jibal

Reductionistic fallacy, among other errors. "understanding" is best defined operationally. (Note that teachers and educational institutions test understanding operationally.)

> not too long ago

Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Google also has a URL filter that breaks URLs, stripping off components after the domain name, among other trasnformations, turning any response from Gemini that includes URLs into dangerous gibberish. This was reported in April and perhaps earlier, and was promptly closed.

You're talking to the wrong person. I was on the C Standards Committee and am well aware of CHAR_BIT.

None of the responses actually provides a reason to think that life exists there.

> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.

"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)

And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:

> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe. That was absolutely terrifying.

Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.

Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.

Per the C standard `sizeof(char)` is always 1, regardless of how many bits it has.

I know what it is. One can read it and see that CA's effect wasn't just "all of [Trump's] Meta advertising".

This guy made the exact same comment 12 days ago ... that one was flagged and is dead.

Right? The charge that "he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically" is a blatant lie, and then the GP moves the goalposts. As we all know, including the blatant liar, Russia was not Snowden's destination and he was trapped in the airport because the U.S. cancelled his visas. The claim that choosing to accept Russian citizenship months later as an alternative to spending a lifetime in a U.S. prison is hypocritical is vile.

> In fact, spacecrafts already in planning could be used to identify evidence of life there much easier than previously thought, should it exist.

But there's no reason to think that it does.

The GP writes "me and many others think ...". I find that many of the complaints about the way LLMs write come from people who are illiterate and haven't been exposed to much literate writing before.

> Types are properties of values, not variables.

In statically typed languages, variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type.

> Mutability is a property of variable, not of a value.

In which languages?

In D, mutability is a property of a type. And variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type, so mutability is also a property of variables, expressions, and values.

(Immutability is also transitive in D, so an immutable value cannot have mutable parts, including mutable references, and a variable with an immutable type cannot contain a value or reference with any mutable parts.)