supergarfield

I agree that drivers should know not to reverse on a highway regardless of local signage.

But in situations that could be ambiguous, I think this is a regional difference - the US, Australia, part of the rest of the Americas use lots of text on road signs (including literal "wrong way" signs); Europe and much of the rest of the world use far less text (including purely pictographic "wrong way" signs). Especially important in Europe where drivers just can't learn 20+ languages.

If my coworker was part of a clone series of 100 million units, requesting a character sheet would be pretty reasonable

I really want to like QBE, but declaration blocks like this make it feel like 1970s Unix code more than a modern hackable piece of software:

    int t, x, r, rf, rt, nr;
    bits rs;
    Ins *i, *i1;
    Mem *m;
    Ref *ra[4];

I think it deters some users by making it hard to read and understand the relatively subtle code in the 300 line function that follows. (Skill issue, I know)

Carmack gives updating in a loop as the one exception:

> You should strive to never reassign or update a variable outside of true iterative calculations in loops.

If you want a completely immutable setup for this, you'd likely have to use a recursive function. This pattern is well supported and optimized in immutable languages like the ML family, but is not super practical in a standard imperative language. Something like

  def sum(l):
    if not l: return 0
    return l[0] + sum(l[1:])

Of course this is also mostly insensitive to ordering guarantees (the compiler would be fine with the last line being `return l[-1] + sum(l[:-1])`), but immutability can remain useful in cases like this to ensure no concurrent mutation of a given object, for instance.

> It's all fun and games until you realise you can't run a consumer economy without consumers.

If the issue is that the AI can't code, then yes you shouldn't replace the programmers: not because they're good consumers, just because you still need programmers.

But if the AI can replace programmers, then it's strange to argue that programmers should still get employed just so they can get money to consume, even though they're obsolete. You seem to be arguing that jobs should never be eliminated due to technical advances, because that's removing a consumer from the market?

Some laws are much easier to evade than others, and some laws have especially bad side effects when evaded. (A law about e.g. requiring a certain type of government certification before a large construction project can be undertaken, for instance, would be far harder to evade than this one, and "they can just do <x>" would probably be a bad objection)

Using non mainstream sites instead seems like a realistic way people are going to skirt this law, and those are very hard to regulate without other unpleasant side effects on Internet freedom. I think it's a reasonable concern to raise.

What do you think the current text encoding footguns are?

In a different direction, I don't know what your problem domain is/was, but in general when I'm dealing with UTF8, I don't need to convert back to bytes very often. Was the need for conversion mostly due to the libraries that still expected strings instead of bytes?

I'm always interested in understanding animal neurology, especially in the context of trying to reach more general levels of AI. I find it interesting that modern ANNs perform near human level at some difficult tasks, and yet it seems there are some tasks that insects perform that we'd have no idea how to implement. Animal nervous systems certainly have interesting things to teach us.

It also seems like understanding simpler brains will help in progressively understanding the human brain, even if these brains are very different. Developing a less human-focused toolkit might be what we need; sometimes studying a more general problem is what you need to get past blockers in a more concrete problem.

On that topic I really enjoyed _Other minds_ by Peter Godfrey-Smith, which talks about octopus behavior and some neurology, but I'm interested in recommendations for more technical readings in animal cognition / neurology.

visudo isn't a fork, it just locks the sudoers file against concurrent edits, runs whatever standard editor you want, waits for it to finish, and validate the new file before committing it to the real location.

I can agree that process is too complex, but they're not maintaining a fork of vi for that purpose.