xormapmap

I used to manage a small fleet of about 6 XPS laptops at my old job. 3 of them needed motherboard replacements under warranty within a year. People would put them on standby and put them in their bag, then get home and find the laptop had decided to start up of its own volition and overheat to the point it would be searing hot to the touch. The charging would randomly fail or the laptop would go into a boot loop. Not to mention problems with Windows deciding to update 2 minutes before an important meeting (and then naturally the progress bar would get stuck).

> Wouldn’t a language designed for vibe coding naturally dispense with much of what is convenient and ergonomic for humans in favor of what is convenient and ergonomic for machines? Why not have it just write C? Or hell, why not x86 assembly?

Or why not just produce a binary directly? It seems we've just invented a compiler.

I became interested in the language after a brief relationship with a Ukrainian.

The idea that child brains are better at learning languages is a myth. Adults struggle with languages because traditional language education is not fit for purpose. If you took a child and isolated them in such a way that they never got comprehensible input, and instead only gave them traditional language lessons (think textbooks, grammar drills) - they too would struggle. The good news is that if you take an adult and give them comprehensible input like you would a child, they will learn at least as effectively as a child.

Comprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1).

I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.

Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.

Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content. Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.

I had no problem with ads when they were just a banner next to the video. Now youtube is borderline unusable without an ad blocker. That said they are free to try and stop me, and I am free to continue using ublock.

So many of the so-called "C alternatives" end up doing way too much. I don't need algebraic data types or classes or an integrated build system or a package manager.

What I would like to see is a language that is essentially just C with the major design flaws fixed. Remove the implicit casting and obscure integer promotions. Make spiral rule hold everywhere instead of being able to put const at the beginning of the declaration. Make `sizeof()` return a signed type. Don't allow mixed signed/unsigned arithmetic. Make variables/functions private by default i.e. add `public` to make public instead of `static` to make private.

Keep the preprocessor and for the love of god make it easy to invoke the compiler/linker directly so I can write my own Makefile.

He isn't? The patch of green on the finger is his middle knuckle. His finger is well outside the trigger guard.

> If you weld 2 sticks of metal together end to end, then bash them on the ground, they're likely to break at the weld

This doesn't sound even remotely true to me, except in the case of an absolute beginner doing the welding

> Is there a library for that?

What? Are there really people out there relying on libraries for every peripheral? I've never seen anyone use a third party library for peripherals like that, short of some prototyping on an Arduino or the like. It's always just drivers implemented from scratch.

> I just don't see any of the upsides that so many people seem to.

The way I see it I'm going to be paying a mortgage either way. I'd rather it be my own than my landlord's.

> It’s not uncommon for borrowers to extend their loans until their deaths

How is this possible? I can't imagine any bank giving me a loan knowing there's a good chance I won't be alive to pay it back.

The MISRA guidelines are awful.

I know we all generally just do what the boss tells us but:

> being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard

Why do we keep doing this? If you get rid of the animations, popups, and invasive ads, then with what's left you can probably do away with all of this crap.

Many countries do this for immigration. In New Zealand they say your test result doesn't affect your application. Whether that's true I don't know.

> It is much easier to set a kid straight than try to fix an adult

Is this true? Adults have free will & personal responsibility, kids are sort of at the whim of their parents and have no real legal rights when it comes to escaping a bad situation

In terms of the physics involved, a head-on collision with a similar vehicle traveling at the same speed as you is equivalent to hitting a concrete wall.

I find C89 to be much nicer to be honest.

The actual application step might take that long, assuming you have all your supporting documents ready. The trouble is you often need to adapt your CV to the job & write a cover letter at a minimum. Depending how much you care about the job, this might include studying the job description carefully, reading the company website, and maybe even contacting the company to request more information. Then proof-reading and editing everything. It probably takes me at least an hour for most jobs, even if the actual submission of files only took 1 minute in the end.

Hit the nail on the head. A more appropriate comparison would be if one worker went on strike, not all of them.

In my view, bachelor's degree is beginner, especially if you haven't got any further knowledge than that from work experience or anything.

> I wonder how we will prevent ourselves from making this and similar mistakes in the future

Just listen to the teachers, parents, and students. In high school I was among the last year groups to be pen and paper. All the younger students had laptops and iPads. I distinctly remember during the change that very few people thought it was a good idea, except for those students who got a free laptop or iPad out of it. I imagine the change was mostly brought about by administrators and politicians.

That doesn't mean the death rate of children due to firearms is high, it could just mean there isn't really anything else that kills children i.e. they mostly have parents looking out for them, don't have to work dangerous jobs, and haven't lived long enough for lifestyle factors to take effect yet.

> shortcuts like bagged premixed salad, bottled dressing ...

At what point is something no longer a shortcut? Do you also consider the time it takes you to track, shoot, carry, & butcher an animal? Or do you take the shortcut of buying your meat? Do you grow your own wheat? Grind your own flour? Or are those shortcuts too?

> To me the fact that insurers aren’t insuring natural disasters due to climate change is a good argument that it’s real.

The only thing I conclude from this is that they think this move will be profitable and that is independent from whether climate change is real.

While this is a cool idea, is typing speed really the bottleneck for anyone who uses a keyboard for a living?

Oh please, ham radio is not nearly in the same category as making bombs or committing arson. You could make your argument about pretty much any hobby (what service does growing your own vegetables provide to society? We should ban it to let commercial farming get ahead). And for what it's worth, ham radio has probably got plenty of hackers into fields like electrical engineering, so if you value what those engineers provide...

> put a computing device in every student’s hands

Did anyone stop to think if this step was necessary?

> It's amazing how much extra mental energy I have now that I'm on amphetamines

You don't say.