If they fuck with alt-tab at all, I'm not sure I could use that operating system. That's like 20+ years of muscle memory to overcome
Well you know, I've been running the icewm window manager
on linux for over 20 years, and mostly living inside emacs
all that time... worrying about someone changing my user
interface out from under me has not been a big concern.
Just, as they say, sayin'.
(On the other hand, I also run Firefox which gives
mozilla.org and Gnome an opportunity to fuck with me
whenever they flip a coin. I'll solve that one one-of-these-days.)
That's one of the reasons why newer systems bundle everything in a self-sufficient container.
The main reason is the js kids got burned by less.js and they've concluded that the dependencies on anything is dangerous and you can't trust anything but massive libraries shipped by the FANG.
the person who decided that using a space or a tab in the wrong place would break things really should suffer in the next life however
On the subject of backwards compatibility-- which I'm generally a big fan of-- the Makefile syntax was quickly understood to be a mistake, but the author had about 10 people using it already, and didn't want to annoy them by changing it.
I've seen people working on Makefiles who very carefully cut and paste the beginning of the previous line before entering a new one-- they know there's something magic about that indentation, but they're not too sure what...
That's the official report from 2012. It's well worth reading,
but will not tell you anything about the construction of the
"Land-side Impermeable Wall" which was started in 2016.
The short answer: the "ice wall" is helping to reduce water flow,
but isn't perfect, and if you want to spin that in a positive
way, you can say "look, it's working!", and if you want to
go the other way you can say "it's not working!"-- because anything
short of perfection is obviously useless.
A better question would be "how well is it working?" but even
better would be "how well does it need to work?".
I'm inclined to agree with our anti-nuclear friends that this
is all a bunch of theater to reassure people (much like that that
other "wall" we've been hearing so much about). It would be nice
if they were just reassured by declining levels of leakage, and
little evidence of health impacts, but that kind of message gets
lost in the weeds of statistical chatter and "activist" shouting.
A government-commissioned group of experts concluded
Wednesday that a costly underground ice wall is only partially
effective in reducing the ever-growing amount of contaminated
water at Japan's destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant, and said
other measures are needed as well.
The panel agreed that the ice wall helps, but said it doesn't
completely solve the problem. Panel members suggested that
additional measures be taken to minimize the inflow of rainwater
and groundwater, such as repairing roofs and other damaged parts
of buildings.
Martin Fackler at the NYT commented:
Since the start, the project has attracted its share of
skeptics. Some say buried obstacles at the plant, including
tunnels that linked the reactor buildings to other structures,
will leave holes in the ice wall, making it more like a
sieve. Others question why such an exotic solution is necessary
when a traditional steel or concrete wall might perform better.
What are the health implications of the Fukushima Daiichi NPS (FDNPS) nuclear accident?
[...]
UNSCEAR published a report on the levels and
effects of radiation exposure due to the accident. In 2015,
UNSCEAR released a white paper that evaluates new information in
the peer-reviewed literature.
There were no acute radiation injuries or deaths among the
workers or the public due to exposure to radiation resulting from
the FDNPS accident.
Considering the level of estimated doses, the lifetime
radiation-induced cancer risks other than thyroid are small and
much smaller than the lifetime baseline cancer risks.
[...]
There have been recent reports about thyroid cancer cases being
diagnosed among children exposed to low doses of radioactive
iodine as a result of the Fukushima accident. These reports
should be interpreted with caution. [...] The substantial number
of cases that have already been observed in the Fukushima Health
Management Survey have been considered likely due to the
sensitivity of the screening rather than to radiation exposure.
From a global health perspective, the health risks directly
related to radiation exposure are low in Japan and extremely low
in neighbouring countries and the rest of the world.
Wake me up when the software can discover the relationship between the columns in the table, and insert the appropriate cell-references and math operations.
Thinking in terms of "discovering the relationship" is
old-fashioned thinking, today's advanced software can
automatically try every possible relationship and use a
crowd-sourced technique to determine the most popular of all
possible underlying data models.
And column summation errors can now be introduced
automatically to eliminate any legal responsibility for
re-working estimates to hit desired targets.
Don't be ridiculous, reel-to-reel tape is cool. You can use them as echo filters because the record and play heads are slightly seperated,
you can play tapes backwards, you can create physical tape loops that degrade in neat ways, if you've got two of them you can create virtual ("frippertronics") loops with them, running a tape from one to the other...
Reel-to-reel is the greatest-- it's just not dumbed-down consumer tech.
"Not enough freedom" is not actually what comes to mind when most people think of internet commenting-- nearly everyone is interested in better quality and/or improving the tone or direction of on-line discussions.
There's a certain kind of nerd that thinks the freedom to shout [censored epithets] is just what the world needs... most of us feel like we can live without it.
(Slashdot's "lameness filter" prevented me from citing actual examples of epithets in the last paragraph-- ironic infinite loop detected, aborting
You may not give a second thought to the tunes spinning on a constant loop
Actually, I give it a second thought, in fact I give it a
first thought, and it's one of the things that keeps me out of
those places.
I've walked into a big chain supermarket
twice in the last six months, the first time I realized they were
playing Christmas Music I got out of there as quickly as I could.
I just went back the other day, and they had some new pop music
running, none of which I'm familiar with, which puts it in the
"mildly interesting" category for me-- then they put on a song
that seemed listenable at first but was so repitious it had
clearly been designed to be Catchy-- it got stuck in my head after
listening to only about half of it.
I got out of there mumbling Tension apprehension and dissension has begun.
I doubt it. Everyone there seems to be ordering
mocha-almond-bacon slushies with freeze-dried lark
tongues on top.
One thing about the 90s, I will never forgive the kids for
ruining the coffee. If you walk into a random place you're
likely to get carmel-flavored turpentine. And the show tunes
don't improve the experience.
Nuclear power has generated a tremendous amount of clean power over the last half-century, and if the entire planet had reacted to the 70s energy crisis the way France did, we might not actually have a global warming problem now; and any place that gets Green Fever and shuts down it's nukes is actually contributing to global warming-- their CO2 emissions either go up, or-- in the case of German-- go flat when you might've expected them to come down, because of less coal use.
Nuclear power is not actually expensive, it just looks that way when compared to stuff like Natural Gas that has side-effects that everyone ignores, and which may actually destroy the planet-- and to this day, "renewables" rely on infill from wonderful power sources like this to cover it's gross unreliability.
I can't imagine why you think the goal here is to be "fair" to solar power-- the goal is to keep from destroying the planet.
I put "zero carbon" in quotes because I know some pedantic
asshole will point out that large carbon footprint of building a
nuclear power plant.
Full life-cycle analyses of CO2-e emissions for various energy
sources have been done many times-- the only metastudy the
anti-nukes had on their side was a piece of garbage by Sovacool,
and even that didn't really do a good job of villifying nuclear,
if you looked at the numbers. The summary is that anything
besides burning fossil fuels is pretty damn good, quibbling about
whether nuclear or wind or solar is cleaner is just trying to
score talking points through pedantry. (This is true even if
you use Sovacool's ridiculous and outdated meta-study.)
If there are any numbers that are questionable in this realm
it's with Natural Gas. We know it's worse than we used to think, but
the renewables enthusiasts still implicitly think it'll make a wonderful
"bridge technology" though they tend to use different dog-whistles
these days (something about flexible load, adaptive networks? I forget
now).
Ah, A man who knows something about outrageous lies...
I sometimes dream of a world where the anti-nuclear/pro-solar fanatics had everything they
say recorded and they were held to some standard of accountability-- instead they just say
whatever, and when it turns out it's nonsense (Mark Z. Jacobsen?) then they just get to dance
away from it and start saying whatever else sounds good that week.
If reporting on nuclear technology was like reporting on solar, we'd all talk about this idea all week, telling everyone that nuclear power was about to become incredibly cheap as the fuel costs drop to near zero.
Then if the idea didn't pan out, we'd all pretend we'd never said anything about it, and move on to another nifty-sounding announcement.
It's nice to see the slashdot crowd chiming in with another round
of entirely predictable commentary.
Some people just can't handle it, if only you were a
brilliantly well-adjusted genius like myself you would never have
these problems. Only addicts have trouble with addiction, so just
don't be one. See, easy!
Technology goooood. Technology always goooood.
No need to worry about anything.
And forget about that "regulation" idea. Government always the problem.
The New York Times? If this were really a problem it'd be on zdnet. Or medium.
I say this every other day in one form or another, but let me try again: we all keep jumping up and down and shouting about whether we need a more flexible language or a fussier language with super-strong type-checking and encapsulation and what not, and some are deeply convinced that Pythons's fascist attitude toward formatting is excellent, and some are not -- one of the reaons the Go project was started, from what I understand, was to get away from syntactic whitespace--
None of us really know who's right about any of this, because to really find out someone would need to do experiments, and designing these experiments would require knowledge of social science techniques, and "Computer Scientists" refuse to consider doing that kind of science, because most of them are really mathematicians in disguise.
So we're stuck with a religious fervour for concepts like "elegance" without any real reason to believe any of it is right.
For big projects you need rigid type checking, complex data structures, fine tuned encapsulation, compile time error checking, static and dynamic analysis, verifiable memory allocation and release, etc.
So you're arguing for a less flexible language. Yann LeCun suggests we might need a more "flexible and easy to work with" than Python.
Why he thinks that's the case is not touched on at all in this article, which makes it an unusually inane story even for slashdot.
Well you know, you've got to dumb things down for the swipe-and-wipe crowd. They never do anything much, so there's no point in putting in features to do anything, because we are all just consumers of the big infotainment pipeline.
Elon Musk's shall we say, fanciful, hyperloop notion
was widely regarded as one of the distractions that
undermined this project and killed it. So we get no
high-speed rail, and we certainly don't get any
hyperloop, because Musk has moved on to new gosh-wow
announcments to seize the newscycle and keep his
fans happy.
And yet, some of us are capable of identifying meaningless buzz phrases, even if we're unable to define them, which actually is kind-of the point.
Any network is a social network, unless it's not used by human beings, in which case "social networking app" is redundant, because applications are actually intended to be used by human beings, or whatever passes for them these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you know, I've been running the icewm window manager on linux for over 20 years, and mostly living inside emacs all that time... worrying about someone changing my user interface out from under me has not been a big concern.
Just, as they say, sayin'.
(On the other hand, I also run Firefox which gives mozilla.org and Gnome an opportunity to fuck with me whenever they flip a coin. I'll solve that one one-of-these-days.)
The main reason is the js kids got burned by less.js and they've concluded that the dependencies on anything is dangerous and you can't trust anything but massive libraries shipped by the FANG.
I can't imagine what it is you think the standard computer science curriculum has to do with understanding arbitrary, evolved lash-ups of tools.
I think pretty much what you need is experience with a few real world messes, so that you won't sweat the fact that nothing seems to make much sense.
On the subject of backwards compatibility-- which I'm generally a big fan of-- the Makefile syntax was quickly understood to be a mistake, but the author had about 10 people using it already, and didn't want to annoy them by changing it.
I've seen people working on Makefiles who very carefully cut and paste the beginning of the previous line before entering a new one-- they know there's something magic about that indentation, but they're not too sure what...
That's the official report from 2012. It's well worth reading, but will not tell you anything about the construction of the "Land-side Impermeable Wall" which was started in 2016.
The short answer: the "ice wall" is helping to reduce water flow, but isn't perfect, and if you want to spin that in a positive way, you can say "look, it's working!", and if you want to go the other way you can say "it's not working!"-- because anything short of perfection is obviously useless.
A better question would be "how well is it working?" but even better would be "how well does it need to work?".
I'm inclined to agree with our anti-nuclear friends that this is all a bunch of theater to reassure people (much like that that other "wall" we've been hearing so much about). It would be nice if they were just reassured by declining levels of leakage, and little evidence of health impacts, but that kind of message gets lost in the weeds of statistical chatter and "activist" shouting.
Fukushimas Ice Wall Not Working:
Martin Fackler at the NYT commented:
From the World Health Organization faq:
"Bio-concentration" is essentially not happening: Insignificant Environmental and Public Health Risk from Fukushima in North America 8 Years On
Thinking in terms of "discovering the relationship" is old-fashioned thinking, today's advanced software can automatically try every possible relationship and use a crowd-sourced technique to determine the most popular of all possible underlying data models.
And column summation errors can now be introduced automatically to eliminate any legal responsibility for re-working estimates to hit desired targets.
He also doesn't understand the problem with "freedom" very much.
Even when I'm free to think how I like, I get stuck living with other people who are being led around by the nose.
It hardly matters if I'm capable of ignoring a shill brigade if it throws an election anyway.
Don't be ridiculous, reel-to-reel tape is cool. You can use them as echo filters because the record and play heads are slightly seperated, you can play tapes backwards, you can create physical tape loops that degrade in neat ways, if you've got two of them you can create virtual ("frippertronics") loops with them, running a tape from one to the other...
Reel-to-reel is the greatest-- it's just not dumbed-down consumer tech.
Someone who is too young to remember 8-track tapes.
"Not enough freedom" is not actually what comes to mind when most people think of internet commenting-- nearly everyone is interested in better quality and/or improving the tone or direction of on-line discussions.
There's a certain kind of nerd that thinks the freedom to shout [censored epithets] is just what the world needs... most of us feel like we can live without it.
(Slashdot's "lameness filter" prevented me from citing actual examples of epithets in the last paragraph-- ironic infinite loop detected, aborting
Actually, I give it a second thought, in fact I give it a first thought, and it's one of the things that keeps me out of those places.
I've walked into a big chain supermarket twice in the last six months, the first time I realized they were playing Christmas Music I got out of there as quickly as I could. I just went back the other day, and they had some new pop music running, none of which I'm familiar with, which puts it in the "mildly interesting" category for me-- then they put on a song that seemed listenable at first but was so repitious it had clearly been designed to be Catchy-- it got stuck in my head after listening to only about half of it.
I got out of there mumbling Tension apprehension and dissension has begun.
I doubt it. Everyone there seems to be ordering mocha-almond-bacon slushies with freeze-dried lark tongues on top.
One thing about the 90s, I will never forgive the kids for ruining the coffee. If you walk into a random place you're likely to get carmel-flavored turpentine. And the show tunes don't improve the experience.
But I'm sure the job has other perks as well.
In other words, they want government to save them from themselves, right?
Nuclear power has generated a tremendous amount of clean power over the last half-century, and if the entire planet had reacted to the 70s energy crisis the way France did, we might not actually have a global warming problem now; and any place that gets Green Fever and shuts down it's nukes is actually contributing to global warming-- their CO2 emissions either go up, or-- in the case of German-- go flat when you might've expected them to come down, because of less coal use.
Nuclear power is not actually expensive, it just looks that way when compared to stuff like Natural Gas that has side-effects that everyone ignores, and which may actually destroy the planet-- and to this day, "renewables" rely on infill from wonderful power sources like this to cover it's gross unreliability.
I can't imagine why you think the goal here is to be "fair" to solar power-- the goal is to keep from destroying the planet.
Full life-cycle analyses of CO2-e emissions for various energy sources have been done many times-- the only metastudy the anti-nukes had on their side was a piece of garbage by Sovacool, and even that didn't really do a good job of villifying nuclear, if you looked at the numbers. The summary is that anything besides burning fossil fuels is pretty damn good, quibbling about whether nuclear or wind or solar is cleaner is just trying to score talking points through pedantry. (This is true even if you use Sovacool's ridiculous and outdated meta-study.)
If there are any numbers that are questionable in this realm it's with Natural Gas. We know it's worse than we used to think, but the renewables enthusiasts still implicitly think it'll make a wonderful "bridge technology" though they tend to use different dog-whistles these days (something about flexible load, adaptive networks? I forget now).
Ah, A man who knows something about outrageous lies...
I sometimes dream of a world where the anti-nuclear/pro-solar fanatics had everything they say recorded and they were held to some standard of accountability-- instead they just say whatever, and when it turns out it's nonsense (Mark Z. Jacobsen?) then they just get to dance away from it and start saying whatever else sounds good that week.
If reporting on nuclear technology was like reporting on solar, we'd all talk about this idea all week, telling everyone that nuclear power was about to become incredibly cheap as the fuel costs drop to near zero.
Then if the idea didn't pan out, we'd all pretend we'd never said anything about it, and move on to another nifty-sounding announcement.
It's nice to see the slashdot crowd chiming in with another round of entirely predictable commentary.
I say this every other day in one form or another, but let me try again: we all keep jumping up and down and shouting about whether we need a more flexible language or a fussier language with super-strong type-checking and encapsulation and what not, and some are deeply convinced that Pythons's fascist attitude toward formatting is excellent, and some are not -- one of the reaons the Go project was started, from what I understand, was to get away from syntactic whitespace--
None of us really know who's right about any of this, because to really find out someone would need to do experiments, and designing these experiments would require knowledge of social science techniques, and "Computer Scientists" refuse to consider doing that kind of science, because most of them are really mathematicians in disguise.
So we're stuck with a religious fervour for concepts like "elegance" without any real reason to believe any of it is right.
For big projects you need rigid type checking, complex data structures, fine tuned encapsulation, compile time error checking, static and dynamic analysis, verifiable memory allocation and release, etc.
So you're arguing for a less flexible language. Yann LeCun suggests we might need a more "flexible and easy to work with" than Python.
Why he thinks that's the case is not touched on at all in this article, which makes it an unusually inane story even for slashdot.
Well you know, you've got to dumb things down for the swipe-and-wipe crowd. They never do anything much, so there's no point in putting in features to do anything, because we are all just consumers of the big infotainment pipeline.
Elon Musk's shall we say, fanciful, hyperloop notion was widely regarded as one of the distractions that undermined this project and killed it. So we get no high-speed rail, and we certainly don't get any hyperloop, because Musk has moved on to new gosh-wow announcments to seize the newscycle and keep his fans happy.
Musk has become the Trump of tech.
And yet, some of us are capable of identifying meaningless buzz phrases, even if we're unable to define them, which actually is kind-of the point.
Any network is a social network, unless it's not used by human beings, in which case "social networking app" is redundant, because applications are actually intended to be used by human beings, or whatever passes for them these days.