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Ever heard about Laos?

"Between December of 1964 and March of 1973, the US launched more than 270 million cluster bombs on Laos during Operation Barrel Roll. This number is equivalent to dropping a full plane cargo load every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. Laos is thus the most heavily bombed country in the world."

"The legacy of this once secret war continues today. More than 80,000,000 undetonated bombs are strewn across the country threatening the lives of its people."

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/laos-the-most-heavily-bo...

"Since the end of the operation in 1973, over 20,000 people have died or been injured by these remaining bombs. At any moment, a farmer may strike one while plowing or a child may find one while playing. (...) Estimates suggest that as many as 100 civilians fall victim every year"

Only somebody who isn't aware of whose "Congress speech received multiple standing ovations, touted 'most by any world leader'" would be surprised by that bipartisan support you mention. That happened in 2024, before Trump began his second term, but shows how the system works.

European, not accidentally, also mostly deliver the same, misleading, narrative.

Can you write or point to some more insights about the problems / critique of these most recent approaches?

Another advantage of Pascal is that the programs written in it crashed much less, which also allowed for a much safe development on the machines of that time which didn't have any "memory write" protections. And safety in development actually translated in less crashy product too.

> the C example ... by definition strings cannot contain that character

They can, only some functions stop at the first zero:

    char s[] = "gogo\x00gogo";
    printf( "%d\n", (int)sizeof( s ) );

That's what Doctorow calls "a cartoonish vision of markets in which “the customer is king” and successful businesses are those who cater to their customers." In reality, the capitalists also don't care, _when they can get away with it._

"To understand whom a platform treats well and whom it abuses, look not to who pays it and who doesn’t. Instead, ask yourself: who has the platform managed to lock in? "

etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-22...

And then imagine how it all appears on my 4inch-screen iPhone, if 5.8 inch is already too small.

"Smearing" is much more sensible approach for the use cases where it is implemented. There is simply no solution that is optimal for every use case, and insisting on using just one approach everywhere is unreasonable.

Now I'd like to have a link to that patch in code used by Apple that also appeared as a typo. Anybody remembers?

Pity that the post from understandwp is marked dead, it was helpful to me:

"The "100 Bytes of CSS to look great everywhere" - https://gist.github.com/JoeyBurzynski/617fb6201335779f8424ad... should help with achieving that.

There is also a lively discussion and more examples on the Gist."

Still:

- the church officially wrote that the Earth is the center

- that the Holy Scripture says so and

- whoever says differently is heretic

and the Earth was never the center.

You still can't deny: the church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim.

The Earth was never the center around which the Sun rotated. Not in 1AD, not in 1600AD, not now.

If the church claimed that the "Holy Scripture" says that the Earth is in the center, the church was still wrong, and moreover, the "Holy Scripture" was wrong.

The church can't be right to claim "heresy" to somebody who was right then and is still right now.

So yes, that's exactly an example of the "guilty Galileo and the good church" false narrative.

Many useless claims which don't disprove that his sentence was literally because of:

"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"

And the church forbade his book as "heresy" for 200 years.

He was right. The church was wrong, directly referring to the effing "Holy Scripture" to support its claim and played fighting "heresy", keeping being wrong for 200 years afterwards. It's so clear.

You probably don't want to know:

https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-us-secret-war-laos-st...

"From 1964 to 1973, the United States bombed Laos more heavily than any country on earth. The reason most Americans do not know this is because it was a secret war orchestrated by the CIA; it stands as the largest covert CIA operation to date."

"One team can find anywhere from three to 16 bombs in a day. The UXO Lao’s 2015 annual report states that since 1996, 1.4 million UXO have been cleared in Laos by a combined effort of UXO Lao and other UXO-clearing organizations, like MAG International. At this rate, it will take thousands of years before Laos is free of UXO."

"Forty percent of UXO victims are children who pick up the bombs, usually thinking they are toys."

The US cluster bombs. Now also in Ukraine:

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/20/politics/ukraine-cluster-...

Oh, there's now a bunch of accounts claiming that Galileo was "just" mean to pope and therefore "guilty", but this is an actual pro-religion propaganda. The real sentence is preserved up to this day and is completely clear:

https://hti.osu.edu/sites/default/files/documents_in_the_cas...

"heresy" ... "that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world" ... "contrary to Holy Scripture"

More detailed:

"We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture".

Additionally, Galileo's and Copernicus' books were finally removed from the index of the banned books only in 1835, they were on the banned list for more than 200 years, since the 1616 Inquisition's judgment.

Context: Galileo was the first person to see with his own eyes with his first of the kind self-made telescope the moons that are today known as Galilean moons and recognized them as the satellites of Jupiter in March 1610. Which convinced him that the understanding of the church was wrong. The church sentenced him in 1633 to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_moons

The author of this one is an artist. Whoever consumes this work without considering this is also demonstrating how often the information is processed under already fixed expectations, also affecting the results.

Adam Curtis also stated that his own work is intentionally "different", so I believe the similarities aren't accidental.

Afghanistan opium cultivation in 2023 declined to one in 20 compared to earlier (95% less), following drug ban by those who are now in power:

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2023/November/...

You know when the opium production numbers started to rise, in earlier times? 2004. Correlates with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...

If you really think the fake narratives originate only from the countries which aren't "behaving" as the politicians of your preferred countries would like, I have a huge stock of bridges to sell to you.

Edit: If you'd like a very recent example, research who's telling he saw the "pictures of beheaded babies", and why.

"Only 35% slower overall than LuaJIT" as per video from a month ago.

No idea which kind of tests are these "overall" though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxSHIpEQRjs

Slides (pg. 31 performance):

https://github.com/brandtbucher/brandtbucher/blob/master/202...

The demand for the huge calculations for the design of nuclear weapons started in WW II already:

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/human-computers-lo...

"The staff in the T-5 group included recruited women who had degrees in mathematics or physics, as well as, wives of scientists and other workers at Los Alamos. According to Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project, some of the human computers were Mary Frankel, Josephine Elliot, Beatrice “Bea” Langer, Augusta “Mici” Teller, Jean Bacher, and Kay Manley. While some of the computers worked full time, others, especially those who had young children, only worked part time.

General Leslie R. Groves, the Director of the Manhattan Project, pressured the wives of Los Alamos to work because he felt that it was a waste of resources to accommodate civilians. As told by Kay Manley, the wife of Los Alamos physicist John Manley, the recruitment of wives can also be traced to a desire to limit the housing of “any more people than was absolutely necessary.” This reason makes sense given the secretive nature of Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. SEDs, a group of drafted men who were to serve domestically using their scientific and engineering backgrounds, also worked in the T division."

You are right. Here is the source of "compress" that existed at that time. It compresses the produced song to 1048 bytes, not less.

https://www.nic.funet.fi/index/minix/compress.c

The program that produces the song, without the introductory comment, is 913 bytes, as presented in the article. Removing whitespaces it uses just 800 bytes and produces the song which is 2359 chars here. The whole C is:

    main(t,_,a)char*a;{return!0<t?t<3?main(-79,-13,a+main(-87,1-_,
    main(-86,0,a+1)+a)):1,t<_?main(t+1,_,a):3,main(-94,-27+t,a)&&t==
    2?_<13?main(2,_+1,"%s%d%d\n"):9:16:t<0?t<-72?main(_,t,
    "@n'+,#'/*{}w+/w#cdnr/+,{}r/*de}+,/*{*+,/w{%+,/w#q#n+,/#{l,+,/n{n+,/+#n+,/#;\
    #q#n+,/+k#;*+,/'r :'d*'3,}{w+K w'K:'+}e#';dq#'l q#'+d'K#!/+k#;\
    q#'r}eKK#}w'r}eKK{nl]'/#;#q#n'){)#}w'){){nl]'/+#n';d}rw' i;# ){nl]!/n{n#'; \
    r{#w'r nc{nl]'/#{l,+'K {rw' iK{;[{nl]'/w#q#\
    \
    n'wk nw' iwk{KK{nl]!/w{%'l##w#' i; :{nl]'/*{q#'ld;r'}{nlwb!/*de}'c ;;\
    {nl'-{}rw]'/+,}##'*}#nc,',#nw]'/+kd'+e}+;\
    #'rdq#w! nr'/ ') }+}{rl#'{n' ')# }'+}##(!!/")
    :t<-50?_==*a?putchar(31[a]):main(-65,_,a+1):main((*a=='/')+t,_,a+1):
    0<t?main(2,2,"%s"):*a=='/'||main(0,main(-61,*a,
    "!ek;dc i@bK'(q)-[w]*%n+r3#l,{}:\nuwloca-O;m .vpbks,fxntdCeghiry"),a+1);}

It compiles and links even without #include.

Trying to solve the modern problems and showing that one needs more code than in Python is not the point.

The reason Basic wasn't horrible but amazing at the time as the home computers appeared is hard to understand without the context of that time:

Basic on these computers was, in today's language:

- an actual "complete" operating system and

- a command language and

- a script language and

- a programming language

Additionally, if one wanted to use the "full power" of the CPU one had to use machine code, as there was so little RAM that most of the programs that did fascinating stuff were true masterpieces. Those using Basic knew that it's not "all there is".

The excuse there is that the whole video is kind-of "moving images" inspired by Sgt. Peppers covers and the fact that the music is also a result of combined sounds recorded in different decades.

On another side, we have the recent "washing and flattening" of the films by AI for no reason but to "look better" for those who aren't really going to invest their energy to see where it gives worse results.

"It is expedient and profitable if people don’t remember what film is supposed to look like."

And there are also enough who have never seen how it looked like before, anyway.

The 1902 original of the linked film was "actually shot on Biograph’s proprietary 68mm stock" i.e. could be considered very high resolution in any historical timeframe, even today ("The IMAX of the 1890s")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU

So, a taste:

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...

"1.5.2 Computing Lagrange's Equations

The procedure for computing Lagrange's equations mirrors the functional expression (1.18), where the procedure Gamma implements :58

   (define ((Lagrange-equations Lagrangian) q)
       (- (D (compose ((partial 2) Lagrangian) (Gamma q)))
            (compose ((partial 1) Lagrangian) (Gamma q))))"

Maybe more readable version:

https://tgvaughan.github.io/sicm/toc.html

Source: https://github.com/tgvaughan/sicm

Also thanks for mentioning Clascal, I wasn't even aware of it. Also fascinating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/toolkit_3.0/Package_2_E...

Reading the motivation for the second:

"Relying on autoregressive forward passes to generate text is slow and prone to hallucination/repetition. From the nougat paper: We observed [repetition] in 1.5% of pages in the test set, but the frequency increases for out-of-domain documents. In my anecdotal testing, repetitions happen on 5%+ of out-of-domain (non-arXiv) pages."

When these are fed in the next levels as inputs, isn't it even less surprising to get even more hallucinations/repetitions?