hyperman1

I wonder if you've built it faster than I wrote that post.

I don't know if this is in there, but I wonder if books have a kind of 'eb and flood', where books raise to the top, stay there a while, then go away again. Could you plot some graphs? I'd expect some alrounders to stay around in the background forever, and other books come and go according to the average HN trending mood

I've known about a student, long ago in the '90s, who got to speed up a batch codebase in some bigcorp, as a summer job. The original did basically everything wrong, up to bubblesort. So student diligently cleaned up the mess and got a speedup from multiple hours to a few minutes.

Then he could not get an interview anywhere. After some backchannel communication it turned out he had to remove that experience from his CV, as all employers assumed he was just lying.

AI isn't the only cause of deskilling. I've seen a few people go from coder to architect roles. Architects, being the decision makers, talk to vendors, CxOs, consultants,... and mainly spend their lives in powerpoints and visions.

When an engineer stops coding, managing servers, ... it takes about 6 months to transform even a really smart person into a buzzword factory. It is scary. People like Oracle or Microsoft sales are really good in decoupling all of us from the relevant day to day concerns. It is reversible too, with former architects getting really angry if they have to deal with the software they themselves procured or envisioned.

My take is that you need non stop contact with reality, both the computers and the customers, or you start to drift. I fear AI is causing this in all of us.

In the 1970’s the Belgian deficit ran from 66 to 100+ percent of the BNP. Every governement since had serious trouble getting the deficit manageable. We never really got it unde control, and the intrest is hurting us. Afaik we got to 104% because we had to when joining the euro, which was our best. We are now at 109% again, and even that is hurting us hard.

Dave Duncan, A handfull of men.

It is the second series in the same world, and all the people have grown up. The kids became parents and think like responsible adults. It talks in an adult way about quite a few horrific events, without overdoing it. It gave child me an idea about what the difference actually was.

Apart from that, it had an interesting magic system.

In Europe, there is this stereotype about how southern countries produce more extrovert reactions, and northern countries create silent, calm people. Untill you piss them off, then you get exactly the kind of reaction Linus produces. I think the world got used to the USA corporate blandness, and gets surprised when people just don't fit in that culture.

I expect the participants in this discussion to grumble for a few days, then continue working amically together.

I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.

My work laptop, an Ubuntu, runs MS Defender since a few days. I can say that it seems to work. It takes 400Mb RAM. I haven't seen a big slowdown yet but didn't do anything too heavy on it. It manages to clean up the eicar test virus.

This is a pleasant surprise, as an older job had McAfee on windows, and it was basically unusable. We lost most monday mornings on a weekly security scan, and everything touching a zip file forced you to take a 15 minute break. I learned to hate virus scanners.

I don't know about any other linux virus scanners, but I must admit it a pleasant surprise (even if a working laptop should just be table stakes).

Mathematically correct is not enough.

Java's byte code verification algorithm had a proof. This was important for running untrusted java in the browser. If it said the byte code was ok, it was.

Turns out, nobody made a proof for the verifier actually finishing. So it could return true, or false, or run longer than the universe has time. So around Java 6(?), someone wrote some bytecode that basically took forever to validate, DOSing the validator. Sun had to change the file format and add extra information to get the guarantees back.

It made me wonder, however: SI instead of AI brands you a follower of Trump. Does Grokking/Drinking instead of Understanding mark you as a follower of Heinlein?

I'd much rather follow Heinlein's free thinking instead of Trump's dictatorialism, and Heinlein never requested followers, but there is a similar mechanism going on nevertheless.

This sounds like a human trying to reason about quantum mechanics. We als simplify to newtonian for day to day tasks.

If Wero grandfathers in the existing iDeal flow, no cellphone is required. Just a bank card and a small gadget provided by your bank. Belgian Bancontact already works like that since the '80s. I never use my cellphone for payments.

I've heard it is only illegal becausr they signed treaties that would require them to keep it illegal, and they would have to leave these treaties. The USA president at the time hated weed and put it in every treaty he could.