It's not a question of "not bothering"---that's just outright arrogance on your part---it's that breaking everyone's code regularly in pursuit of perfection will more or less guarantee at best a fragmented language and at worse an unused one.
That's why you need to fix these problems while you're designing the language. For C++, the window of opportunity for fixing them was between 1979, when Stroustrup first started working on it, and 1985, when the first edition of the language spec was published. Once a language has been standardized you're stuck with its flaws. C++ is decades past the point where its flaws are fixable. But that doesn't make the flaws any less egregious.
Inside C++ is a small(er), clean(er) language trying to get out, but it's still neither a small nor a clean language. It's still a verbose, inconsistent, badly designed language.
Why do you need to separately declare and then define every piece of your API? Because that's how C worked, and C did it that way because of the limitations of compilers in 1977. It's totally unnecessary in a modern language, and it makes your code way less clean. But that's how C++ works.
Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file? That was totally unnecessary, and it leads to clunky code. But that's how C++ works.
How come if a parent class doesn't mark its destructor as virtual, all subclasses will (silently) fail to get cleaned up correctly? This is just bad design. It's probably caused countless bugs over the years.
The language is full of inconsistencies because no one ever bothered to fix them. Why is "this" a pointer instead of a reference? Why does exception.what() return a char* instead of a string&? There are tons of minor points like this that could easily have been better if someone had bothered to think about consistency. But no one did.
You can avoid the worst parts of C++, but what remains is still a poor substitute for a well designed language.
Since I believe in the usually futile approach of trying to counter lies with facts...
We know very well that the current warming is caused by greenhouse gases and not by increased solar radiation. We know this because the two would produce different patterns of warming, and what we actually observe agrees in every detail with the predictions for greenhouse gases and disagrees with the predictions for increased solar radiation.
Example: greenhouse gases should cause the lower atmosphere to get warmer (since they hold heat in) but the upper atmosphere to get cooler (because less heat escapes). Increased solar radiation should cause both the lower and the upper atmosphere to get warmer (because both would be getting more radiation). Sure enough, the upper atmosphere has been getting colder at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has been getting warmer.
With greenhouse gases you expect the poles to warm faster than the tropics and winter temperatures to increase more than summer temperatures. For increased solar radiation, you expect the opposite: the tropics should warm more than the poles and summer temperatures should go up faster than winter temperatures. Here again the evidence strongly agrees with greenhouse gasses being the cause and strongly disagrees with increased solar radiation being the cause.
Have you noticed how easy it is to bias the reader just by the order you say things in? Take this quote from the summary.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Now let's reverse the two paragraphs and move the word "but", which tells us the second quote rebuts the first one.
A Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards.
But a policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
Funny how that leaves you thinking something totally different. Now let's try to write it in a more evenhanded way that doesn't tell the reader who is right.
Commenters disagreed on the legality and privacy implications of the technology. A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
On the other hand, a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.
There's an easy solution to that problem. Make them get a search warrant before searching the public site too. DNA is super sensitive personal information. The police shouldn't be searching it without a warrant.
I know, people will say that doesn't make sense. It's a public database. Anyone can access it. The information was freely given away by other people. But we're dealing with a hard paradox. On one hand, your DNA is super sensitive personal information. No one but you should be able to give it away. On the other hand, each of your parents and siblings shares half your DNA. When a relative gives away their own sequence, they're also giving away part of yours. So does that mean your DNA isn't really private after all? Or does it mean that no one is allowed to give away their own sequence? Or do we try to balance the two, putting up barriers that protect privacy without restricting freedom too much?
The same problem comes up in other places. That's what the whole "right to privacy" is about. Anyone can walk by your house, take photos of it, post them online with your address and phone number. They can follow you to work and post details about where you work, when you commute, what route you take. Once you leave your house you're on public roads, right? But there are laws protecting your right to privacy (at least in some places), so they can't do all that. We need to balance your right to privacy against their right to follow you around in public and post what they see. The same with DNA.
I can play the latest AAA games on an old potato with everything on ultra and it's perfect.
The thing is, most people don't care about that. We long ago passed the point where increasing the resolution or polygon count makes any difference to how good a game it is. Having powerful hardware is probably less important today than it's ever been. Even a phone can now produce better graphics than a PS3! All the hardware makers are trying to convince us we desperately need to run everything at 4K, but as far as I'm concerned, even 720p looks great.
The one place where powerful hardware really does matter is VR, but that's also the case streaming is least suited for. It requires a very high, rock solid frame rate and super low latency. If you need to display a new frame every 11 ms and your ping time to the server is 20 ms with occasional spikes to 80 ms, that's just not going to work.
Even a very small fine could make a big difference. Maybe $1 for less sensitive data like email addresses and phone numbers, $10 for more sensitive things like credit card numbers and social security numbers. But this would be the minimum statutory fine, independent of any damages caused. If someone can show they were hurt by the leak, they can still sue for compensation.
The main effect of this would likely be to make companies a lot more selective about what data they collect. Say you have a database of a million people. Do you really need to include their home addresses? If you do, that adds $1 million to the fine if it gets leaked. How about the ages of their children? That's another million dollars. You'd better consider every column of the database carefully, because each one adds to your potential liability.
A lot of that information goes out of date quickly. Home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card numbers all change. People's interests change. People have children, and their children grow up. Personal information collected today will be much less useful to advertisers and hackers ten years from now.
We need to stop the collection and leaking of personal information. In time privacy will reestablish itself.
You're leaving out an important point. The oil companies knew very well that their product was harmful, but continued to publicly deny it and spend lots of money to discredit anyone who claimed it was. That was a key argument in the lawsuit. Selling a product that causes both harms and benefits is legal, as long as you're honest about it. Selling a product that you know causes harm, but insisting that it doesn't and trying hard to discredit anyone who reveals the truth, even though you know they're right, is illegal.
Scientists know which journals are reputable. In any field, there are maybe a half dozen or a dozen journals that most papers get published in. Everyone knows what they are. And then there's a hundred wannabe journals with intentionally similar names that exist just to make money. No one reads them, and no one reputable publishes in them. If you look at someone's publication list and see a lot of papers in journals you've never heard of, you immediately know to be suspicious.
Here are the prices for Amazon cloud storage. Depending on the type of storage, it ranges from $0.025 to $0.125 per GB per month. Yes, that's a lot more than buying a hard drive, but a huge stack of hard drives is pretty useless for storing lots of data. This gives immediate availability to all your data, backups, etc.
Let's say a company has 1 PB of data they need to store. Depending on the type of storage they need, that will cost between $25,000 and $125,000 per month. A 1% reduction in that cost could save them over $1000 per month, which is definitely meaningful.
You just described the old fashioned, pre-machine-learning way of doing it. You guess at some calculations you think might be useful. "Let's look at color differences between adjacent pixels and look for circles that stand out. That should match how a lot of people use Photoshop. Oh, and let's look at noise levels, and check for regions that are different from the rest of the image." So you code them up by hand and try them out. If they work you say, "Great, I've got an algorithm!" And if they don't, you try something else.
Sometimes this works ok and you figure out a calculation that's mostly effective. And sometimes it doesn't work and you give up. But even when it does work, maybe you didn't do the calculation in exactly the optimal way. And maybe there are other calculations you didn't even think of that would have worked much better.
Machine learning with neural networks approaches the problem completely differently. You don't make any guesses about what signals you should look for. You just build a really general model, then let it figure out on its own how to distinguish real images from fake ones. And this works really, really well. It blows away all human coded algorithms. Deep learning has revolutionized the whole field of computer vision. Comparing classic computer vision algorithms to modern deep learning models is like comparing a bicycle to a sports car. They aren't in the same league.
It's all how you look at it. "Inflated ego" is a bad thing. "Confidence" and "self-esteem" are good things. But there often is little difference between them. This story is trying to spin it as a bad thing, but you could just as easily spin it as a good thing. So let's rewrite that headline.
People's Self-Esteem Increases After Meditation and Yoga, Says Study
How about Facebook? They also were caught breaking the law, signed a consent decree with the government, and then went right on doing exactly what's they'd promised not to do.
There are times when a corporate death penalty might make sense. But only if it's applied uniformly. It can't be just for foreign companies, not American ones.
But Swift does a really good job of it. It's not a perfect language for everything, but it's a really good language for a lot of things. People keep inventing new languages because we keep learning more about how to design good ones.
You realize too late that had you used cross-platform technologies from either the very start, or at least switched to cross-platform technologies early on, you could have told your scumbag vendor to piss off; and then you could have found a different vendor to support you.
Swift is cross platform. You can use it on Windows, Linux, even Android. The compiler is open source. You can get support from anyone who has the experience to provide it. You're no more locked in than with any other language.
a combination of live services, such as FIFA Ultimate Team, and subscriptions will lead to "uncapped" monetisation of its players over the longest possible period of time.
At least he's being honest about what the point is. Companies like to pretend this will be good for gamers, but how many gamers are asking for it? Not a lot. The point is to "monetize players over the longest possible period of time". That is, get more money from you for playing the same games.
Just don't do it. Really. It's a terrible idea. It's gambling, not investing, but it's even worse than gambling because there's no limit on how much money you can lose.
The position of this story is really ironic: right after a story about how 30% of West Virginia doesn't have internet access. Not just broadband. They don't have any internet access at all. And he really thinks streaming is ready to replace consoles?
I'm also bothered by that part. It seems to undercut their whole argument. If they just said, "It's not our job to make judgements, you can do anything as long as it's legal," that would be a consistent position. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I can see how a reasonable person might adopt that viewpoint. But trolling? Do they seriously think trolling is so much worse than anything else in the world, it's the sole legal activity they're going to ban? And how do they define trolling anyway? Anything designed to be offensive? Or maybe it also can't have artistic merit? And who judges artistic merit?
They first say they won't make judgements, then punch a big hole in the middle of the policy by requiring themselves to make judgements. And it's a super subjective hole at that.
These are really just electric airplanes, not flying cars or anything similarly revolutionary. Not that the term "flying car" is well defined, but as most people understand it a flying car needs to be able to drive on ordinary roads, and it needs to be able to take off and land without needing an airport. If you have to get in an ordinary car to drive to the place where your "flying taxi" picks you up, and then when it drops you off you need to get in another car to drive to your destination, you might as well just drive the whole way.
Eventually batteries may get to the point where electric airplanes make sense, at least for short flights. And maybe that will save some fuel and help airlines make more money, but it won't revolutionize how people get around. I just don't see air travel becoming practical for traveling short distances. Physics is against it. The energy needed is too high, and ground transport can be almost as fast.
This is just part of a natural cycle. Major social disruptions tend to reduce inequality: wars, revolutions, plagues, etc. In between, inequality increases steadily. The last major disruption to American society was WWII. At the end of the war, inequality was at historic lows. It's been going up ever since.
Maybe we'll find a way to break this cycle and reduce inequality without needing a war or plague to do it for us. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Based on how bad Google News is at recommending stories for me, they don't seem to have much idea what I like. You'd think that would be easy. I've been reading Google News for years so they ought to know what stories I click on. But they still keep recommending things I'm totally not interested in. I'd say their hype is way ahead of reality.
Apparently the author has never heard of Bayesian networks. Questions like, "Why did this happen?" or "What if I had acted differently?" are exactly what they're designed to answer. They've been around since the 1980s, so this isn't some brand new innovation. They're a classic method we've been using for years.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a question of "not bothering"---that's just outright arrogance on your part---it's that breaking everyone's code regularly in pursuit of perfection will more or less guarantee at best a fragmented language and at worse an unused one.
That's why you need to fix these problems while you're designing the language. For C++, the window of opportunity for fixing them was between 1979, when Stroustrup first started working on it, and 1985, when the first edition of the language spec was published. Once a language has been standardized you're stuck with its flaws. C++ is decades past the point where its flaws are fixable. But that doesn't make the flaws any less egregious.
Inside C++ is a small(er), clean(er) language trying to get out, but it's still neither a small nor a clean language. It's still a verbose, inconsistent, badly designed language.
Why do you need to separately declare and then define every piece of your API? Because that's how C worked, and C did it that way because of the limitations of compilers in 1977. It's totally unnecessary in a modern language, and it makes your code way less clean. But that's how C++ works.
Why are templates designed in a way that makes you put the entire implementation in the header file? That was totally unnecessary, and it leads to clunky code. But that's how C++ works.
How come if a parent class doesn't mark its destructor as virtual, all subclasses will (silently) fail to get cleaned up correctly? This is just bad design. It's probably caused countless bugs over the years.
The language is full of inconsistencies because no one ever bothered to fix them. Why is "this" a pointer instead of a reference? Why does exception.what() return a char* instead of a string&? There are tons of minor points like this that could easily have been better if someone had bothered to think about consistency. But no one did.
You can avoid the worst parts of C++, but what remains is still a poor substitute for a well designed language.
Since I believe in the usually futile approach of trying to counter lies with facts...
We know very well that the current warming is caused by greenhouse gases and not by increased solar radiation. We know this because the two would produce different patterns of warming, and what we actually observe agrees in every detail with the predictions for greenhouse gases and disagrees with the predictions for increased solar radiation.
Example: greenhouse gases should cause the lower atmosphere to get warmer (since they hold heat in) but the upper atmosphere to get cooler (because less heat escapes). Increased solar radiation should cause both the lower and the upper atmosphere to get warmer (because both would be getting more radiation). Sure enough, the upper atmosphere has been getting colder at exactly the same time the lower atmosphere has been getting warmer.
With greenhouse gases you expect the poles to warm faster than the tropics and winter temperatures to increase more than summer temperatures. For increased solar radiation, you expect the opposite: the tropics should warm more than the poles and summer temperatures should go up faster than winter temperatures. Here again the evidence strongly agrees with greenhouse gasses being the cause and strongly disagrees with increased solar radiation being the cause.
Have you noticed how easy it is to bias the reader just by the order you say things in? Take this quote from the summary.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Now let's reverse the two paragraphs and move the word "but", which tells us the second quote rebuts the first one.
A Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards.
But a policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
Funny how that leaves you thinking something totally different. Now let's try to write it in a more evenhanded way that doesn't tell the reader who is right.
Commenters disagreed on the legality and privacy implications of the technology. A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
On the other hand, a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
The commercial sites require authorities to obtain search warrants for the information; the public site does not.
There's an easy solution to that problem. Make them get a search warrant before searching the public site too. DNA is super sensitive personal information. The police shouldn't be searching it without a warrant.
I know, people will say that doesn't make sense. It's a public database. Anyone can access it. The information was freely given away by other people. But we're dealing with a hard paradox. On one hand, your DNA is super sensitive personal information. No one but you should be able to give it away. On the other hand, each of your parents and siblings shares half your DNA. When a relative gives away their own sequence, they're also giving away part of yours. So does that mean your DNA isn't really private after all? Or does it mean that no one is allowed to give away their own sequence? Or do we try to balance the two, putting up barriers that protect privacy without restricting freedom too much?
The same problem comes up in other places. That's what the whole "right to privacy" is about. Anyone can walk by your house, take photos of it, post them online with your address and phone number. They can follow you to work and post details about where you work, when you commute, what route you take. Once you leave your house you're on public roads, right? But there are laws protecting your right to privacy (at least in some places), so they can't do all that. We need to balance your right to privacy against their right to follow you around in public and post what they see. The same with DNA.
I can play the latest AAA games on an old potato with everything on ultra and it's perfect.
The thing is, most people don't care about that. We long ago passed the point where increasing the resolution or polygon count makes any difference to how good a game it is. Having powerful hardware is probably less important today than it's ever been. Even a phone can now produce better graphics than a PS3! All the hardware makers are trying to convince us we desperately need to run everything at 4K, but as far as I'm concerned, even 720p looks great.
The one place where powerful hardware really does matter is VR, but that's also the case streaming is least suited for. It requires a very high, rock solid frame rate and super low latency. If you need to display a new frame every 11 ms and your ping time to the server is 20 ms with occasional spikes to 80 ms, that's just not going to work.
Even a very small fine could make a big difference. Maybe $1 for less sensitive data like email addresses and phone numbers, $10 for more sensitive things like credit card numbers and social security numbers. But this would be the minimum statutory fine, independent of any damages caused. If someone can show they were hurt by the leak, they can still sue for compensation.
The main effect of this would likely be to make companies a lot more selective about what data they collect. Say you have a database of a million people. Do you really need to include their home addresses? If you do, that adds $1 million to the fine if it gets leaked. How about the ages of their children? That's another million dollars. You'd better consider every column of the database carefully, because each one adds to your potential liability.
A lot of that information goes out of date quickly. Home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card numbers all change. People's interests change. People have children, and their children grow up. Personal information collected today will be much less useful to advertisers and hackers ten years from now.
We need to stop the collection and leaking of personal information. In time privacy will reestablish itself.
You're leaving out an important point. The oil companies knew very well that their product was harmful, but continued to publicly deny it and spend lots of money to discredit anyone who claimed it was. That was a key argument in the lawsuit. Selling a product that causes both harms and benefits is legal, as long as you're honest about it. Selling a product that you know causes harm, but insisting that it doesn't and trying hard to discredit anyone who reveals the truth, even though you know they're right, is illegal.
Scientists know which journals are reputable. In any field, there are maybe a half dozen or a dozen journals that most papers get published in. Everyone knows what they are. And then there's a hundred wannabe journals with intentionally similar names that exist just to make money. No one reads them, and no one reputable publishes in them. If you look at someone's publication list and see a lot of papers in journals you've never heard of, you immediately know to be suspicious.
Here are the prices for Amazon cloud storage. Depending on the type of storage, it ranges from $0.025 to $0.125 per GB per month. Yes, that's a lot more than buying a hard drive, but a huge stack of hard drives is pretty useless for storing lots of data. This gives immediate availability to all your data, backups, etc.
Let's say a company has 1 PB of data they need to store. Depending on the type of storage they need, that will cost between $25,000 and $125,000 per month. A 1% reduction in that cost could save them over $1000 per month, which is definitely meaningful.
You just described the old fashioned, pre-machine-learning way of doing it. You guess at some calculations you think might be useful. "Let's look at color differences between adjacent pixels and look for circles that stand out. That should match how a lot of people use Photoshop. Oh, and let's look at noise levels, and check for regions that are different from the rest of the image." So you code them up by hand and try them out. If they work you say, "Great, I've got an algorithm!" And if they don't, you try something else.
Sometimes this works ok and you figure out a calculation that's mostly effective. And sometimes it doesn't work and you give up. But even when it does work, maybe you didn't do the calculation in exactly the optimal way. And maybe there are other calculations you didn't even think of that would have worked much better.
Machine learning with neural networks approaches the problem completely differently. You don't make any guesses about what signals you should look for. You just build a really general model, then let it figure out on its own how to distinguish real images from fake ones. And this works really, really well. It blows away all human coded algorithms. Deep learning has revolutionized the whole field of computer vision. Comparing classic computer vision algorithms to modern deep learning models is like comparing a bicycle to a sports car. They aren't in the same league.
It's all how you look at it. "Inflated ego" is a bad thing. "Confidence" and "self-esteem" are good things. But there often is little difference between them. This story is trying to spin it as a bad thing, but you could just as easily spin it as a good thing. So let's rewrite that headline.
People's Self-Esteem Increases After Meditation and Yoga, Says Study
Sounds like a good reason to meditate.
How about Facebook? They also were caught breaking the law, signed a consent decree with the government, and then went right on doing exactly what's they'd promised not to do.
There are times when a corporate death penalty might make sense. But only if it's applied uniformly. It can't be just for foreign companies, not American ones.
But Swift does a really good job of it. It's not a perfect language for everything, but it's a really good language for a lot of things. People keep inventing new languages because we keep learning more about how to design good ones.
You realize too late that had you used cross-platform technologies from either the very start, or at least switched to cross-platform technologies early on, you could have told your scumbag vendor to piss off; and then you could have found a different vendor to support you.
Swift is cross platform. You can use it on Windows, Linux, even Android. The compiler is open source. You can get support from anyone who has the experience to provide it. You're no more locked in than with any other language.
a combination of live services, such as FIFA Ultimate Team, and subscriptions will lead to "uncapped" monetisation of its players over the longest possible period of time.
At least he's being honest about what the point is. Companies like to pretend this will be good for gamers, but how many gamers are asking for it? Not a lot. The point is to "monetize players over the longest possible period of time". That is, get more money from you for playing the same games.
Just don't do it. Really. It's a terrible idea. It's gambling, not investing, but it's even worse than gambling because there's no limit on how much money you can lose.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Anyone who invests in her this time around only has themselves to blame.
The position of this story is really ironic: right after a story about how 30% of West Virginia doesn't have internet access. Not just broadband. They don't have any internet access at all. And he really thinks streaming is ready to replace consoles?
I'm also bothered by that part. It seems to undercut their whole argument. If they just said, "It's not our job to make judgements, you can do anything as long as it's legal," that would be a consistent position. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I can see how a reasonable person might adopt that viewpoint. But trolling? Do they seriously think trolling is so much worse than anything else in the world, it's the sole legal activity they're going to ban? And how do they define trolling anyway? Anything designed to be offensive? Or maybe it also can't have artistic merit? And who judges artistic merit?
They first say they won't make judgements, then punch a big hole in the middle of the policy by requiring themselves to make judgements. And it's a super subjective hole at that.
These are really just electric airplanes, not flying cars or anything similarly revolutionary. Not that the term "flying car" is well defined, but as most people understand it a flying car needs to be able to drive on ordinary roads, and it needs to be able to take off and land without needing an airport. If you have to get in an ordinary car to drive to the place where your "flying taxi" picks you up, and then when it drops you off you need to get in another car to drive to your destination, you might as well just drive the whole way.
Eventually batteries may get to the point where electric airplanes make sense, at least for short flights. And maybe that will save some fuel and help airlines make more money, but it won't revolutionize how people get around. I just don't see air travel becoming practical for traveling short distances. Physics is against it. The energy needed is too high, and ground transport can be almost as fast.
This is just part of a natural cycle. Major social disruptions tend to reduce inequality: wars, revolutions, plagues, etc. In between, inequality increases steadily. The last major disruption to American society was WWII. At the end of the war, inequality was at historic lows. It's been going up ever since.
Maybe we'll find a way to break this cycle and reduce inequality without needing a war or plague to do it for us. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Based on how bad Google News is at recommending stories for me, they don't seem to have much idea what I like. You'd think that would be easy. I've been reading Google News for years so they ought to know what stories I click on. But they still keep recommending things I'm totally not interested in. I'd say their hype is way ahead of reality.
Apparently the author has never heard of Bayesian networks. Questions like, "Why did this happen?" or "What if I had acted differently?" are exactly what they're designed to answer. They've been around since the 1980s, so this isn't some brand new innovation. They're a classic method we've been using for years.