amended.

Fair enough. It's fine as long as people don't forget that fixing individual problems won't fix systematic problems; it would be like curing the symptoms, not the root cause.

Yes. People here imagining workarounds based on automatic wipe, encryption, etc. should rather acknowledge that their country is slowly drifting to a fascist state.

Your tech tricks are childish. Act like adults. Take responsibility, make decisions, take action, gather support.

It is. When you read "6. A Tale Of Two Stacks" you can be pretty sure that Forth is involved.

Sorry but, ain't we tired of beating that dead horse again and again? We got it, C is a portable assembler and as such, is barely more "secure" than assembler. And yes, 50 years after C you finally have something as fast as it and more secure, congratulations.

No exactly. "Lambdas" are usually function closures [1]. Which do not exist in C and were quite "late" in C++, because decent support of closures require automatic memory management (GC).

C++ lambda/closures are a bit clunky because you have to specify if the captures are by reference or by value, and you're better of having a good idea of what you're doing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)

I've always wondered if the melting of glaciers would move masses from one place to another and induce some tectonic moves. But the mass is most likely not significant enough; water/ice has a relatively low density after all.

No source but a possible counter-example: SIM card carries the date-of-birth of the user (because, really, part of the problem is that you cannot supervise what a kid does with their phone 24/7), age-restricted websites have a flag in their HTTP headers, browser get age from SIM card through the OS. Same goes with app stores etc.

Like copy-protection there's always a way to circumvent it, the name of the game is to make it difficult enough. And for parents, to make it very easy to set-up.

Possible false positive because of the text was translated from Japanese to English with AI?

I don't see the point of starting a newsletter written by AI.. But I don't understand the point of cheating with a computer on lichess.org either.

And because of that we are a few steps away from WarGames [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames