DoomHotel

Peter Watts covered the possibility of "zombie" intelligences pretty well in his novel Blindsight. One thing I took from it is that such an intelligence could not possibly behave exactly like a human being, because a lot of what we do as humans involves interaction with other humans where we have a mental model of their consciousness being much like our own. Expressing sympathy toward another person, for example, would be inconceivable without consciousness.

Postgres (>11) also implements the SQL/JSON path language that lets you extract table data from JSON.

Using the type system to implement a Natural Numbers Object[1] is pretty clever. Doing math with it is not exactly efficient, but it does prove it works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_numbers_object

The kernel uses the sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure to determine whether to evict cache vs. process memory.

Sam Vimes's $10 boots have become the 800 dollar cars in that article.

But cars are optional if you live somewhere with working mass transportation.

RISC-V International's plan to give away 1,000 boards to developers seems like a good idea. I like some of the products I've seen but the cheap ones are just toys and the decent ones are way overpriced.

The US government's official numbers for 2019 [1] only show 131k jobs for "information security analysts" and they project 171k by 2029. The total for computer, network and database administrators is only around 500k.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

Nobody likes Monty Python references?

I guess I shoulda known, my Simpsons one got downvoted too. Well, lessons learned, I guess.

I think it'd be more appropriate if the post bore a great red label: 'WARNING: EMACS!!!'

Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all the way to the left first.

I negotiated a deal at a former employer where I worked 4 x 9.5 hour days with Wednesdays off. I took a 5% pay cut and lost a proportional amount of vacation time. I kept my benefits but had to pay a slightly higher share for my contribution to the health care plan. It worked out very well—I especially liked having Wednesdays to run errands when government offices and banks etc. were open.

> unrestricted immigration

I'm in the USA and this polemical strawman is standard fare on Murdoch's Fox News. It's just a lazy way of dismissing the issue without real discussion.

You should be very glad you did not move to the UK. The Home Office has a backlog of 320,000 unprocessed applications for residency status, according to a recent Guardian article. [1] These people will be in legal limbo with no right to remain in the UK after June 30th if the backlog is not cleared.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/10/eu-citizens...

This week's Brexit & Beyond [1] mentioned this and I forgot to follow up on the link, so thank you. Performative cruelty for the masses while the Government talks up the great and wonderful success that is Brexit is only to be expected, I guess.

[1] https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/parallel-un...

Wow, it didn't work at all on my desktop. It thinks I have 23 apps from its list installed, on both Firefox and Chrome. Pretty funny seeing that on a Linux box running CentOS 7. Even better, it detects a different app on each as the only one missing: on Firefox it says I don't have Skype installed, while on Chrome it says I don't have Hotspot Shield installed.

The Sun RPC code had a loop where it allocated one page at a time and filled an array with the returned pointers. The article says there was a 500% performance improvement after replacing the loop with a single call to the batch allocator. (While RPC can be thought of as networking code, it is more than just network packet flow.)

There are probably other places where this will help. Now that the interface is available, developers can start trying it.

Do you hate your feelings and try to run away from them?

My inherent cynicism leads me to believe the real reason they shut down the pipeline was because the attackers took down the accounting system.

Is this title trying to riff on "No, it is the children who are wrong"?

Figure 2 in that article, illustrating a constant-width figure with three sides (a Reuleaux triangle), reminded me of a science fiction story from long ago. I finally found the title: it's "The Three-Cornered Wheel" by Poul Anderson. A spaceship crew on an alien planet needs to transport something heavy but the natives worship circles and won't let them use cylindrical rollers. They eventually find a solution that satisfies everyone.

That Washington Post story is dated May 3, 2016 and now I'm wondering if that justifies flagging the post.

The 1980 film The Lathe of Heaven is wonderfully done, especially when you consider it was made as a PBS project for $250,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven_(film)

Use Firefox Focus on mobile.

On desktop, set Firefox to purge everything when closing the browser. Use Chrome only when necessary to do strictly Google-related things.

We had some coding rules to help prevent that:

1. No unnecessary periods in the code

2. Required periods (ending paragraphs and if/then/else) go on a line by themselves

I learned structured programming using COBOL in the 1970s on a Xerox Sigma 6 and went on to use it on Burroughs Medium Systems (B3500/B4800).

We used PERFORM to implement calls. Whether or not implemented with a stack, it acts the same as any call/return. So to implement a simple loop to count records in a file:

PERFORM COUNT-ROWS VARYING COUNT FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL EOF.

And the callee did:

READ INPUT-FILE AT END MOVE 1 TO EOF-FLAG.

IBM mainframes also do/did hardware BCD arithmetic, starting with System/360.

And as for COBOL not lending itself to structure, how did Structured COBOL exist, then? I wrote lots of COBOL without a single GO TO anywhere in the code.