I would argue that the ending of the book is optimistic despite the event that precedes it. An imperfect father wants the best for his child, and does the best he can with the hand he's dealt. In a dying world of cannibals and worse, there are people who are good, and whose surroundings don't poison their view on what it means to be good. "Do you carry the fire?" is, to my mind, an incredibly optimistic sentiment.
I’ve had a lot of experience in developing on QNX over the years, and with each successive year, the call to migrate to Linux got stronger. The day to day developer experience is great, you can very easily setup a CMake toolchain and bypass the need for QNX’s Momentics, which if you’re just developing for QNX is something you will want to do. But, in my experience the driver support simply isn’t there, and that became painful. A fair few major board manufacturers treat QNX integration as a complete afterthought, and at a point you start to feel that this is directly related to RIM’s decision to shutdown source access to QNX. I’ve since left that company, but I imagine there is still a call to use Linux.
I work with embedded DSPs, and there are certainly points where the maths gets incredibly dense and hard to intuitively parse. Your last point has proven true for me many times. Luckily, with the exception one block of code, the maths is detailed plainly above the implementation. So, while there might be an occasion where I might not fully understand what's going on, I can see where the original author of the code was coming from, and can follow the following code accordingly. Indeed, I believe one of the comment blocks does start with "Here be dragons".
There's a strong argument for the fact that Japan was effectively on its last legs by the time the bombs dropped. Indeed, the fire bombings that preceded dealt far more damage to Japan than both bombs, in real terms. Nuclear intervention wasn't a requirement for ending the war, the war was effectively over, and a sustained bombing campaign could have seen the end without the atomic bomb.
Now, the argument I find the most interesting in the case for using the bomb is public, and national and international political opinion. It is arguable that Truman saw very little options other than use the bomb at the time. They had spent millions on the project, politicians knew that something was being developed, and the Cold War was already on the horizon. Further if not used, and the existence of the bomb post war would come to light for the public, there might well be questions as to why it wasn't dropped, and, exactly the line you used, if it could have ended the war early.
Ultimately, I think a combination of international clout spun into national pride in total victory sealed the decision (although this conclusion was probably made by FDR before him as well). I will say, that the post-Hiroshima speech by Truman is also one of the most powerful speeches by a US president ever made.
> It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
Bitter was the one thing in the UK that I wish I could get here (Australia). You can get London Pride in Melbourne, but they keep it refrigerated like a standard lager, so the flavour is off. There really is nothing quite like it.
I was once asked how I got to where I am, where others in my situation might not have, my response was: “Parents that gave a damn”. It wasn’t about pressuring me, it was about recognising my interest in computers, and fostering that interest as much as was financially possible given our circumstances (which were often dire). My parents aren’t technical, but they did what they could, and I wouldn’t be the engineer I am without that.
I check in on this project every year or so, and I'm happy to see that their support for AS3 is creeping towards completion. I, like many, wasted so many hours in flash games while in school that it was sad to see an element of gaming history fall by the wayside. At least Ruffle can pick up some of the pieces. It does remind me that that there is still no way to play Wolfenstein RPG on iOS. I have an old iPod that I bought in 2010 almost exclusively to play it, but that battery won't last forever. But for now, I think I'll go and play some Adrenaline Challenge.
Having watched the announcement the (literally) singular question that was presented was essentially "Why should the man on the street care about AGI now?", to which the answer was "They shouldn't". But key to that answer was Carmack's assertion that Keen will probably never release a "product" like ChatGPT that aims to specifically wow people, that's not Keen's goal.
I've been looking for a decent replacement for milk for a long time, I've tried them all. Oat Milk is what I've finally settled on. Specifically the brand Oatly (which I believe is broadly available) for me has solved the overly oaty taste with their Barista Edition milk. I will say that it is still notably worse than cows milk, but to a degree I can personally live with. But I'd recommend maybe ordering an oat milk latte one day when you're feeling particularly adventurous and just seeing if the downgrade in taste is tenable for you.
Cheese is a whole other kettle of fish, they're all awful.
Not who you were asking, but I'm a big Moore fan as well:
* From Hell (Some might be put off by the original comic's black and white art, but there was a recent release that colourised them by the original illustrator)
There's no strict technical reason for keeping Corba around. It's primarily an issue of finance. Where I work there's no real way to get funding for a maintenance task if it doesn't directly relate to a specific project (we produce a product that is utilised by various projects, and through those projects get the funding for new features, and maintenance). There's no external call to not use Corba, so we will continue to use Corba.
This is now a compounding issue, the tool that uses Corba was initially quite standalone but managers started pushing the tool as an interface to the embedded system I actually work on, this has resulted in more tools utilising Corba.
>The writing for new shows is predicable and boring. Actors are featureless blobs that all look the same
I would argue this is a symptom of the money men exerting too much control over entertainment. Everything has to be safe and neutered, every investment has to be as sure as possible. This isn't down to writers, there's interesting writing going on, you just won't see it come out of the big studios unless it's a smaller subsidiary.
I started writing then went on to automatically vent. I extend my apologies for wasting everyone's bandwidth. There are better technologies to use that can do pretty well everything that CORBA offers. That's the source of my general frustration, OmniORB just extends that frustration.
Unfortunately I know exactly what CORBA means. Helming a legacy project that still contains the requirement of using CORBA is a real bugbear of mine. It takes non-trivial effort to even build the ORB we use (OmniORB) for each platform we support (the number is low, currently 4) that its effectively the only library we don't build from source each time. Every now and then, someone struggles to build it, we then check in the built libraries and forget about it for as long as we can.
I'd be interested to know if there are any cases where RHEL have issued a WONTFIX on a bug due to some software relying on the bugged behaviour. Given how much of it is free software, would they really not merge a fix into their releases to keep the bugged behaviour?