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I think the OP's statement is perfectly fine.

We don't really care which of those trillions of sewer bacteria carries the pre-existing genes that resist an anti-biotic; we care when a new strain starts becoming prevalent and decreasing the effectiveness. From our perspective, it's a new resistant strain.

I can't speak for ActiveX since I avoided IE like the plague, but Java applets were sandboxed. Just that the sandbox had a lot of holes.

On paper, Google's throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy (that has lead to a substantial Google Graveyard) seems like it was intended to allow for some parts of the company to innovate while keeping the core products stable and boring. In practice, many of those innovations (Google Inbox, anyone?) were not deemed profitable enough to keep around. Others were never given the resources to grow beyond an experiment. And even with a long leash, a big company project is never going to innovate as quickly as a startup.

This year, however, with the extremely deep cuts to Google's internal incubator (Area 120), it seems pretty clear that they've given up on this strategy, at least for anything that isn't somehow AI-related.

Normally I'd consider it an acquihire when a company acquires a startup / smaller company and immediately announces the discontinuation of the product. Less so if there's an attempt to continue developing the product, even if it eventually gets shut down.

I had to double check the date to make sure it wasn't an old article.

Also, this is inexcusable for an $11B company.

Or a malt liquor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwID1I5nXc

> Polyfills that don’t polyfill

This is what's sometimes called a "ponyfill". The idea is to avoid messing with global scope (monkeypatching), which could be problematic if you have multiple polyfills for the same API or polyfills that don't perfectly match the native behavior.

This can be a good thing in some situations, but in general it's probably best to leave polyfill decisions to the bundler so you can decide which browsers you want to support. Or even produce multiple versions, a lightweight one for modern browsers and one with tons of polyfills that gets served to ancient ones.

I generally prefer to make the regex rule look for the hash signature, e g. `/\.[0-9a-f]{6}\./` rather than solely by file extension. That way if there's any files that didn't get fingerprinted it won't cache it indefinitely.

In science fiction it's common to have species that are so far advanced that humans are like ants to them. For all we know, our reality could be a petri dish sitting under the couch of an alien dorm room.

I would call a chat bot a specialized application. And I dispute that a chat bot was ever considered the end goal of AGI. The idea is that if we had AGI, we could build a chat bot with it to test/demonstrate its general reasoning capabilities. Simply being effective at chatting is not sufficient to be called an AGI. And today's chatbots are quite stupid.

Sure we're starting to give chat bots the ability to query information and even interpret user-provided images, but AFAIK the image interpretation is done using a different model rather than being an extension of the LLM.

As I understand it, Rust originally had support for garbage collected objects. It was removed because the community avoided it as a general practice to ensure that libraries could work without the optional GC runtime, due to its popularity as a systems language.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130607161259/http://pcwalton.g...

I think it's more that residential areas are 1hr+ commutes from offices/downtowns. You could build an office next to a residential area, and some do, but many of the job applicants will be in a different residential area -- often even in a different city. Suburban sprawl, y'all.

You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.

I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.

The basic principle of the greenhouse effect is that light from the sun hits the earth. Some of it is reflected out into space (because the atmosphere mostly lets it, some of it is absorbed and converted into heat. The heat can be radiated as IR but IR tends to get trapped by the atmosphere.

Solar panels are all black. So from a very nitpicky perspective, the energy used to power the A/C creates heat that is not radiated in the same way as, say, having a giant mirror on your roof would. The heat is also released locally rather than being aimed at the sky.

But from an overall perspective you are correct, because the alternative to solar is just having a regular roof which will convert some of the light into heat without doing any useful work, and because you'd probably get your energy from some less clean source.

Recycled water is usually considered non-potable, so while it can be reused it's usually not available for drinking water and needs separate pipes.

The UX for client certificates is horrible and practically an afterthought, so it's no surprise.

Interesting concept, but it feels like a distillation of the "insanity" difficulty mode of a roguelike where the only way to get a high (or low) score is to win the lottery. Repeatedly.

I'd echo liquidise's comment; some limited ability to rotate the pieces would add strategy instead of just spamming the reroll button and pattern-matching. The frequency that you're allowed to use the ability could serve as a difficulty slider.

It doesn't even take that much interactivity to make a mostly RNG-based game more fun; compare a basic slot machine to video poker.

204 No Content is not supposed to actually include any content

https://github.com/httpwg/http-core/issues/26

The elevator itself would need to extend past LEO into geostationary orbit, but you should be able to get off the elevator in LEO space.

As you're going up the space elevator, you would also be picking up horizontal velocity as you ascend. At ISS altitudes there would be enough atmospheric particles to slow you down once you got off, but it would take a while; probably on the order of years. Base jumping would not be a good idea.

This would probably be something closer to actors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model) rather than programs since programs are traditionally implemented as OS processes which are relatively expensive to spin up and terminate. At some level, though, somebody has to deal with freeing the memory, and they may do it less efficiently than you can.

"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail"

- Eliot Spitzer to CNN Money, an updated version of a much older saying by Martin Lomasney

There are CEOs that get paid a lot more than $5M/year in stock. Arguably that's also ridiculous, but it's certainly possible that paying a team of 20 highly skilled engineers $5M/year each brings more value to the company than paying a CEO $100M a year.

What's the value of the reputation risk of a major, very high profile failure?

Sometimes businesses end up on the wrong side of that bet. They see only the costs but not the benefits of preparedness (by the time it fails, there will probably be a different CEO in charge) and make a bad call.

Last couple times I went this year, it was a $5 fee at the box office, which was still considerably less than the $18 in fees online (for a $35 ticket). After I paid, they asked for my number and texted me a Ticketmaster link.

I've written multiple IMAP clients, and I agree it's a huge pain to work with. But the real issue is the API design and the fact that more advanced searching, synchronization, etc, is only available via extensions that are not guaranteed to exist on a given server.

You can write a JSON API that's equally bad, doesn't support paging, doesn't let you select just the fields you need, is missing key information in the extracted fields forcing you to parse the entire RFC822 text as a fallback, etc. Dealing with the parser is just one part of the battle.

Maybe they're the AOL dial-up of satellite phones? Surviving off legacy customers with minimal requirements who don't want to switch to something new.

React JSX mostly uses JS DOM property naming (className, style, tabIndex) but converts a few HTML-style attributes (data-, aria-)

I'm not a graphics programmer, but I found this article helpful for understanding the history and background behind mesh shaders: https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/04/mesh-shaders-release-the-i...

At least it's just a library and not a standard, but yes similar logic applies.

The most infamous recall was the Ford Pinto, and it was particularly bad because they knew about the problem before the car ever shipped, and once the problem was known didn't fix it for years even though the cost would have been $11/car.

Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).

I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.

I mean, I hope they'd at least vouch for you in a GoFundMe