codebje

Plumbing is fractionally less regulated where I am and I am allowed to change my own taps washers, but a whole tap assembly falls under similar issues as a power switch.

(I wound up building a gaming PC, much more capable but much more than the cost of streaming over an equivalent lifetime - IF streaming services don't enshittify to cost more and deliver less over time, which we all know they will.)

There's a vast number of operators who won't even look at their site when its performance craters due to a scrum of crypto miners all competing for resources. Why waste time on sophisticated attacks trying to fly under the radar of competent admins who will detect you by your egress traffic anyway?

But parser combinators build your final parser out of little bits, and sometimes those little bits might be something potentially ambiguous, like "any number of leading zeros followed by a number" which needs to parse "0" as no leading zeros and the number 0, but "00" as one leading zero and the number 0.

Non-deterministic parsers can easily blow out with backtracking much like careless recursive descent parsers, though.

The question is capabilities. Either gives you an error result that might be useful. List gives you backtracking and, depending on your grammar, multiple parses. Maybe is like a weaker Either. Other monads might do other interesting things, but from the perspective of accepting strings satisfying a grammar, List is the choice that supports non-determinism.

(Laziness strongly recommended.)

The poem is not mine, I believe it is Conor McBride’s.

    A parser for a thing
    Is a function from a string
    To a list of pairs
    Of strings and things.

(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)

    Date,Amount,Account Number,,Transaction Type,Transaction Details,Balance,Category,Merchant Name,Processed On

We know how to apply LLms to problems, which is a subtly different thing to understanding how they do what they do. It's similar to fire: I can cook using fire, but I don't really understand how fire _works_. Heat+oxygen+fuel, sure, but what goes on chemically? I dunno. Doesn't stop me using it. (Pretty sure _humanity_ knows how fire works, though).

As an example, register allocation is graph colouring, and thus NP complete; a model for producing an allocation plan is learning heuristics that might look at more features in combination than the ones hand-crafted into the compiler. An LLM for the job might do better than a more focused model like a GNN, due to sheer size, the effectiveness of transformers, or magic. But it probably won't do an overall better job than the handcrafted heuristics, because those handcrafted heuristics also tend to compile very, very fast with a small memory footprint, and can be debugged (more) easily when they go wrong.

1. It's not a ban on using social media, it's a requirement for age verification to create an account. This only limits usage on the few platforms that force an account to do anything.

2. The technical controls platforms implement are, unsurprisingly, generally quite weak. Kids are crafty enough to circumvent them, and share how freely.

3. Wannabe-influencer parents just create accounts for their kids, making the circumvention trivial.

4. There are no consequences for using a social media account while under 16.

I think the final point is the main one, though. By design there's no mechanism in place for the government to take any action if a kid gets onto social media, only if a platform fails to implement age checks that satisfy the legislation's criteria. So platforms all implemented tokenistic age checks. Platforms don't care, or need to care, if they get bypassed. The government doesn't care.

If I were a more suspicious man I'd say that either the point was never to reduce the use of social media by kids in the first place, or it was well intentioned but railroaded into toothlessness by lobbyists.