pogopop77

Well now we know Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meta, apparently.

A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.

Information was so much more scarce back then. Made programming feel like a black art. I remember when I learned about overlays in Turbo Pascal, it felt like I learned a new spell :)

In a small town of 900 people, it seems odd a council member would be THAT upset about removing license plate reading camera systems, when it's clear the town doesn't want it. To get flustered enough to start proposing sarcastic bills, it's not a stretch to immediately think that there's at least some political maneuvering behind it, if not blatant kickbacks.

The irony is that on-shoring high-end manufacturing would be a good thing. But the approach of "do it right now, or I'll put tariffs on your product(s)" is not the way to get any lasting change. It's a way to get the performative changes we're seeing, that will drift right back offshore when this administration mercifully ends.

Given this was backdoor was likely funded by a nation-state actor and very carefully obfuscated, the fact that it was discovered within a month and never rolled out to production releases, shows that the open source process mostly worked. Not saying it couldn't be better.

Interesting investigation, good read. Definitely illustrates how new paradigms (i.e. overlay filesystems) can subtly affect behaviors in ways that are complex to track down.

"Be curious, not judgemental" -- Ted Lasso (via Walt Whitman?)

If the software development is mostly stock and standard, I would agree, it doesn't matter if staff have advanced degrees or not. But developers with advanced degrees tend to have a better understanding of what is actually going on "under the hood". When tackling unorthodox, challenging problems, they use that knowledge to make better design decisions, resulting in better quality software. For those types of cutting-edge projects, I think there is value to having staff with advanced degrees.

I hope Boom can make supersonic travel commercially viable. Would be nice to have a faster option for long-distance travel, even though the cost will probably be too high for most. I'd sooner spend money on that vs. edge-of-space tourism (a la Virgin Galactic/SpaceX).

As advertising is a huge part of Google's revenue, I'm surprised they've let an extension like uBlock Origin work on Chrome as long as they have. If you haven't tried Firefox in a while, it's time to give it another shot. If I could get Firefox to handle Microsoft Teams meetings, I wouldn't even have Chrome installed.

Mozilla is a non-profit that made a couple of poor decisions. Meanwhile Google's whole business model is based around it. It is not the same thing at all.

I understand where you are coming from. I've done that with a few selected items, but in general I have chosen the newer options. There always seems to be a feature or two I find worth the hassle.

Newer tech has added vast amounts of new functionality at the expense of making the older, simpler functions a bit more cumbersome and less reliable. Not everyone likes that trade off. For example, in the early 1980s, landline phones were indestructible, never dropped calls, and had 99.99999% uptime. VOIP phones are nowhere near that reliable, by any metric, but that's the price for fully redirect-able calls/messages among dozens of other useful features.

C and C++ are most often used when performance is the highest priority. Undefined behavior is basically the standards committee allowing the compiler developers maximum flexibility to optimize for performance over error checking/handling/reporting. The penalty is that errors can become harder to detect.

It appears the author is a Go advocate. I assume they are valuing clearly defined error checking/handling/reporting (the authors definition of correctness) over performance. If that's what you are looking for, consider Go.

Very impressive. If my understanding of how the AI works is correct, it is using a pre-computed strategy developed by playing trillions of hands, but it is not dynamically updating that during game play, nor building any kind of profiles of opponents. I wonder if by playing against it many times, human opponents could discern any tendencies they could exploit. Especially if the pre-computed strategy remains static.