smithkl42

That would make sense, except that one of the universal rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when they don't like it.

Perl failed because it's a write-only language. The only time you really understand a Perl program is when you're writing it. Check back in six months and good luck. It's like trying to read someone else's regular expression - and the connection between Perl and Regular Expressions is not accidental.

Plausible article, but it reads like a preschooler frustrated that his new toy is broken. "Fix it! Make it work!" - without ever specifying how.

Granted, this is an exceedingly hard problem, and I suppose there's some value in reminding ourselves of it - but I'd much rather read thoughts on how to do it better, not just complaints that we're doing it poorly.

We've been using Aspose.PDF for the last 10 years or so in our C# platform, and paying for the license. It's expensive and buggy and has shite support, so a year or so back I decided to see if there was some other library or combination of libraries that could meet our needs. Basically, we needed:

* HTML to PDF

* Compress PDF

* Manual PDF generation

* Text extraction

* No browser engine or other weird dependencies

I researched every library I could find, and downloaded, integrated and tested anything that looked remotely promising.

At the end of all that, I reluctantly handed my company credit card back to Aspose. There simply wasn't any open-source or even just cheaper PDF library that I could actually make work, and all the other paid ones that did work were even more expensive.

The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

If your attacker controls the data you're exporting to a CSV file, they can take advantage of a memory safety issue in your CSV exporter to execute arbitrary code on your machine.

https://georgemauer.net/2017/10/07/csv-injection.html

Bear is (or at least can be) delicious. You can get a lot of tasty meals out of a fat berry-fed bear.

I've never had the chance to eat cougar, but I've talked to folks who have, and they say it's their favorite meat - like a light, tender pork.

Insurance companies vote with their feet. The practical reality is that if insurance companies are able to make money in a given state, they'll stay in that state. Insurance companies fleeing states like CA or FL in droves is a really good indication that the actual, hard reality on the ground is that they can't make money when the regulations are stacked against them. That's fine for insurance companies - they'll just go somewhere else - but it's really bad for the people who need insurance.

I think the issue he's pointing at is that LLVM is itself written in C++ - so the entire "trusted" Rust toolchain depends on trusting a huge C++ app.

The iron law of uptime: "The mandatory single point of failure in every possible system is configuration."

I'm not sure we're looking at the same industry. Overall, insurance company profit margins are in the single digits, usually low single digits - and in many segments, they're frequently not profitable at all. To take one example, 2024 was the first profitable year for homeowners insurance companies since 2019, and even then, the segment's entire profit margin was 0.3% (not 3% - 0.3%).

https://riskandinsurance.com/us-pc-insurance-industry-posts-...

Copilot is getting better - I'm getting fewer of those than I used to - but it's still significantly more stupid than other agents, even when in theory it's using the same model.

If you think that insurance companies have "light regulation", I shudder to think of what "heavy regulation" would look like. (Source: I'm the CTO at an insurance company.)

Nah, if I manufactured my own silicon, I'd be infinitely more hackable than I am right now - just like if I wrote my own crypto code. 99.9999% of people are going to be more secure if they just rely on publicly accessible cryptography (and silicon). Otherwise you're just going to be making stupid mistakes that real cryptographers and security folks found and wrote defenses against three decades ago.

It depends mostly on the denomination, sometimes on the individual church. I'm a man, so maybe I wouldn't notice it, but I've never attended a church where I got the impression that women were second-class citizens. Every church I've ever attended has had women in the pulpit, standing on stage, leading worship, running programs, wrangling volunteers, leading Bible studies, teaching kids, discipling teenagers ... and the list goes on. I've never met a church that could have survived without the women in the congregation, and if any man ever tried to treat them like second-class citizens, I think they were likely too busy running things to notice it.

That's not saying there aren't churches like what you're worried about. It's just that I've attended a pretty good mix of conservative and liberal churches over my 50+ years, and I haven't seen one.

Among other things, the attack space for npm is just so much larger. We run a large C# codebase (1M+ LOC) and a somewhat smaller TypeScript codebase (~200K LOC). I did a check the other day, and we have one potentially vulnerable nuget dependency for every 10,000 lines of C# code, but one potentially vulnerable npm dependency for about every 115 lines of TS code.

I agree with Doctorow about the de-humanizing nature of this sort of work - but to your specific point about fact checking, it'd honestly be fastest to outsource that to a different LLM, maybe ChatGPT in "deep research" mode or something like that.

This is a classic example of Poe's Law. If it's satire, it's brilliant. If it's serious, well ...

I'm the CTO at my company, and I had to convince my own IT guys that they needed to remove our firewall's weapons-related filters.

More-or-less agreed about the waterfall model, but you can't blame horrific US government website performance on "corporations" or "corporate management". This is precisely the sort of thing that would get you fired in any real-world corporation that wants to survive, and it's precisely the fact that you can't get fired by the federal government that allows this sort of thing to continue.

The id.me process is absolutely horrific.

This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me when adding a specific feature to our main app. But at roughly 2 million lines of code, and with 10 years of accumulated tribal knowledge, LLMs really seem to struggle with our current codebase.

The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers - just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand.

The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20% or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally: fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.

Undoubtedly that's the reason for the under-representation of women as Fortune 500 CEO's. They're just not applying.

Insurance is a pretty common one. Lots of insurance companies have offices there - and if you're a top-notch dev, you can make a crap-ton of money as well.

What I said about NPR might apply to some of their listeners as well: "What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias."

> Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said.

If that was true, losing the CPB would be a travesty. But as a loyal NPR listener for decades, I've found their stuff lately to be unlistenable. It's Fox, but for the Left, and with a bit more of an intellectual spin. What makes it most annoying is their utter blindness to their own bias. The Fox hosts know that they're taking one side of a story. I've never gotten the impression that any of the NPR hosts are even that self-aware.

Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this sentence?

"You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused."

It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory could you expect otherwise?

That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications. It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be able to measure from a study like this.

My understanding (bowing to ChatGPT) is that you can get 1 pound of iron from <2 pounds of iron ore. But to get 1 pound of lithium, you need around 500 pounds of lithium ore.

So if an electric car requires 2000 pounds of iron and 50 pounds of lithium, that works out to 4000 pounds of iron ore that needs to be mined and refined, vs 25,000 pounds of lithium ore.

This is not military, but it's widely advocated in the concealed carry community that you should carry with one in the chamber. The argument is that with modern pistol designs and the right precautions, it's generally safe; and that many scenarios where you might need to defend yourself need all the possible speed you can get. Having to stroke your firearm to load it can easily add 2 seconds to your draw.

That said, given all the stories I've read, I can't imagine carrying a P320 with one in the chamber.

Where did you get those details? I've read a couple stories on this incident and haven't seen that mentioned.