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Do you refer to his marriage with Virginia Clemm [1]?

For comparison, at this time in France the sexual majority was defined by law at 13 years old, and is currently at 15. This is the age at which consent from the minor has legal value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Eliza_Clemm_Poe#Marri...

I don't know about the "stuff Haskell people get excited about", but IMHO, Haskell is a mathematician's language and the language of mathematics isn't a natural language. Dijkstra himself was also a mathematician, and his positions regarding programming languages features like 1-based indexing [1] are already conflicting with practice, the famous case being Lua which receives mixed opinions about it. I find for instance 1-based indexing more "natural", and that's coming from someone whose second and third languages are assembly and C (the first being... Basic).

Yet the point about DSL is interesting, in particular internal/embedded DSLs [2]. I lied a little earlier, my third programming language was actually Forth. His creator said in 2001, "When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words [i.e. functions] or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application" [3].

I've been trying to do that exactly that in other languages, make it so that the code expresses "naturally" what it does as much as possible. When you succeed, people call your code "beautiful" or "elegant" (nobody ever told me that :-) which, I think, subsumes "naturality".

This is of course harder to do in low-level languages such as the ones I mentioned (except Basic maybe) because you get caught in details such as memory management. But high-level languages are not exempt of these problems (and contrary to Forth or Lisp, their syntax is often written in stone). Then there's essential complexity [4], which can be "unnatural" no matter what, like thinking about things in a concurrent programming context, with languages that don't natively support it like they support automatic memory management (i.e. garbage collection).

The topic is dangerously close to "readability", which is known to be 80% subjective.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language#Domai...

[3] https://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet

The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).

Granted, that's the theory.

When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.

But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.

It's funny to see LLMs being mentioned, because this is yet another case where "good enough" is, after all, not good enough once you know how "good enough" should be.

Including development of AI models?

Amusingly, LLMs are good at detecting patterns because they are modelled after the human brain, which is very good at detecting patterns (this e.g. is annoying when you are a game developer who wants to reuse assets). People are still able to tell if the source of an artwork (or text) because LLMs tend to output "patterned" text (like the famous "load bearing"). That being said, the false positive/negative rate of humans for this task has yet to be measured.

AIs cannot invent things like cubism, surrealism or hip-hop.

Or maybe it can; the early image generators famously did output horrific images sometimes because of their limitations, but these outputs qualify nonetheless creations.

Now the interesting thing is that it is humans who evaluate them as horrific, worthless or interesting.

Certainly AIs could pretend they have that sort of opinions and judgement, but hopefully humans will remain more interested in the opinions of other humans.

I think the answer is that they don't, indeed, need source control but just a way to let their agents resolve editing conflicts. It's basically yet another message board.

I don't disagree, but having remote monitoring capabilities on a professional fridge is most likely not a hipster feature. Even mid-size supermarkets have dozens of them, with different temperature settings; they can fail, customers can block the doors, etc. You do want to receive an alert when something is wrong.

GP might realize sooner or later that they need larger security margins, for when unexpected things happen; like really having to go to the toilets, spilling the coffee they just made, etc.

They can shift their daily schedule e.g. 30 minutes earlier and peacefully drink their coffee at home. They also should eat something at home or on their way, because hurrying in a cold morning with an empty stomach is not good. Source: personal experience. I did that for months as a student until I passed out one day in class.

If they don't like waiting for the train in the cold, they probably can find a warm place near the station, and wait there a little.

If you're going for ad hoc solution to that specific problem, just charge $99/year or $102/year instead, depending on how you feel like about profit margins.

Is that really that much of a big deal, though? Before stdint, if one needed that level of accuracy, one would do your own equivalent of stdinit by hand, and adjust those definitions when porting to another compiler/platform. The same goes for your local boolean type.

I think the only real annoyance is that each programmer/team did it with their own convention (I32, INT32, i32, int32, WORD, Word bool, BOOL, Bool, etc., etc.); standardizing helps with putting everyone on the same page more than it helps porting. It doesn't prevent people from reverse-typedef-ing standard names to local "dialectal" names, though.

But I also think that one should only rarely use raw integer types, in an ideal world; the elephant in the room is that typedef is kind of the second "billion dollars mistake" [1]. C is a weakly typed language and there's no practical way to undo it (besides transpilation), so there's double no point to leave behind raw types.

[1] For those not too familiar with C, typedef defines a "type alias", not a type: https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/language/typedef

I've always believed that they kept 32 bits ints on 64 bits CPU as a default because going full 64 bits would make the code and data structures bigger for "no reason" (it's not often that one hits the 4.10^9 limit in system code (if you don't count timestamps, that is)). For instance, a load-register-with-immediate instruction would normally take 5 bytes (opcode+value) on 32 bits, but 9 bytes on 64.

> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users

And it always will be, because "users" is plural. It is not a defect in the design of the desktop or whatever has "too many" alternatives. The mistake would be to think that "one-desktop-fits-all".

Also, the only good reason to change things is to fix problems. Nobody's really asking for "moar modernity". Starting from design theories is plain wrong. Ask users about their problems first, and the use your design knowledge to analyse and fix them.

> Strategy is another part of UX; understanding who the target user is, and determining what they want. Deciding what is important, and what is not; what will the development team prioritize and what will it ignore? "The fastest way a UX designer can save your team time is to help you say no."

He is not talking about users but customers.

That's how FOSS works: some users find it annoying to have to place and resize their windows manually, so some of them made "tiling window managers". Many Linux DEs also had virtual desktops a million years before Windows because FOSS is made by users, for users.

Since political threads don't last long on HN, I'll add for the anecdote that I was first puzzled the difference in meaning by the lyrics of a Slayer song, "Consumed democracy returns to socialist regime" [1], certainly because at that time the government in my country was "socialist".

[1] https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/slayer/fictionalreality.html

Socialism means different things depending on where you are, even within Europe. For some socialism is the same as communism, for others socialism simply means social-democracy.

Except we did had a bunch of close calls [1]. Also, we've been warned about climate change for at least 30 years and were unable to avoid it. So OP's remark is entirely deserved.

Until proven otherwise, we are not part of a movie where the hero saves the day at the end. I thought 9/11 made it pretty clear to everyone?

[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2020-0...

It did. While you're busy recording an "instagramable" moment, you are not entirely enjoying that moment. Your eyes are on the screen, not on the subject.

In a way, if photography is an ersatz for painting that eventually made imaging available for the masses, then AI could become an ersatz for thinking. But it feels like I'm paraphrasing TFA.

What will happen when AI companies have spent their advertising budget on math problems and whatever else gives the maximum wow effect for the bucks? Probably customers hooked on the vain satisfaction of spending token$ to impress friends.

Also as a child, I was amazed by the associative tables it offered; I thought "I can make intelligent programs". I think I was thinking AI but I won't trust my memory on this. But I played a lot more with the turtle.

I am not, indeed. However as programmer I was sometimes told to do what the customer wants, even though it is complex or inapt. If this DNS blocking is inapt or misused, it's a political problem so let the citizens deal with it (I know this seems like wishful thinking given the current poor state of politics at least in the EU, but hopefully we will fix that while it's still in our hands).

Besides, I read about what happened with Spain and football, and from my understanding the issue was that they blocked not DNS but IP addresses. And problem domain is also vastly different, a priori: in that case, they faced sites that were actively trying to avoid blocking, while in our case, I doubt pron sites and such will try to do the same, because children are not their target audience.

An alternative could be to create a top level domain (TLD) "for kids" and restrict kid phones to it. Then in your TLD you can admit sites that meet minimum criteria (no pron, no terrorism, content and chat moderation for SNS).

An alternative one could consider is that the ISP could DNS-block sites for "kid SIMs"). On the OS part, this would require protection against picking alternative DNS, but that's already standard. Other "anti-circumvention" features might be required, such as factory reset.

For all the protections that the ISP cannot reasonably provide, one can consider creating a nation-wide (or EU-wide, or US-wide) official label, that device makers can obtain if they meet certain requirements. Parents can them make their choice. We have that for food etc., so why not for internet access mobile devices. Because from my perspective, the main problem that needs to be solved is that parents cannot monitor 24/7 what their children do on their phones.

Yet another solution is to create a top level domain for kids, restrict kid devices to that domain, and allow sites enter this domain only if they meet defined criteria.

Oh, and prevent ISPs and phone makers to sell 'for kids" products at a higher price. People can whine all they want about free market, but it's to protect our children.

But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).

Maybe we were led into a false dichotomy by the title. If someone wants to learn programming for other reasons than as a mean to a goal - which will become more and more rare because LLMs do that already - this person must not learn just one language but one per major paradigm : C (imperative/procedural), Smalltalk (OOP), Prolog (logic), SQL (declarative, although maybe there are better representatives), OCaml (functional, although one can go for Haskell or Lisp/Scheme), and Forth (concatenative, but also to take a look under the hood of interpreters/compilers/VMs).

HNDL can be worth it without the "threat" of quantum computing; for instance we see currently a lot of interest in AI-assisted math, and maybe it could lead to a breakthrough that affect crypto algorithms that are currently considered safe.

Therefore it seems weird to use QC as a benchmark. Rather, if your communications being decrypted in the future is unacceptable, then the logical conclusion is that you must not transmit it in such a way that a third party can intercept it.

Admittedly, it is inconvenient or even impractical, so people do accept the risk anyway without admitting it. They are sweeping the issue under the carpet of supposedly QC-proof crypto - because new quantum algorithms can be discovered too.

The reward function seems indeed to be the protagonist there, still it stays in the shadows. One can only imagine that it is some kind of evaluator that scores the sequence based on grammar correctness, semantic consistency, etc.? To use the proposed chess analogy, maybe it could be a Stockfish engine that evaluates the submitted position that results from the move submitted by the LLM?

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but we might find ourselves in such a situation that the only practical solution would be to use agents to counter rogue agents. This won't be without collateral damage, though.

Guess what people talk (and write) about after meetings.

They would tell us we are contradicting ourselves because none of them are straight lines in the traditional sense, if we really believe the Earth is a sphere. Don't underestimate trolls ;-)

I think you are hallucinating that quote.

Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.

And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.

One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].

Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.

[1] https://content.luanti.org/copyright_dmca/