By that logic, if I want a production script to copy some files around and test a few things I should code it up in C++ or ASM since all languages are technically equally suited for the task.
Ruby is a good example of the magpies in action - they hop from flavor of the year language to language to have something new on the resume and to get in while it's still fun and they can still be trendmakers.
Then they flocked off to whatever the new hotness was (I've lost track) and left it as 'That language you use for Rails'.
Python people just want to get their work done and have the code be maintainable, so it endures.
Nim is somewhat interesting, but even that article says that now the hard work starts - you need a library for/everything/.
Developing GUIs for databases on Windows 10 is not going to be fun and cool. But that existed back in the 80s, it was COBOL on mainframes.
If you want it to be fun then you have to pick something fun, which usually involves one of the small boards like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, adding some motor control... This is what I do. These small systems are all quite digestible and have stuff built in we would have killed for, and you can make actual things which do things, be they useful or just playful.
Or you could develop games for a classic system - there are still people doing homebrew games for all the old systems like Megadrive, Speccy, Apple ][, C/64, Lynx, etc etc. Or there's RPGMaker.
There is so much awesome stuff going on right now from Arduino-like Maker stuff to drones to GPU power to deep learning to VR - I just got excited about a cheap tiny little camera component (neeeerd).
So when you say 'computing isn't as fun and cool as it used to be' you mean YOU aren't as fun and cool as you used to be - and who is, besides Betty White? Not me. But that's what really happened, don't blame it on computing. You let your skills decay, didn't keep up to date, don't get excited by new stuff, and are too lazy to even keep up with what you knew how to do. The C64 is still thriving if you thought it was more interesting than watching sports or, oh hey, Westworld is on, I'll start tomorrow.
First, I know Javascript is wildly more popular as the language that runs everywhere, but it's not what most people use when they're writing a system / glue script - though some people do, they've got a hammer.
Python's the utility / glue scripting language of choice precisely because it's READABLE - it doesn't have nine different ways to do everything like Perl does which makes it less expressive but more comprehensible and maintainable. You can definitely bang stuff out faster in Perl, but you can come back to the Python four years later and easily figure out what it's doing (just did that recently, fixed a large four year old 2.x script for new requirements and features and upgraded it to Python 3.x in a day, most of that testing), or grab someone else's Python and maintain it with reasonable effort unless they were seriously defective. Terrible programmers can write Perl in Python, and great programmers can write very maintainable code in Perl, but the language heavily skews the odds.
Remember when Ruby briefly seemed like a contender for Python? Well, it was neat, and decent enough (I used it), but it had too many perlisms (punctuation vomit syntax) which made it similarly not so readable, and then all the magpies flew away to the next hotness and I went back to Python as more maintainable - and more capable because of the strong library support. And now Ruby is just 'That language you use for Rails'.
Similarly, people like to bitch about the whitespace, but it forces readability. Perl people considered cramming 5 or more lines worth of Python on a single line a bragging point, and it was when vertical space was limited, but it's hell for readability and maintainability and we've got big monitors now. And if you have any code skills at all the whitespace is not a problem - I do Python, C#, C++, bash, Haskell, ASM, and VHDL - all wildly different, and the biggest problem is remembering how each does '# of items in a collection' (Count? count? Count()? Length? length? sizeof()?) - whitespace is not even on the radar.
A more valid complaint is that Python has relentlessly marched towards cleaning itself up even if that breaks compatibility - it is not afraid to clean up terrible mistakes it has made (usually on new features) rather than leaving them in forever for compatibility reasons like bash has to. I know that's a big sticking point - it can be jarring when old code breaks, but locking old code you don't have the time to maintain to a specific version has worked pretty well for us. Mostly that's just segregating things as 2.x or 3.x. Code we have kept up to latest version has improved as a result as the language improves.
Biggest weakness - the lack of compile time checks due to strong but dynamic typing continues to be an Achilles heel for any large project. Python (and other scripting languages) just aren't suited for that and we don't use it for that. Use something with static compile-time checking like C# or C++ - yes, after all my kvetching about readability we still use C++ for some things because nothing else fills its niche.
Unless the company has personally treated you amazing, being the white knight for a giant corporation is an incredibly dumb thing to do, and something you only do because we're just hairless tribal chimps. But you can overcome that.
Be a whore. Buy whatever's best at the time. When the AMD M1s were out I used nothing but. Then they slowly fell behind and I switched to Intels, and have been there ever since - I had hopes for Piledriver, but no. But if the AMD Zen is as good as it looks then I'll be all over that. Same thing with graphics cards. I've done Voodoo, Matrox, ATI, Nvidia, AMD, using an NVidia 1080 right now just because it was best bang for the buck with least power and noise.
Do you really think they care if AMDNo1Fan is out there defending it in every thread and loyally buying only AMD? Only insofar as it means they can raise prices on you. Buy from someone else and force them to get better.
Updating the fucking lightbulb because the thing Phillips sold you is a piece of shit is not the job of the customer. They bought an appliance that's just supposed to work.
I don't buy any of them because I know Internet of Shit companies have completely blown it there and in every other way and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Pardon the strong language, not trolling, this is just such an obvious, predictable, very predicted cluster that I have Strong Feelings.
You use what you need to. Sometimes I use Windows, sometimes I use BSD, sometimes I use MacOS, sometimes I use Debian, sometimes CentOS yadda yadda yadda. The craftsman skill is to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one and how to fix them. They're all sgreat in various ways and all shit in various ways and they can all be redeemed if you know how.
Or you can just hold your nose and be RMS tootling his recorder while dancing in a tutu.
They've got a whole range of laptops that are generally sane - for instance ctrl key is on the outside left not the f@#!$ing Fn key. Last time I looked, which was 8 months ago, I got one with a 17" 4k screen, 16 gigs RAM, 512 gb PCIe SSD, 3 usb3 ports for $1100 and I'm sure that's cheaper now. And it'll be much cheaper if you want a smaller screen - but I have to do real coding and design work on this on the road so went as large as possible.
Note - like Lenovo or Dell their autoupdate stuff is poop.
It's about time - I keep running into issues with my IoT botnets, car overrides, and industrial process control malware where I just can't guarantee that I can get into these hideously insecure systems on a fixed time budget.
This is a serious concern, because when I can only deliver 500,000 insecure baby monitors to my Russian masters instead of the 800,000 they demanded, that's a polonium-210 desert!
(Seriously, this is actually a real issue that needs to be fixed- you want real-time ethernet for some things like you want a real-time kernel, but I can't help picturing this as working on how reliably you can get across a flaming bridge).
Eagleworks has a $50K budget. It's a couple guys puttering around in their spare time, and NASA's stance is 'We don't know what the hell they're doing' and refuses to comment on whatever it is that they are doing. It's good department to have, because stuff can get weird, but this is like finding a bump in LHC's data. It's a decent first step, and if positive hopefully the next step will be someone with some serious lab equipment taking a stab at it and trying to make it fail. And if it still works then it's time to dance in the streets.
Hell, I hope this works, it's just something you need a super high standard of proof on, especially with all the high profile scammers.
The reason they leaked this is that nobody will touch Eagleworks's papers, not just this one. This is softening up the reception via gullible 'journalists' and bloggers who have had shit for science education.
It could still be real, but you'd be absolutely crazy to even worry this before someone reputable looks at the final paper and goes 'wow, guess we should look at this.'
> the paper which argues that the signals "cannot be caused by instrumental or data analysis effects."
It can. Their methodology is completely full of holes and willfully insufficiently paranoid considering what they're claiming.
Go read the PDF - it's hard to say 100% without having the original data, but it sure looks like they're torturing the data till it confesses what they want - what they predicted in their previous paper.
Hell, there might even be a signal, by all means keep looking harder. But when you jump right to History Channel 'I Don't Know - Therefore Aliens.' And then add 'HUNDREDS of Aliens Civilizations' on such tenuous evidence you start the race with a self-inflicted foot wound.
Oh come on, the quality measure here is just ludicrous. China is certainly on the way up, but also leads in number of bad papers and circle jerks for paper cites . That's a common tactic in boiler room publish or perish science and not just in China. Anyone can get cited once or even twice; people often cite themselves just to drive their numbers up. If you read Nature this is a common subject, as is China's magnificent drive to game the numbers.
What matters are results, and here are some countries that have demonstrated more talent in AI than China has so far. In no particular order, and I've definitely missed some: - UK - Canada - United States - Israel - Germany
Again, don't count them out in the long run - but right now, no.
I know I've said it before, but customer complaints about the phantom accounts go back to at least 2001.
The big thing here is that we now have a certified letter from a high ranking Wells Fargo employee that the crooks in charge of the illegal program were notified as early as 2006.
He's endorsed Hillary before too, but Trump is very much his kind of guy.
Just always remember that he's a liar who thinks he's the smartest man on earth - and just in case you doubt it, he will create sockpuppets to argue with you.
Samsung laser printers are cheap and just work. The ones at work (and the ones I have at home) just WORK, the only time they don't work is when they're out of paper. You can always print to them, and it's reliable.
On the other hand, the HP printers on the same work network are pieces of crap that get 'lost' all the time ('Printer is not online'), probably because of how terrible the HP drivers are. And those HP drivers nag you all the f@$ing time to install the rest of the HP bloatware.
So now they're going to slap their shitty drivers on the Samsungs and they'll be completely terrible too, and cartridge prices will skyrocket. There's no upside on this for consumers.
Amen. Hey manufacturers, blue LEDs were cool for about six months in the 2000s, now they're just painfully eye-gouging in the dark and a painful reminder of how uncool you guys are. Why not put swarovski crystals or a black velvet Elvis on your device too?
They have been decreasing them instead. Because they figured TSA Pre would be a resounding success and everyone would be using that.
But they made it so annoying hardly anyone bothers - which is great when I just sail through, but sucks if you're in the other line, especially since they've effectively removed a lane for TSA Pre people.
I know a guy who couldn't hold a job even at Target, Wendy's, corner gas station... Now he works for the TSA.
He's not making fat cash, but this is a guy who wasn't even capable of working at Target as a shelf stocker and now he's working at security checkpoints. If I thought the TSA actually did anything I'd be horrified.
And they're union (I don't think union is automatically bad, but government and union is the worst possible combo), so performance is a joke and he can't get fired short of doing something blatantly illegal (and maybe not even then). Luckily he's just dumb, not crooked, but there are plenty of low class criminals working for TSA. Sometimes they even get caught.
I do the chores when I'm in a good mood because that's when I've got the energy and motivation. Similarly, after a terrible day, forget it.
Also, your better than normal mood won't last even if you don't do anything with it - you'll return to equilibrium. I've tried! It's not sabotaging a good mood, it's making good use of it.
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic, if I want a production script to copy some files around and test a few things I should code it up in C++ or ASM since all languages are technically equally suited for the task.
Ruby is a good example of the magpies in action - they hop from flavor of the year language to language to have something new on the resume and to get in while it's still fun and they can still be trendmakers.
Then they flocked off to whatever the new hotness was (I've lost track) and left it as 'That language you use for Rails'.
Python people just want to get their work done and have the code be maintainable, so it endures.
Nim is somewhat interesting, but even that article says that now the hard work starts - you need a library for /everything/.
Developing GUIs for databases on Windows 10 is not going to be fun and cool. But that existed back in the 80s, it was COBOL on mainframes.
If you want it to be fun then you have to pick something fun, which usually involves one of the small boards like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, adding some motor control... This is what I do. These small systems are all quite digestible and have stuff built in we would have killed for, and you can make actual things which do things, be they useful or just playful.
Or you could develop games for a classic system - there are still people doing homebrew games for all the old systems like Megadrive, Speccy, Apple ][, C/64, Lynx, etc etc. Or there's RPGMaker.
There is so much awesome stuff going on right now from Arduino-like Maker stuff to drones to GPU power to deep learning to VR - I just got excited about a cheap tiny little camera component (neeeerd).
So when you say 'computing isn't as fun and cool as it used to be' you mean YOU aren't as fun and cool as you used to be - and who is, besides Betty White? Not me. But that's what really happened, don't blame it on computing. You let your skills decay, didn't keep up to date, don't get excited by new stuff, and are too lazy to even keep up with what you knew how to do. The C64 is still thriving if you thought it was more interesting than watching sports or, oh hey, Westworld is on, I'll start tomorrow.
First, I know Javascript is wildly more popular as the language that runs everywhere, but it's not what most people use when they're writing a system / glue script - though some people do, they've got a hammer.
Python's the utility / glue scripting language of choice precisely because it's READABLE - it doesn't have nine different ways to do everything like Perl does which makes it less expressive but more comprehensible and maintainable. You can definitely bang stuff out faster in Perl, but you can come back to the Python four years later and easily figure out what it's doing (just did that recently, fixed a large four year old 2.x script for new requirements and features and upgraded it to Python 3.x in a day, most of that testing), or grab someone else's Python and maintain it with reasonable effort unless they were seriously defective. Terrible programmers can write Perl in Python, and great programmers can write very maintainable code in Perl, but the language heavily skews the odds.
Remember when Ruby briefly seemed like a contender for Python? Well, it was neat, and decent enough (I used it), but it had too many perlisms (punctuation vomit syntax) which made it similarly not so readable, and then all the magpies flew away to the next hotness and I went back to Python as more maintainable - and more capable because of the strong library support. And now Ruby is just 'That language you use for Rails'.
Similarly, people like to bitch about the whitespace, but it forces readability. Perl people considered cramming 5 or more lines worth of Python on a single line a bragging point, and it was when vertical space was limited, but it's hell for readability and maintainability and we've got big monitors now. And if you have any code skills at all the whitespace is not a problem - I do Python, C#, C++, bash, Haskell, ASM, and VHDL - all wildly different, and the biggest problem is remembering how each does '# of items in a collection' (Count? count? Count()? Length? length? sizeof()?) - whitespace is not even on the radar.
A more valid complaint is that Python has relentlessly marched towards cleaning itself up even if that breaks compatibility - it is not afraid to clean up terrible mistakes it has made (usually on new features) rather than leaving them in forever for compatibility reasons like bash has to. I know that's a big sticking point - it can be jarring when old code breaks, but locking old code you don't have the time to maintain to a specific version has worked pretty well for us. Mostly that's just segregating things as 2.x or 3.x. Code we have kept up to latest version has improved as a result as the language improves.
Biggest weakness - the lack of compile time checks due to strong but dynamic typing continues to be an Achilles heel for any large project. Python (and other scripting languages) just aren't suited for that and we don't use it for that. Use something with static compile-time checking like C# or C++ - yes, after all my kvetching about readability we still use C++ for some things because nothing else fills its niche.
Unless the company has personally treated you amazing, being the white knight for a giant corporation is an incredibly dumb thing to do, and something you only do because we're just hairless tribal chimps. But you can overcome that.
Be a whore. Buy whatever's best at the time. When the AMD M1s were out I used nothing but. Then they slowly fell behind and I switched to Intels, and have been there ever since - I had hopes for Piledriver, but no. But if the AMD Zen is as good as it looks then I'll be all over that. Same thing with graphics cards. I've done Voodoo, Matrox, ATI, Nvidia, AMD, using an NVidia 1080 right now just because it was best bang for the buck with least power and noise.
Do you really think they care if AMDNo1Fan is out there defending it in every thread and loyally buying only AMD? Only insofar as it means they can raise prices on you. Buy from someone else and force them to get better.
Updating the fucking lightbulb because the thing Phillips sold you is a piece of shit is not the job of the customer. They bought an appliance that's just supposed to work.
I don't buy any of them because I know Internet of Shit companies have completely blown it there and in every other way and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Pardon the strong language, not trolling, this is just such an obvious, predictable, very predicted cluster that I have Strong Feelings.
You use what you need to. Sometimes I use Windows, sometimes I use BSD, sometimes I use MacOS, sometimes I use Debian, sometimes CentOS yadda yadda yadda. The craftsman skill is to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one and how to fix them. They're all sgreat in various ways and all shit in various ways and they can all be redeemed if you know how.
Or you can just hold your nose and be RMS tootling his recorder while dancing in a tutu.
If you're on Win 10 and you care, use Shut Up Windows 10 ( https://www.oo-software.com/en... ).
You'll have less telemetry than Windows 7 or 8, MacOS, and probably Ubuntu (I forget, are they spying this month or not?).
They've got a whole range of laptops that are generally sane - for instance ctrl key is on the outside left not the f@#!$ing Fn key. Last time I looked, which was 8 months ago, I got one with a 17" 4k screen, 16 gigs RAM, 512 gb PCIe SSD, 3 usb3 ports for $1100 and I'm sure that's cheaper now. And it'll be much cheaper if you want a smaller screen - but I have to do real coding and design work on this on the road so went as large as possible.
Note - like Lenovo or Dell their autoupdate stuff is poop.
I meant dessert, but the non-real-time ethernet ate my keystroke.
It's about time - I keep running into issues with my IoT botnets, car overrides, and industrial process control malware where I just can't guarantee that I can get into these hideously insecure systems on a fixed time budget.
This is a serious concern, because when I can only deliver 500,000 insecure baby monitors to my Russian masters instead of the 800,000 they demanded, that's a polonium-210 desert!
(Seriously, this is actually a real issue that needs to be fixed- you want real-time ethernet for some things like you want a real-time kernel, but I can't help picturing this as working on how reliably you can get across a flaming bridge).
Eagleworks has a $50K budget. It's a couple guys puttering around in their spare time, and NASA's stance is 'We don't know what the hell they're doing' and refuses to comment on whatever it is that they are doing. It's good department to have, because stuff can get weird, but this is like finding a bump in LHC's data. It's a decent first step, and if positive hopefully the next step will be someone with some serious lab equipment taking a stab at it and trying to make it fail. And if it still works then it's time to dance in the streets.
Hell, I hope this works, it's just something you need a super high standard of proof on, especially with all the high profile scammers.
Excellent - that's far more useful info than a fake leak. I'd like this to be true, but after so many scams...
The reason they leaked this is that nobody will touch Eagleworks's papers, not just this one. This is softening up the reception via gullible 'journalists' and bloggers who have had shit for science education.
It could still be real, but you'd be absolutely crazy to even worry this before someone reputable looks at the final paper and goes 'wow, guess we should look at this.'
> the paper which argues that the signals "cannot be caused by instrumental or data analysis effects."
It can. Their methodology is completely full of holes and willfully insufficiently paranoid considering what they're claiming.
Go read the PDF - it's hard to say 100% without having the original data, but it sure looks like they're torturing the data till it confesses what they want - what they predicted in their previous paper.
Hell, there might even be a signal, by all means keep looking harder. But when you jump right to History Channel 'I Don't Know - Therefore Aliens.' And then add 'HUNDREDS of Aliens Civilizations' on such tenuous evidence you start the race with a self-inflicted foot wound.
Oh come on, the quality measure here is just ludicrous. China is certainly on the way up, but also leads in number of bad papers and circle jerks for paper cites . That's a common tactic in boiler room publish or perish science and not just in China. Anyone can get cited once or even twice; people often cite themselves just to drive their numbers up. If you read Nature this is a common subject, as is China's magnificent drive to game the numbers.
What matters are results, and here are some countries that have demonstrated more talent in AI than China has so far. In no particular order, and I've definitely missed some:
- UK
- Canada
- United States
- Israel
- Germany
Again, don't count them out in the long run - but right now, no.
I know I've said it before, but customer complaints about the phantom accounts go back to at least 2001.
The big thing here is that we now have a certified letter from a high ranking Wells Fargo employee that the crooks in charge of the illegal program were notified as early as 2006.
He's endorsed Hillary before too, but Trump is very much his kind of guy.
Just always remember that he's a liar who thinks he's the smartest man on earth - and just in case you doubt it, he will create sockpuppets to argue with you.
Open Source Siri always responds with 'RTFM, noob'. Should be pretty easy.
Yes, this joke has been brought to you by the year 2005.
Samsung laser printers are cheap and just work. The ones at work (and the ones I have at home) just WORK, the only time they don't work is when they're out of paper. You can always print to them, and it's reliable.
On the other hand, the HP printers on the same work network are pieces of crap that get 'lost' all the time ('Printer is not online'), probably because of how terrible the HP drivers are. And those HP drivers nag you all the f@$ing time to install the rest of the HP bloatware.
So now they're going to slap their shitty drivers on the Samsungs and they'll be completely terrible too, and cartridge prices will skyrocket. There's no upside on this for consumers.
Amen. Hey manufacturers, blue LEDs were cool for about six months in the 2000s, now they're just painfully eye-gouging in the dark and a painful reminder of how uncool you guys are. Why not put swarovski crystals or a black velvet Elvis on your device too?
That's only because they're sniveling corporate bitches. The giant media companies own them, and they know it, so they're not going to bite the hand.
They have been decreasing them instead. Because they figured TSA Pre would be a resounding success and everyone would be using that.
But they made it so annoying hardly anyone bothers - which is great when I just sail through, but sucks if you're in the other line, especially since they've effectively removed a lane for TSA Pre people.
I know a guy who couldn't hold a job even at Target, Wendy's, corner gas station... Now he works for the TSA.
He's not making fat cash, but this is a guy who wasn't even capable of working at Target as a shelf stocker and now he's working at security checkpoints. If I thought the TSA actually did anything I'd be horrified.
And they're union (I don't think union is automatically bad, but government and union is the worst possible combo), so performance is a joke and he can't get fired short of doing something blatantly illegal (and maybe not even then). Luckily he's just dumb, not crooked, but there are plenty of low class criminals working for TSA. Sometimes they even get caught.
I do the chores when I'm in a good mood because that's when I've got the energy and motivation. Similarly, after a terrible day, forget it.
Also, your better than normal mood won't last even if you don't do anything with it - you'll return to equilibrium. I've tried! It's not sabotaging a good mood, it's making good use of it.