cgh

> Spanish flu was not created in a lab.

Neither was covid-19: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

Is the fundamental problem with npm still a lack of enforced namespacing?

In the Java world, I know there’s been griping from mostly juniors re “why isn’t Maven easy like npm?” (I work with some of these people). I point them to this article: https://www.sonatype.com/blog/why-namespacing-matters-in-pub...

Maven got a lot of things right back in the day. Yes POM files are in xml and we all know xml sucks etc, but aside from that the stodgy focus on robustness and carefully considered change gets more impressive all the time.

Quite a cynical perspective. The Economist’s writers have been anonymous since the magazine’s founding in 1843. In the 19th century, anonymity was normal in publications like this. Signing one’s name to articles was seen as pretentious.

This is discussed and dismissed in the first paragraph of the article.

To expand on the capabilities thing: https://fil-c.org/invisicaps_by_example

In particular, check out the sections called "Laundering Pointers As Integers" and "Laundering Integers As Pointers".

Various cities in Canada regularly see temperatures way below zero. For example, Edmonton’s mean daily minimum is below zero for seven months a year. It has hit lows of -50°. And let us not speak of Winterpeg, er Winnipeg.

Toronto != Canada

Yeah, have to say I am a little surprised to see a Jordan Lasker article here. It follows his usual race-science pattern: innocuously well-researched article that he takes to a somewhat bonkers conclusion.

Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.

I saw a quote somewhere to the effect of “LLMs are lossy compression of the internet” and it seemed about right.

Should be fine as long as these government workers never have to use it for basic arithmetic. After all, when do governments deal with actual numbers?

What is 10,286x953751?

ChatGPT said: 10,286 × 953,751 = 9,817,342,086

Yes, the point wasn’t “Clojure rules, Haskell drools”, it’s that at a high enough level of abstraction, encoding business rules with static types is brittle. It’s not some huge revelation; enterprises have done this for decades with SQL and gasp stored procedures.

In my experience, online gambling or banking.

This is answered in the article’s second paragraph.

There's another specific class of person that seems helped by them: the paralysis by analysis programmer. I work with someone really smart who simply cannot get started when given ordinary coding tasks. She researches, reads and understands the problem inside and out but cannot start actually writing code. LLMs have pushed her past this paralysis problem and given her the inertia to continue.

On the other end, I know a guy who writes deeply proprietary embedded code that lives in EV battery controllers and he's found LLMs useless.

In Thailand in the ‘90s, there were street vendors selling every dvd and cd you could think of, all bootlegs, complete with copied artwork and packaging. It was completely out in the open.

Re your Gulf Stream comment: Whitehorse, Yukon is roughly at the same latitude as Bergen, Norway. Bergen’s climate is temperate and similar to, say, Vancouver: rainy, a bit of snow in winter, rarely staying below freezing for long. The coldest temperature recorded is -17° back in 1987.

Whitehorse’s average daily low in winter is close to -20°, with common drops to around -40°. When I was a kid up in that area, I remember walking to school at around -30 to -40°. We also played outside in those temps, which seems a bit mad now.

Here’s the fun part: Whitehorse has the warmest climate in the Yukon.

I get that there are other factors, like coastal vs inland environments, but regardless, any disruption to the Gulf Stream is bad news indeed for Europe.

Canada is recruiting US scientists: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/us-scientists-canada-1.750252...

This is a fantastic comment, thank you.

I think the idea is that the cycle is inferred by analyzing purchasing data.

In a previous comment, you remarked you don’t even know Zig.

Yes, NHL blackouts are a great example. You want to watch your home team? Great, you have to subscribe to what they refer to as your “RSN” (regional sports network, usually a regular tv channel).

But the RSN doesn’t show all the games across the league, nor will it show playoff hockey. So you need to also subscribe to a big streaming service like Sportsnet.

It gets worse: your RSN may not offer a streaming service. So you need an old-fashioned cable package to get it. The cost becomes ridiculous, just to watch hockey.

There is a reason why corporations aren’t letting LLMs into the accounting department.

Debugging Java is great, as others have mentioned. This includes probably the best remote debugging capabilities available for any platform.

OpenJDK, the de facto standard version used by everyone, is licensed under the GPL version 2 with the classpath exception.

No offence, but you simply aren’t well informed.

Every large company I’ve ever worked at had a strict “no Microsoft on the server” policy and for better or worse, C# is closely identified with Microsoft.

> Here in Sweden, it is customary to roast and brew coffee the same color as your soul: dark and ragged.

Okay, caffeine pills it is. In fact, I take a half of one now and again to get 100mg of caffeine, especially before hard physical activity. I have never actually had a cup of coffee in my life.

Paperclip (word processor) had an 80 column preview mode, which showed your text in hi-res 80 columns. It seemed like magic at the time and made ten year old me feel like I was performing serious business.

Thank you, this is excellent information. Hopefully it beats the Kate + LSP experience.

Again, this list is from Random House, a major American English-language book publisher.

The Modern Library is a publishing imprint of Random House so it’s pretty much focused on works in English.

Our neighbours have Prime vans as well as unmarked white delivery vans dropping stuff off almost daily, mostly small items. I have sometimes wondered where it all goes, until I see their overflowing garbage and recycling bins.