rm445

This isn't the kind of article people have questions about - everyone is ready to jump in feet-first with strongly-held opinions!

I thought the article was fascinating and thought-provoking, I hope all the strongly-worded opinions aren't causing you to regret it.

I was also wondering whether tokenizer rules deserve some flak for making it harder to build identifiers and operators? Why is it more important (in C-like languages) for programmers to write without spaces, than to be able to call a variable ready? or define a +++ operator?

That's a fair comment. I don't think my comment reflects a fully rational decision and I could just use an app and log in. I don't need to have Reddit on my phone, it's entertainment I could take or leave.

However I do have sympathy for people who don't have any interest in becoming engaged users, and just want to see a useful comment thread for some particular info without all the hassle. The web is full of gates, walls and popups, and we don't all want to download the app and create an account for every site.

I can't be alone in just pretending Reddit doesn't exist on mobile. It's weird, I like Reddit a lot, on desktop I post and comment, but on mobile it is so shabby that I just ignore it instead of seeing if it can be made bearable by being logged in to an app.

Also, for anyone who just wants to fly and shoot without the grittiness and over-realism of No Man's Sky, check out Starlink: Battle for Atlas.

I love that there's this spectrum of space games in the last few years. Starlink is a fun little game, with a bad rep due to the toys-to-life aspect. (Though also, if you like the toys, they're cheap/clearance nowadays).

I don't know if there's any way to use Palm Pilot ('Graffiti') style alphabets on modern devices. I guess every year handwriting recognition gets better, fewer and fewer people are outliers, and it doesn't matter, but it has always appealed to me as a way to increase accuracy, finding an accommodation between man and machine.

On a side note, I've made my handwriting more readable on the past year, and it was a fairly small effort. Changing a few letter forms, but mostly just slowing down and being conscious about it. Little things like slanting the crosses on 'f' and 't' so they're distinct rather than running together.

You can buy car rental excess insurance from another insurer, much more reasonably priced than the rental companies' extra insurance.

My perception is that the rental companies are incredibly vigilant about minuscule scratches - my concern would be being charged €hundreds for a tiny scratch caused by a chipped-up stone. I wonder if the companies providing excess insurance are able to negotiate more robustly with the rental companies than the typical private individual?

It seems fairly clear from a licensing point of view that a bootloader is a separate program from what it boots (which can be pretty much anything). It does seem like something which could concern the community though. What if (in future) the bootloader only boots Prusa-signed firmware, and lines for programming the board directly are disabled in hardware at the factory? If Prusa aren't planning any user-hostile behaviour, they should act fairly quickly to keep their community happy.

Yow. Amazon prisons, maybe?

That's a great point - what's true for Amazon workers is just as true for waiters etc. But Amazon is big enough in absolute terms that they could maybe reach some better equilibrium if one exists, plus they're under a lot of scrutiny.

Preach. I did warehouse work years back in my teens, trundling around with a pallet truck picking orders was moderately enjoyable but it was inherently obvious that if the management had 'raised the temperature' by micromanaging us or demanding more output it would have become horrible.

Another thing that was apparent was that some people were just better order-pickers than me. One part of my post above was kinda wondering how Amazon would do if they kept the demanding work, but paid enough to recruit (and treated well enough to retain) physical outliers, a bunch of warehouse athletes.

I've visited a car factory, a well-run Japanese marque, where it was mentioned that they had very high initial turnover - some people just couldn't take the pace of the production line - but high longer-term retention. In a sense they must be doing something right.

The interesting wrinkle is that they seem to need to source unusually energetic and resilient people, and instead they're hiring at some lower bar and having enormous turnover.

It's an unusual twist on clearing the market - arguably they ought to raise wages, not so much to retain people by paying them enough that they stick it out in hell a bit longer, but so they can clear the market for people able to tolerate and thrive in the working conditions.

Ken Thompson wrote a regex engine which compiled (at runtime) regexes into data structures containing executable machine code, and invoked them (from C source) by jumping into the data i.e. treating its location as a function pointer. That's what's happening here except it's the start code inserted by the linker which is jumping into main.

So there's the utility, if you're hardcore enough to build machine code at runtime.

If you wanted to abuse main() particularly, I guess you've got argc and argv in registers, and your hand-compiled main 'function' could maybe have some self-modifying code?

It's weird though, you'd think that would be exactly the kind of risk that would be insurable. Privately or as a whole society. Some of us will keel over on the spot or otherwise incur near-zero end-of-life costs; others will need $2 million of care to make it through the last couple of years. It seems less relevant whether people in society pay their everyday medical costs out of pocket, compared to the fact that any one of us might need rare expensive treatment or complex care. The whole country sharing the risk as a massive national collective self-insurance exercise seems like the best solution.

Well that's two different things. Intrinsic versus extrinsic complexity.

The user experience may get simpler again, but the technology inside is likely to get more complex. Electrification might mean simpler mechanisms and fewer moving parts, but the software will get ever more complicated.

Now in a way it's usually a good thing, if all the complexity of something is hidden and users can treat it as though it's simple. But we'd probably all agree that extra complexity in software that can kill us if it goes wrong is worrying. The only way we know to write safe software is to make it as simple as possible, and write it slowly and expensively. SIL-rated software has already reached the automotive sector. But it seems like the sheer demand to make cars more complex (especially for self-driving) will outrun our ability to make them safe.

One of life's little wondrous coincidences - a global hunt for one Satoshi, years before the Satoshi Nakamoto mystery. I guess it's just a given name, like Richard or whatever.

I wish there had been a creative solution to the puzzle, rather than 'wait until a sufficiently creepy facial search on internet photos product is invented'.

Does this sort of incident cause secondary disruption, any kind of ripple effects? I felt that large chunks of the Web were flaky for most of the day, not the relatively short space of time mentioned here.

Musk was known to joke that the (pressurised) Cargo Dragon spacecraft had everything needed for a stowaway to visit the ISS. Thank goodness he didn't try it - probably a stunt too far even for him.

I don't think another player can actually be that helpful in Mario Kart, but it does have extremely strong steering assistance, which can be enabled/disabled in the pause menu. Not trying to be rude by comparing you to a small child, but the main benefit is that little ones can join in and have fun while they're not quite co-ordinated enough to steer properly.

If you wanted to get more into gaming, a Switch would be a good choice. There are lots of games which are mechanically accessible (still not trying to be rude here) to six-year-olds, while still being a ton of fun.

It's conceivable that microcontrollers with memory management units could become more commonplace. Your memory-trashing program could be restarted while the device keeps on doing other things, rather than the traditional bare-metal approach of having a watchdog restart the device.

Is 'you can either consent or leave' GDPR-compliant?

These large-scale war games aren't just an opinion or a white paper though. Maybe better to ask something like how often an unconventional win in a war game could actually be replicated by an adversary in real life.

I seem to recall a similar response to massed small boats (simulating) taking out a U.S. carrier in war games a few years ago. Implying that the Persian Gulf is far more dangerous than previously understood. AIUI the Navy did nothing but cry foul. Maybe the strategy has been changed in response since.

For the naming institution, the prospect that the eponymous person would be found to have done something dreadful is probably a bigger worry.

(Nothing remotely against Dr Perlmutter whom I know nothing about. It just seems we live in a scandal-filled age).

Is it appropriate to ask an on-topic but naive question?

It seems as a layman that safer and more legible AI would come from putting neural networks inside of a more 'old-fashioned AI' framework - layers of control loops, decision trees etc based on the output of the black box AI. So at least if your robot crashes or whatever, the computer vision output is in some legible intermediate form and the motion is tractable to traditional analysis.

This can't be an original thought, it must already be done to a large extent. But I get the impression that the way things are going is to get the trained model to 'drive' the output, for whatever the application is. Can someone with current industry knowledge comment?

The nice thing about buildings which last a long time is, the good ones can be kept around. It's the good side of survivorship bias.

Just to shout out that Raspberry Pi Press produce some excellent print magazines, albeit very beginner-focused.

Whether they'd be a profitable standalone business I don't know, but as a whole the Raspberry Pi operation seems to be very successful.

The occasional heavy-duty trip is a reasonable use case for a range extender (as in, an IC engine gen-set) either towed or on the truck bed.

It's mildly upsetting to me that the usual file extension for C++ isn't .c++, or for that matter .C++

Why shouldn't it be?

Very funny. But leak memory until you have to restart the process seems to be a very common strategy in practice. The programs explode even if the computer doesn't.

(Why (aren't (Working (SMS Interventions Designed to Boost College Success) (at Scale))))

The demand side is a factor too. Some companies seem to place a premium on being able to flex numbers of contract staff rather than adding and removing numbers of permanent employees. Maybe for morale?