You don't know that. It could have been an attack using Meltdown or Spectre, which is indifferent to the OS you are using. Why didn't you say "Ditch Intel", that would make as much sense.
That's *usually* correct. But there are places where things need to be really optimized (for something...possibly speed, possibly memory, possibly intelligibility). That the code should be correct is difficult to dispute. There are very few places where that's secondary. But they exist!! That's why some code uses heuristics. (Unless you adopt a definition of "correct code" where code that sometimes produces the wrong result can fit as part of a larger system.)
OTOH, some quite experienced programmers will argue against choosing intelligible code over concise code, even when there's little advantage to conciseness. And some programmers feel that using their own personal macro library makes the code more intelligible. (And it does...to them.)
That's interesting. I was given that assignment (decades ago) in an extension class called something like "advanced introduction to programming".
But the article is largely right. Most businesses don't need more than one or two real programmers. Many don't need any, if they use packaged solutions.
Back in the day, if you wanted to use a computer, you needed programmers and a systems administer. Then someone wrote a spreadsheet, and someone else wrote a good word processor...and the number of businesses that really needed a programmer took a nosedive. But most people didn't realize that, and didn't realize that systems administers had become MUCH more important. These days (I'm guessing here!!!) the number of real programmers needed is probably about the same number that were needed in 1970, but the number of "power users" needed is immense...but declining. And if systems administration were properly valued, then the number of systems administers needed would be declining, but since it hasn't been, the proper automation tools have not been really developed, much less widely used. (OTOH, just imagine that every smart phone required a systems admin.)
A part of the problem, though, is that programming is an art, a highly technical art, but still an art. You can't know how good a programmer someone will be until that person has been trained extensively as a programmer. And different programmers will be "good programmers" in different areas of the profession. There are extremely few "universally good programmers". (I'm not claiming that every programmer will be a good programmer in some area, but rather that a good assembly language programmer is unlikely to be a good web page programmer. One *is* more difficult than the other, but which depends on the person. They need to optimize things differently.)
This makes it a difficult problem. You need to train large numbers of people most of whom will only end up being adequate, and you can't predict ahead of time which will be good at what...and neither can they. But because of the nature of programming (software is easily duplicated) and the lack of a large need for custom solutions,... (left as an exercise for the reader)
It was trivial because you rarely need to look at the text. I
You are making invalid assumptions about the kind of processing I was doing. Different tasks demand different tools. I was doing a bit more than just parsing the string. And C's handling of unicode is not satisfactory. (Actually, I also don't like the way it handles, or rather doesn't handle, variable name hiding either, but since I don't really expect the language to protect access I could learn to live with names like: NodeA_instance1_id_prefix. It's hideously ugly, but it can be lived with. Much worse is creating macros to hide the stuff. (I once had to maintain code that someone who liked to do that had written. Never again.) And nests of pointer indirections are a true abomination, that should be hidden by the language. That's stuff that CPU chips like, but which tend to cause untraceable errors when programmers hand craft them.
Sorry, but no. The annoying syntax is necessary to make the language fast only because of maintaining historical continuity AND remaining a swiss army knife. It's true that the language would have needed to change in other ways to allow the speed without the incredibly ugly syntax. And this basically would have required the language to split into syntactically incompatible subsets, probably, as I guessed earlier, about five.
That said, I will agree that if you are going to make the language maximally compatible with prior versions including keeping the "one tool fits all" form, then maintaining speed requires the (or rather some) horrendously ugly syntax. There were choices, and they didn't make the worst choices. Possibly they were the best choices given the constraints that they accepted.
FWIW, in my opinion the language made a mistake in not splitting in half back around 2000, probably a bit earlier, with one fork adopting (flexibly disable-able) garbage collection, dynamic strings, and possibly a few other things, and the other fork more or less as it went. The tricky thing would be they would need binary compatible compiled code, so you could mix the two languages in the same program. It's hard to say how things would have gone since then, but it would probably have developed several dialects that could be mixed within a compiled program, but not within the same source file.
If you think utf8 is trivial in C, you must not have used it for text containing non-ascii characters, or done only very simple processing. I'm guessing that it's the "only very simple processing" choice, because that is actually not unreasonable.
FWIW I *do* prefer utf8 for file storage, but when a chunk contains non-ascii text I usually transform it into codepoints as that's easier. But it's far easier to just pick a different language. Choices that work are Python, Go, Vala, D, and Racket (i.e. Scheme). I'm sure there are others. Which is best depends on the task in hand. (Note that I didn't mention Java. Java has trouble with unicode punctuation and non-European characters.)
C++ is a pretty good language. It's main problem is it's trying to be the five top languages. Just about nobody uses more than a small subset of C++ plus the underlying commonality of C (with, admittedly a dialect difference from standard C).
The problem with this is that it makes all the features obnoxiously ugly, because it really needs to squirm to maintain compatibility with all the features when it wants to handle something new.
E.G.: I want a language with a built-in garbage collector and hash tables. This is because of the area in which I'm working. It means that C++ is uses really annoying syntax and I need non-standard libraries. So I look elsewhere. But if I were already committed to C++, I *could* do the entire thing in it, and it could be just as efficient, possibly more so. BUT it would be extremely ugly and difficult to maintain.
Actually, I hate C because it's so difficult to send data between executing parallel processes and, secondarily, because it such a beast to handle unicode in. C was probably my third programming language, and the second was assembler. (Fortran was my first.) There are a few other reasons, the dangerous way it handles pointers, etc., and it's ugly when you start needing multiple layers of indirection. But most of those can be gotten used to. The first two, however,... shudder...
There are things for which boiling water is their normal environment. Most of them don't specialize in infecting humans, but this doesn't mean they can't pass around their plasmids to those that do.
That said, boiling water is generally a good way to throughly wash something. Exceptions are when something is really baked on. Unfortunately, a very small exception can carry a simply huge number of bacteria. When I was an assistant in a biochem lab I sometimes washed glassware. The drill was, first you wash and dry it. Then you submerge it in concentrated Nitric Acid. Then you submerge it in anhydrous alcoholic solution of Potassium Hydroxide. Then you rise it in distilled water. This isn't always a practical approach, and I wasn't even worried about bacteria. Just contamination.
But phages evolve too, so when their food starts becoming elusive, they start becoming better hunters....or, of course, change their food preferences. You could talk to the Australians about some of the downsides.
Maybe mix it with a strong oxidizer. NOT hydrogen peroxide, as the body uses that as a defense, but say ammonium nitrate. Nitric acid would work, but might have undesirable effects.
There have been hiatuses in the past. Usually they have been ended by the eruption of some new technology.
OTOH, the cost of fabs has been increasing so much that the eruption of a new technology may be fatally hindered. And the perceived value has decreased. So you may be right this time.
If I've been reading the reports correctly, fast food and similar places generally ensure that you work less than 20 hours a week at an irregular schedule. So you've got to juggle two irregular hour jobs, neither of which will provide health insurance, workers comp, or other "full time employee" benefits.
Sorry, but you are, in principle, though not in practice, wrong.
If the monopoly controls the market by being more attractive so that any competitor goes broke, then it is a free market that is a natural monopoly. Network effects matter.
If the monopoly uses it's monopoly power to cause others to squeeze out any competition, then it's not a free market.
Monopoly is, in principle, orthogonal to whether or not the market is free. But I've never seen or heard of an example of a monopoly that didn't use external coercion to control the market.
Sorry, but the US does have real Capitalism. It doesn't have a real Free Market, except in illegal drugs and a few other small areas.
That said, Oligarcho-Capitalism is probably worse than Free-Market Capitalism, but it's hard to be sure because there's never been a large scale example of Free-Market Capitalism. This is probably because no government can allow such a source of funding to go untapped. (But anarchy is unstable, even on a fairly small scale. It usually fails badly even within a family.)
I don't think so. Confirmation bias is sufficient to explain deciding this story either way.
FWIW, RSI injuries are not uncommon, and can be quite difficult (read expensive) to prove even where it's possible. Try to remember how long it took carpal tunnel syndrome to be accepted as a valid diagnosis.
That said, an injury that is difficult to prove can easily be faked. And that happens too. But as she remained "unable to work" and became homeless, I tend to believe that her story is correct until I see evidence to the contrary.
Please note that when Beyesian reasoners start with sufficiently different priors it can be the case that no amount of additional evidence will cause them to converge.
Don't place your bet too soon. Others have bet on Moore's law dying before now, and lost big.
That said, there are signs that the replacement won't be conventional silicon. I'm not sure. It might be 3-D chips with persistent state and low dissipation. And since I don't watch that area closely, there are likely options that I haven't even considered. (Last I checked the persistent state had relatively slow switching, so it was considered a bit of a dark horse. But graphene would require investment in new fab technology, so it was considered a dark horse. But...etc. No really evident winners, but lots of contenders.)
The problem is that all the sources of news have proven untrustworthy, so there's no way to validate the stories. People want to believe what they want to believe anyway, and if there's no place that has trustworthy reporting, why fight it?
If the traditional news sources had not sold out (generally after being bought up), then the problem would be considerably less severe. As it is...
There are still a few sources I generally trust. They are biased, but I haven't noticed them actually lying. Of course, they only cover a small portion of the news. How could they cover everything without using untrustworthy sources?
Who doubts that the news reports sports scores as recorded by the sports officials? Does they Chicago Tribune have headlines "Cubs win the Pennant" this year?
I think you're being too hopeful about this as an explanation. Many epigenetic changes are not adaptive, and many others are only arguably adaptive. E.g., what benefit do you ascribe to the kink that some cats get in the tip of their tail from epigenetic modifications? I understand that the stress is the lack of some particular vitamin (or proteing? Can't quite remember.), but it doesn't seem to confer any adaptive advantage, and arguably a slight disadvantage.
I suspect that the major part of the mechanism for "fast adaptation" is the wide diversity of "neutral DNA" carried by most species, that are usually irrelevant in expression, or even unexpressed, but which can become relevant in altered circumstances. It's like a hill-climbing optimization problem where every member of a species is started at the foot of some hill or other. Many will get caught in local maxima, but you're climbing from millions of different starting points.
Crap science reporting, yes. And possibly scientists who interview poorly.
OTOH, the epigenetic modification of the offspring of fathers who were stressed in well defined ways being modified in certain particular respects is well supported. Different cases yield different particulars. So this report is only a potential explanation for an already known result. Requiring them to prove the result is unreasonable, as it's been previously proven.
It would, indeed, be interesting to know what particular stresses cause what particular modifications. And that's probably in either the technical paper they've published or are in the process of producing. (If they're still writing it, they wouldn't want to let the details slip out before publication.)
That said, I'm no expert in the field, so I'd probably find their paper more confusing than illuminating. The summary indicates the article wouldn't be detailed enough to be worth perusing, but I would be interested in a re-write of their academic paper for, say, the Scientific American.
Also, the main point of their work is the mechanism of modification. Someone else will probably work on the details of which stresses cause which changed, and how the epigenetic/RNA changes display in changed phenotypes.
I can't track down why I believe this, but I assert: Sorry, but Darwin did not "believe" in blended evolution, he worried about it. He knew that blended inheritance would make his theory more difficult to support, and knew examples that seemed to show its validity. But he didn't really believe in it. He did give a lot of thought as to how he would support his theory if it were correct. And he had next to no idea of the mechanism of inheritance.
If Mendel thought Darwin believed in blending inheritance, then that was either one of the papers where he was trying to figure out how to support his theory in that case, or it was a poor translation.
All that said, in some sense most inherited traits are "blended inheritance", because most traits depend on the interaction of multiple genes.
FWIW, and IIRC Darwin even considered whether seeing something might have an effect on inheritance. Something (I only half remember) about a nobleman who was a horse breeder in Africa or Arabia and reported that his horse had striped legs because the mother saw a zebra. IIRC Darwin took this seriously enough to investigate, though I don't know what conclusions he came to.
There are much easier and more plausible explanations. Evidence seems to show that you can find in you mind whatever you go looking for. If you decide to believe it, you will elaborate on the creation. People have found gods, demons, alternate personalities, past lives, and more. Finding something is one thing, believing it is a separate choice...but it's one that many people seem to make.
FWIW, I consider the belief in past lives to be relatively harmless in and of itself, though it can be mixed with other beliefs that render it more dubious.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't know that. It could have been an attack using Meltdown or Spectre, which is indifferent to the OS you are using. Why didn't you say "Ditch Intel", that would make as much sense.
Perhaps we'll have better info tomorrow.
That's *usually* correct. But there are places where things need to be really optimized (for something...possibly speed, possibly memory, possibly intelligibility). That the code should be correct is difficult to dispute. There are very few places where that's secondary. But they exist!! That's why some code uses heuristics. (Unless you adopt a definition of "correct code" where code that sometimes produces the wrong result can fit as part of a larger system.)
OTOH, some quite experienced programmers will argue against choosing intelligible code over concise code, even when there's little advantage to conciseness. And some programmers feel that using their own personal macro library makes the code more intelligible. (And it does...to them.)
That's interesting. I was given that assignment (decades ago) in an extension class called something like "advanced introduction to programming".
But the article is largely right. Most businesses don't need more than one or two real programmers. Many don't need any, if they use packaged solutions.
Back in the day, if you wanted to use a computer, you needed programmers and a systems administer. Then someone wrote a spreadsheet, and someone else wrote a good word processor...and the number of businesses that really needed a programmer took a nosedive. But most people didn't realize that, and didn't realize that systems administers had become MUCH more important. These days (I'm guessing here!!!) the number of real programmers needed is probably about the same number that were needed in 1970, but the number of "power users" needed is immense...but declining. And if systems administration were properly valued, then the number of systems administers needed would be declining, but since it hasn't been, the proper automation tools have not been really developed, much less widely used. (OTOH, just imagine that every smart phone required a systems admin.)
A part of the problem, though, is that programming is an art, a highly technical art, but still an art. You can't know how good a programmer someone will be until that person has been trained extensively as a programmer. And different programmers will be "good programmers" in different areas of the profession. There are extremely few "universally good programmers". (I'm not claiming that every programmer will be a good programmer in some area, but rather that a good assembly language programmer is unlikely to be a good web page programmer. One *is* more difficult than the other, but which depends on the person. They need to optimize things differently.)
This makes it a difficult problem. You need to train large numbers of people most of whom will only end up being adequate, and you can't predict ahead of time which will be good at what...and neither can they. But because of the nature of programming (software is easily duplicated) and the lack of a large need for custom solutions, ... (left as an exercise for the reader)
It was trivial because you rarely need to look at the text. I
You are making invalid assumptions about the kind of processing I was doing. Different tasks demand different tools. I was doing a bit more than just parsing the string. And C's handling of unicode is not satisfactory. (Actually, I also don't like the way it handles, or rather doesn't handle, variable name hiding either, but since I don't really expect the language to protect access I could learn to live with names like: NodeA_instance1_id_prefix. It's hideously ugly, but it can be lived with. Much worse is creating macros to hide the stuff. (I once had to maintain code that someone who liked to do that had written. Never again.) And nests of pointer indirections are a true abomination, that should be hidden by the language. That's stuff that CPU chips like, but which tend to cause untraceable errors when programmers hand craft them.
Sorry, but no. The annoying syntax is necessary to make the language fast only because of maintaining historical continuity AND remaining a swiss army knife. It's true that the language would have needed to change in other ways to allow the speed without the incredibly ugly syntax. And this basically would have required the language to split into syntactically incompatible subsets, probably, as I guessed earlier, about five.
That said, I will agree that if you are going to make the language maximally compatible with prior versions including keeping the "one tool fits all" form, then maintaining speed requires the (or rather some) horrendously ugly syntax. There were choices, and they didn't make the worst choices. Possibly they were the best choices given the constraints that they accepted.
FWIW, in my opinion the language made a mistake in not splitting in half back around 2000, probably a bit earlier, with one fork adopting (flexibly disable-able) garbage collection, dynamic strings, and possibly a few other things, and the other fork more or less as it went. The tricky thing would be they would need binary compatible compiled code, so you could mix the two languages in the same program. It's hard to say how things would have gone since then, but it would probably have developed several dialects that could be mixed within a compiled program, but not within the same source file.
If you think utf8 is trivial in C, you must not have used it for text containing non-ascii characters, or done only very simple processing. I'm guessing that it's the "only very simple processing" choice, because that is actually not unreasonable.
FWIW I *do* prefer utf8 for file storage, but when a chunk contains non-ascii text I usually transform it into codepoints as that's easier. But it's far easier to just pick a different language. Choices that work are Python, Go, Vala, D, and Racket (i.e. Scheme). I'm sure there are others. Which is best depends on the task in hand. (Note that I didn't mention Java. Java has trouble with unicode punctuation and non-European characters.)
The comment about non-standard libraries was WRT garbage collection.
C++ is a pretty good language. It's main problem is it's trying to be the five top languages. Just about nobody uses more than a small subset of C++ plus the underlying commonality of C (with, admittedly a dialect difference from standard C).
The problem with this is that it makes all the features obnoxiously ugly, because it really needs to squirm to maintain compatibility with all the features when it wants to handle something new.
E.G.: I want a language with a built-in garbage collector and hash tables. This is because of the area in which I'm working. It means that C++ is uses really annoying syntax and I need non-standard libraries. So I look elsewhere. But if I were already committed to C++, I *could* do the entire thing in it, and it could be just as efficient, possibly more so. BUT it would be extremely ugly and difficult to maintain.
Actually, I hate C because it's so difficult to send data between executing parallel processes and, secondarily, because it such a beast to handle unicode in. C was probably my third programming language, and the second was assembler. (Fortran was my first.) There are a few other reasons, the dangerous way it handles pointers, etc., and it's ugly when you start needing multiple layers of indirection. But most of those can be gotten used to. The first two, however, ... shudder...
There are things for which boiling water is their normal environment. Most of them don't specialize in infecting humans, but this doesn't mean they can't pass around their plasmids to those that do.
That said, boiling water is generally a good way to throughly wash something. Exceptions are when something is really baked on. Unfortunately, a very small exception can carry a simply huge number of bacteria. When I was an assistant in a biochem lab I sometimes washed glassware. The drill was, first you wash and dry it. Then you submerge it in concentrated Nitric Acid. Then you submerge it in anhydrous alcoholic solution of Potassium Hydroxide. Then you rise it in distilled water. This isn't always a practical approach, and I wasn't even worried about bacteria. Just contamination.
But phages evolve too, so when their food starts becoming elusive, they start becoming better hunters....or, of course, change their food preferences. You could talk to the Australians about some of the downsides.
Maybe mix it with a strong oxidizer. NOT hydrogen peroxide, as the body uses that as a defense, but say ammonium nitrate. Nitric acid would work, but might have undesirable effects.
There have been hiatuses in the past. Usually they have been ended by the eruption of some new technology.
OTOH, the cost of fabs has been increasing so much that the eruption of a new technology may be fatally hindered. And the perceived value has decreased. So you may be right this time.
If I've been reading the reports correctly, fast food and similar places generally ensure that you work less than 20 hours a week at an irregular schedule. So you've got to juggle two irregular hour jobs, neither of which will provide health insurance, workers comp, or other "full time employee" benefits.
I think you need to re-figure the costs/rewards.
Sorry, but you are, in principle, though not in practice, wrong.
If the monopoly controls the market by being more attractive so that any competitor goes broke, then it is a free market that is a natural monopoly. Network effects matter.
If the monopoly uses it's monopoly power to cause others to squeeze out any competition, then it's not a free market.
Monopoly is, in principle, orthogonal to whether or not the market is free. But I've never seen or heard of an example of a monopoly that didn't use external coercion to control the market.
I'm not. Various of their policies have caused me to decide to not do business with them. And those were ill-effects on the "customers".
Sorry, but the US does have real Capitalism. It doesn't have a real Free Market, except in illegal drugs and a few other small areas.
That said, Oligarcho-Capitalism is probably worse than Free-Market Capitalism, but it's hard to be sure because there's never been a large scale example of Free-Market Capitalism. This is probably because no government can allow such a source of funding to go untapped. (But anarchy is unstable, even on a fairly small scale. It usually fails badly even within a family.)
I have a dubious attitude to those who post using a handle. Guess how much I trust a shill called "Anonymous Coward".
If you want to be believed, at least get a handle. Better, point to some externally verifiable sources of data.
I don't think so. Confirmation bias is sufficient to explain deciding this story either way.
FWIW, RSI injuries are not uncommon, and can be quite difficult (read expensive) to prove even where it's possible. Try to remember how long it took carpal tunnel syndrome to be accepted as a valid diagnosis.
That said, an injury that is difficult to prove can easily be faked. And that happens too. But as she remained "unable to work" and became homeless, I tend to believe that her story is correct until I see evidence to the contrary.
Please note that when Beyesian reasoners start with sufficiently different priors it can be the case that no amount of additional evidence will cause them to converge.
Don't place your bet too soon. Others have bet on Moore's law dying before now, and lost big.
That said, there are signs that the replacement won't be conventional silicon. I'm not sure. It might be 3-D chips with persistent state and low dissipation. And since I don't watch that area closely, there are likely options that I haven't even considered. (Last I checked the persistent state had relatively slow switching, so it was considered a bit of a dark horse. But graphene would require investment in new fab technology, so it was considered a dark horse. But...etc. No really evident winners, but lots of contenders.)
The problem is that all the sources of news have proven untrustworthy, so there's no way to validate the stories. People want to believe what they want to believe anyway, and if there's no place that has trustworthy reporting, why fight it?
If the traditional news sources had not sold out (generally after being bought up), then the problem would be considerably less severe. As it is...
There are still a few sources I generally trust. They are biased, but I haven't noticed them actually lying. Of course, they only cover a small portion of the news. How could they cover everything without using untrustworthy sources?
Who doubts that the news reports sports scores as recorded by the sports officials? Does they Chicago Tribune have headlines "Cubs win the Pennant" this year?
I think you're being too hopeful about this as an explanation. Many epigenetic changes are not adaptive, and many others are only arguably adaptive. E.g., what benefit do you ascribe to the kink that some cats get in the tip of their tail from epigenetic modifications? I understand that the stress is the lack of some particular vitamin (or proteing? Can't quite remember.), but it doesn't seem to confer any adaptive advantage, and arguably a slight disadvantage.
I suspect that the major part of the mechanism for "fast adaptation" is the wide diversity of "neutral DNA" carried by most species, that are usually irrelevant in expression, or even unexpressed, but which can become relevant in altered circumstances. It's like a hill-climbing optimization problem where every member of a species is started at the foot of some hill or other. Many will get caught in local maxima, but you're climbing from millions of different starting points.
Crap science reporting, yes. And possibly scientists who interview poorly.
OTOH, the epigenetic modification of the offspring of fathers who were stressed in well defined ways being modified in certain particular respects is well supported. Different cases yield different particulars. So this report is only a potential explanation for an already known result. Requiring them to prove the result is unreasonable, as it's been previously proven.
It would, indeed, be interesting to know what particular stresses cause what particular modifications. And that's probably in either the technical paper they've published or are in the process of producing. (If they're still writing it, they wouldn't want to let the details slip out before publication.)
That said, I'm no expert in the field, so I'd probably find their paper more confusing than illuminating. The summary indicates the article wouldn't be detailed enough to be worth perusing, but I would be interested in a re-write of their academic paper for, say, the Scientific American.
Also, the main point of their work is the mechanism of modification. Someone else will probably work on the details of which stresses cause which changed, and how the epigenetic/RNA changes display in changed phenotypes.
I can't track down why I believe this, but I assert:
Sorry, but Darwin did not "believe" in blended evolution, he worried about it. He knew that blended inheritance would make his theory more difficult to support, and knew examples that seemed to show its validity. But he didn't really believe in it. He did give a lot of thought as to how he would support his theory if it were correct. And he had next to no idea of the mechanism of inheritance.
If Mendel thought Darwin believed in blending inheritance, then that was either one of the papers where he was trying to figure out how to support his theory in that case, or it was a poor translation.
All that said, in some sense most inherited traits are "blended inheritance", because most traits depend on the interaction of multiple genes.
FWIW, and IIRC Darwin even considered whether seeing something might have an effect on inheritance. Something (I only half remember) about a nobleman who was a horse breeder in Africa or Arabia and reported that his horse had striped legs because the mother saw a zebra. IIRC Darwin took this seriously enough to investigate, though I don't know what conclusions he came to.
There are much easier and more plausible explanations. Evidence seems to show that you can find in you mind whatever you go looking for. If you decide to believe it, you will elaborate on the creation. People have found gods, demons, alternate personalities, past lives, and more. Finding something is one thing, believing it is a separate choice...but it's one that many people seem to make.
FWIW, I consider the belief in past lives to be relatively harmless in and of itself, though it can be mixed with other beliefs that render it more dubious.