codebolt

Wrong. The rates are higher and the main reason is obvious.

Fewer families being formed => more lonely adults => more people depressed.

> Thank you! It means a lot to me that so many people were able to use VB both to get their start in programming, and to develop applications that businesses relied on.

Oh, then you should know that there are still VB6 apps in heavy use being actively maintained out in the world. I'm working on a treasury management system that is in use by 90+ banks in my country, where the bulk of the app is still VB-based (we're moving to C# but it will be many years still before we can say a complete goodbye to VB).

This is the reason. Too often I will go to a site and find that it's unusable with Firefox.

My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentless hatred for all things MS.

I don't see how this adds anything meaningful to the Bing Chat Enterprise offering that Microsoft has made available for a while now.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/07/18/furthering-our-a...

At my work we've been using Bing Enterprise for a brief while now, which it states is based on ChatGPT4 and has the same promise of keeping data private. From what I've seen, Bing Chat is superior to ChatGPT4 in many respects.

25 is around the age when you start seeing the consequences of the bad choices you've made during adolescence.

This guy captured the excitement pretty well:

https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1685811395273830401?t=z...

I relate so much to this. The only time I could see myself watching something like this is if the wife falls asleep a bit early on the couch one evening. Or as someone else suggested, if I could get the kids interested.

I do listen to a bunch of podcasts and audio books while I'm doing chores or driving, but that's about it these days. I have a faint hope that I will get more time for personal hobby projects (like learning more physics) as the kids get a bit older (currently 4, 7 & 13).

Would you agree that an alien civilization completely separate from humans but equally intelligent would also be likely to discover Pythagoras theorem (with a different name and different symbolics)? To me that would imply that its truth is independent of human perception.

One thing this hypothesis has going for it, from a purely armchair metaphysics perspective, is that it gives some kind of answer to the question 'why does anything exist'. If mathematics (or the underlying 'thing' that math describes) is objectively true or real, then it could have a platonic existence by power of its own self reference.

It also explains why all physical laws are mathematical and all physical properties are quantifiable ('mathematics is the language of the universe' as Galileo said).

I still don't believe in it for several reasons. But I believe that it is the only logical conclusion of a purely materialist worldview.

The main utility of Monero is being able to make anonymous transactions. The downside of the crime that this enables far outweighs whatever libertarian ideals I may be sympathetic to. It's just a bad idea for society.

What I do know is that Nigeria was recently forced to cut their fuel subsidy, and I highly suspect that was done under indirect pressure from western environmentalists. Which would be a very concrete example of making a couple hundred million very poor people even worse off.

"A few percentage points of economic growth" makes it sound so trivial. When what you're really saying is you want to keep billions of poor people around the world away from the chance at a better life.

This is giving me flashbacks to when Digg.com committed a similar suicide, which was a major part of Reddit's growth back in the day.

Couldn't you train the model to keep score (develop a heuristic) for it's own level of certainty for a given answer?

Indeed. As an example, modern era devs don't realize how much of the global financial system is underpinned by decades old Cobol code. Personally I'd rather be working on a system that's massively important with less flashy tech, than building more inconsequential apps with the latest frameworks.

Yes, this is Microsoft (or its employees) siphoning public funds from corrupt governments that those societies sorely need.

My youngest son loves the story about the Three Goats Gruff and also the show Blaze And The Monster Machines on Nickelodeon. One of the first things I thought to do with ChatGPT was ask it to write the story of the Three Goats Gruff as an episode of Blaze. The result was pretty impressive, with Blaze and his friends matching off against a troll to race over a bridge to save three goats. Totally plausible plotline for an episode, and most importantly, my son was thoroughly entertained when I read it.

Maybe I was just too young to know better, but I seem to remember AltaVista being pretty decent. My internet was super slow back then anyway, so the search latency probably didn't make a huge difference.

Somewhat ironic that an article about high-performance networking is down.

I still remember how dumbfounded I was as a physics undergrad the first time I worked through the derivation of the wave equation of light from Maxwell's Laws. There are so many beautiful, awe-inspiring and existentially important ideas in physics that I wish more people could appreciate. Happy to see someone (especially someone so accomplished as prof t'Hooft) attempting to make them accessible for anyone with sufficient motivation and an internet connection.

For Russia and Venezuela you may have a point. But the others in that list still have much better (in terms of risk/reward) options for protecting their wealth than stablecoins.

> In my eyes, it's all about caring about software development: either you do, or you don't.

Yes, that's the difference. I'm lucky enough to work mostly with colleagues that share a certain level of craftsmanship about the software we ship. We all care about the quality of the product, although we may not always agree on what an ideal solution should look like.

The science based counter-argument to all this is the understanding that time is eternalistic, so even though we die our lives never disappear out of existence. I choose to go the complete opposite route of the author here, and try to live each day as if it matters gravely.

> the proportion of people who use psychedelics and end up on good tracks is way higher than that of those who use psychedelics and end up on bad tracks

I'll agree with that, but the real question is whether people who use psychedelics more frequently end up on bad tracks than those who don't, which in my experience is definitely true.

> homeless people are homeless for reasons stemming from their own decisions

No, my bias is that many homeless are homeless because they live in a place that enables and even encourages actions that lead people to become homeless (psychedelics use being one example).

I don't find that surprising, but I'd still be interested to see a survey of what proportion of California's homeless population have used psychedelics extensively _in their past_. Because my experience leads me to believe that someone who does a lot of psychedelics in their younger years is more likely to wind up on a bad track later in life (even if they don't continue with those drugs later on).

> it's basically indisputable that they are socially harmless

Considering that the place with the highest psychedelic drug use is also the place with the highest number of mentally ill and homeless, that seems a rather preposterous assertion.

Yes, they will run, as will most VB6 apps from 1998.

But if you have developed a .NET Framework app that you want to see living into the future a decade or more from today, you need to know that maintaining it is going to be increasingly painful as time goes on. You are locked to an old version of the C# language, and you absolutely can't count on third-party dependencies to stay supported. At some point MS might well decide to drop tooling for .NET Framework development in new releases of Visual Studio.

Since MS decided to deprecate .NET Framework, making .NET 5+ the recommended basis for C# desktop development going forward. Yes you will still be able to run your old apps for many decades still, but you can never move to a newer version of the C# language and maintaining them is going to be an increasing pain as the years go by. I've already been down this road with VB6.