serhei

Dijkstra's personal language design (GCL) actually used anything-based indexing -- you specify the lower bound explicitly when you declare the array, so even if indexing starting from some runtime value k (e.g. k=7, k=b.lower-bound for some existing array b, etc.) is most natural, you provide that as the lower bound. Then a(i) would be translated to e.g. a[i-k] in compilation.

Getting Inform7 to work well probably depended on 'text adventure'/IF culture, since the text adventures themselves rely on this kind of 'restricted natural language' interface to navigate. Conversely, IF developers built up a lot of intuition on how to make pseudo-natural-language input feel natural while keeping the restrictions obvious.

In practice, using UIs that a corporate design department or product manager would never approve today is an implicit fashion-signal.

> Only developers think that in most cases, the hard part is code. Its never been.

The correct way to think about this:

The hard part is ensuring the product does not exhibit undesired behaviours. Writing code is one possible tool for ensuring this. Replacing writing code with LLMs only works to the extent that LLMs accurately predict your definition of 'undesired'. The more unique and innovative your product, the more likely the LLM prediction is to be inaccurate.

There are... multiple blog posts online now about how to use freely available data and modest amounts of compute to train a custom GPT-2-sized model from scratch. It would be quite a policing effort to prevent.

Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:

"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."

It's still completely illogical to install an update just to wait for another update to fix the problems introduced by the first update.

You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.

Yes, that was a typo on my part. Lake Ontario lengthens any NY-Toronto train line. Lake Erie lengthens any NY-Detroit train line.

I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers).

Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.

There could also be a desire to push partial-autonomy features in the short term, when Model 3 owners are making the decision day-by-day whether to drive the car completely manually or whether to rely on whatever level of Autopilot is available now or in 2 years. If driving the car without Autopilot is deliberately made to feel weird and akward, more people will turn on Autopilot in more situations.

Don't worry, those buildings can always be repurposed as condominiums. Unless the housing bubble implodes in which case Toronto has bigger problems.