Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)
Is there a 2010-era feature you're relying on that LibreOffice doesn't have yet?
When was the last security update for MS Office 2010? Wikipedia reckons sometime in late 2020. It might be worth looking at alternatives if you ever open potentially untrusted documents - maybe ones that appear to have been sent by people you know.
> At a Morgan Stanley conference this month, Brian Robins, finance chief for San Francisco-based software maker GitLab, said GitLab is aligned with the goals of DOGE, because the company’s software tools aim to help people do more with less.
> “What the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to do is what GitLab does,” Robins said.
I need to give a name to my theory which posits that horseshoe theory is a bullshit right-wing talking point, no different from the classic villain trope "We are not so different, you and I", where one side admits to being awful but uses false analogies to try and paint the other with the same brush, and the other rejects both the comparison and the conclusion.
The underlying goal of horseshoe theory is not to create a meaningful comparison between two positions, but an underhanded attempt to demoralise those on the left, and to swing undecided centrists by convincing them that the left isn't really offering the progress that it claims. I think it's also used as a shield by people who are right-leaning but don't want to admit it out loud.
...unless you can find a single good example of a notable left-wing proponent suggesting that horseshoe theory is valid, actually.
That takes a really long time though. Most domestic dogs can still breed with wild wolves after ~14,000 years of being pretty well separated by humans, and after some fairly substantial phenotypic shifts.
> During the discussion, Hu said that even if product builders rely heavily on AI, one skill they would have to be good at is reading the code and finding bugs.
Naturally, that brings to mind the classic:
> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
-- Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style
And also:
> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
-- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Yeah, these new-fangled "compilers" will never catch on.
Programmers who rely on them will stop learning machine code, and won't know how their program really works. That's if the compiler actually compiles your code at all, without throwing an internal error, making you change your (correct) code around arbitrarily until it actually accepts it. But at least with an internal compiler error you know the compiler has broken - rather than it silently miscompiling your code to do the wrong thing.
But even then, even if the compiler accepts your code without barfing, and generates correct machine code from it, it still won't generate as efficient machine code as you could write by hand yourself.
Nope, these compilers will never catch on, and never get reliable enough to be useful for serious software engineering.
-- Some programmer circa 1975, probably, who lives in my head mumbling this to themselves whenever I'm sure generative-AI-based "programming" is a crock of shit. Although, to be fair, the 2005-era developer who is drunkenly ranting that UML diagrams will make programming 100x more productive any day now, is a handy counterpoint.
> On the minerals front, the US doesn't need anything from Ukraine.
Need's got nothing to do with it. Bullies don't take what you have because they need it, they take it because that's what you have, and they want to take it away from you, just to be taking it away from you.
For Trump, it is not enough that (as he perceives the situation) he wins, rather than (as he perceives) everyone else loses. Even people's whose backs are up against the wall. Especially people whose backs are up against the wall. If you don't exploit the weakest player at the table, why are you even playing?
(Not that Trump knows anything about gambling... who the fuck loses money running a casino... on multiple separate occasions...)
Trump isn't making deals based on carefully considered advantages and concessions. He's just grasping his tiny hands at whatever comes in reach, whether or not he needs it, like the half-wit schoolyard thug he is.
Yeah, thinking of the puzzle as a game, rather than a competition, allows for a different perspective.
If I think of a competition, then I'd expect the rules to be determined ahead of time according to some pre-imagined criteria. If someone manages to find a clever hack within the rules that allows for trivial "breaks", then that's good for them and they just get to beat everyone else at it.
But if I think of a game, then it's much more natural for the rules to adapt over time as people realise that some types of "play" make the game less fun, or straight-up boring. They don't have to be self-consistent, or logical. They're essentially arbitrary, and just whatever they need to be to make the game "better".
What if it turns out that the radical (square root) symbol is a letter from a language (if a little squished)? And we somehow figure out one day which letter it is, for sure?
But also, if the criteria for allowed functions is that they are "reasonable, elemental" (as per the fine article), then I think it would be quite hard to come up with a set of rules to encode that in a way that includes log() and sqrt(), but not S(). It's hard to imagine a function that is less elemental than S() (except maybe the identity function), or why its inclusion would be unreasonable when the other two aren't.
Well, the earliest version of the code that would morph first into a terminal emulator, and eventually become Linux "was written to use one thread to write the letter A to the screen. The other thread wrote the letter B."¹ Who knows what direction this OS will evolve along?
I think that's debatable. Many open source licenses have a definition of accessible source code that is similar to:
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work
for making modifications to it.
Certainly, in the past "a tarball of the source for whatever version you have" was absolutely considered sufficient for that. But these days the features provided by source control systems, such as "annotate"(/"blame"), "bisect", etc... could very well be argued to have raised the baseline for what "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" should mean.