I don't know if this "problem" can ever truly be "solved" as there's not really a way to prove there to be a difference between something truly "feeling" emotions compared to faking it convincingly. I have to wonder at what point the difference becomes moot, a sort of Chinese room for emotions. I tend to lean towards solipsism when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. Does the difference actually matter?
I find this so bizarre. I did some quick back of the envelope math and I've found that I've been programming between 10k and 20k hours over the course of a 9-year professional career. That seems simultaneously low and high depending on how you look at it. I don't know that I can draw any concrete conclusions or correlations between time spent and proficiency once you get to such a large amount of time.
The author mentions how they're not going to talk about rumors several times over the course of the article. I'd love to hear what the rumor mill is saying about the possible causes of the outage.
I looked at the author's previous post where he details the process of buying the thing. A fair amount of it goes over my head, I must admit. But that final price tag.... You've gotta really love mainframes. I can't imagine the utility bills for it. The power usage was reduced to 1.7kW. I guess some people buy a sports car and some buy a mainframe. Personally, I'd never be able to drop that kind of money for a hobby. I think emulating a mainframe on a fancy PC would scratch my itch. But to each their own.
I agree that unless the point of the question was more of a power move to show he's not an idiot and that they shouldn't try jerking him around, the question doesn't seem particularly useful.
The action of creating Libra could be interpreted as an attempt to undermine US federal currency. Facebook is the first company with enough clout to actually succeed at widespread cryptocurrency adoption to attempt something like this. I think there are bigger issues to deal with than quibbling about languages and release cycles. I know that the congressman's unspoken question is really whether Facebook has considered the security ramifications of allowing foreign nation-states to meddle directly with our system of currency like they were able to meddle with our news media, etc. But we all know that great programs can be written in terrible languages and terrible programs can be written in great languages. If the congressman is thinking what I think he's thinking, I wish he'd come out and say it instead of beating around the bush.
After falling in love with Clojure and then Clojure being rejected by my company, I so wanted Sweet.js to become a thing. Macros allow for some incredible magic and amazing productivity, in my experience. Unfortunately, Sweet.js looks abandoned last I checked. And I'd be surprised if I could sell my company on it.
I agree that fixed point is the way to go for currency. But I read that as meaning COBOL didn't have floating point data types at all. I'm guessing that assumption was wrong. The advantage to floating point math over fixed point is speed. If it wasn't for that, nobody would ever want to use floating point.