usefulcat

What specific apps are showing ads?

Do you have any idea just how much code is in Windows?

I did a quick search and estimates are in the 50-60 million lines range.

No way in hell are they going to rewrite all that in a few years. Even if they actually wanted to, which they don't because it would be a truly enormous expense (even for Microsoft).

Not to even mention that huge software projects have a well deserved reputation for failing, and the scope of such a rewrite would probably dwarf any previous rewrite of anything, ever, and by a very large margin.

"Rewrite all of Windows in Rust" simply does not even begin to pass the sniff test.

> it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.

In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.

LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.

Probably also doesn't hurt that theater audio levels are usually far higher than what most people would use at home.

Is compressed debug info a thing? It seems likely to compress well, and if it's rarely used then it might be a worthwhile thing to do?

They could and they did. That meant that Spain ended up importing more and exporting less, which would have been bad for Spanish businesses.

There’s a lot more to “wealth” than just having a bunch of stuff. Especially in the long term, since most “stuff” will wear out or otherwise decay over time.

Ideally a logging library should at least not make it easy to make that kind of mistake.

Regarding the failure of internal components--there are some 'failure' modes which I had not even contemplated previously.

I have a TV that's only about 5-6 years old and has a built in Roku. It mostly works fine, but the built in hardware is simply not fast enough to play some streaming services, specifically some stuff on F1TV. And before anyone asks, it's not a bandwidth problem--I have gigabit fiber and the TV is using ethernet.

Anyway, between that, general UI sluggishness and the proliferation of ads in the Roku interface, I switched to an Apple TV and haven't looked back.

Best example I've yet seen of Betteridge's law.

> it’s worth calling out just how hard this problem is for retailers and issuers.

I'm having a hard time finding much sympathy. They could always, oh I don't know.. maybe just not sell gift cards? Or have a much lower maximum amount?

I mean yeah, you could take the view that technically the blame really lies with the people trying to use gift cards for theft, but that's not going to be productive.

You could make much the same observation about online search results.

Talk is cheap; actions are what matters. Based on their actions (or lack thereof), the group you're describing must be a very small minority indeed.

Entirely true, and also quite underwhelming compared to an engine failure.

Personally I'd be a lot more interested in the cause(s) of the failure and how it was handled.

How would an exchange enforce the trade through rule without any outside market data?

> the range of blue jays, a temperate bird living all across the Eastern U.S., only extended about as far west as Houston. They

I get why the green jay’s habitat would have expanded northward (from more tropical areas) in a warming climate, but I don’t get why the blue jay’s habitat would have expanded west of Houston.

Like many places, central Texas is warmer than it used to be, and maybe drier, but I wouldn’t think you could call it more “temperate” now.

Touché

Perl stands for “practical extraction and report language”

Reminds me of IBM => HAL, just the other direction

I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.

Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.

Venting may feel good but it does more harm than good to your ostensible cause because it makes it trivially easy for those who disagree with you to dismiss you out of hand (which they're probably already very inclined to do to start with). Assuming you're sincere, of course.

I've heard that MSVC does (did?) that, but if so that's an MSVC problem. gcc and clang don't do that.

https://godbolt.org/z/nasoWeq5M

I get a 401 unauthorized for that link

Your second link shows a slight reduction from '21 to '22, but even then it's still significantly higher than during '18 - '20. And it doesn't show anything prior to '18.

Probably at least in part for the same reason they used NextStep, because it wasn't prone to taking down the entire OS due to stray pointer dereferences during development, as was possible with Win95.

> I wonder how we can make automakers make more repairable cars

Mandate longer warranty durations?

I mean, may not help with damage due to collisions, but there are plenty of other reasons why a car may need reparing..

The best argument I've yet heard against the effectiveness of AI tools for SW dev is the absence of an explosion of shovelware over the past 1-2 years.

https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.

It’s definitely more than just private ownership. In fact I’d say that’s the least part of it.

Look at all the horror stories about businesses that were bought by PE firms; those are all privately held too.

> They're removing features like this because simplifying configurations translates to reduced support costs, and reducing their costs and padding their margin is the name of the game for a monopolist, they believe there's nowhere else for you to go, so they can and will hose you over and over again.

There may be some truth to that, but I really don't think it's the whole story. Otherwise how do you explain spending so much effort on eye candy like MacOS "liquid glass", or the redesigned settings app? For that matter, why bother with an annual release at all?

To me, I think it's a pretty obvious case of prioritizing style over substance. For whatever reason, but not to save money. If they really wanted to save money they'd stop with the gratuitous change.

I regularly wait almost a year after a given version of MacOS has been released before upgrading. I don't care about new features, and I already spend all day fixing bugs of my own creation. That leaves very little time for debugging other people's software.

> If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.

I think the problem is that what you're describing is no longer a viable business model.

Back when there were only at most a half dozen or so news sources (newspapers and TV stations) in each major market, it didn't make sense for any one of those sources to lean hard left or right because that would only alienate a significant portion of the market.

Today, any given individual has access to thousands of different sources of "news", and everyone chooses to listen to only those sources that confirm their existing opinions. To me, that seems more than sufficient to explain a lot of things, including a lack of widespread agreement on basic facts.

Objective reality is frequently very nuanced, but nuance is a PITA when it comes to comprehension, so people tend to very much avoid it (knowingly or not).