Viewing profile — scj

> "because C is such a small and simple language (and one which, as you suggested, often feels like a bunch of syntactic sugar over PDP-7 assembly)." I didn't describe such qualiti…

I'd phrase it differently, C++ was a set of power-to-performance trade-offs that were optimal in the 1990s. Time has moved on. More importantly, a typical 1990s C++ dev was likely …

Using an ASI to subjugate humans in any capacity is a terrible idea. without sharing tech to make the ASI, you'd hope humanity could work together to determine how to align an AI f…

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - G…

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like? My bet is something _like_ ass…

"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement …

One of my favourite little details in Jeeves and Wooster is that British cops are shown as bumbling fools who fit right in with the cast. Meanwhile American police are consistently…

> "At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update..." If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if secur…

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / servi…

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will cha…

The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo. "This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch wher…

It'll likely be used to mine bitcoin instead.

Insane question, asked for the purposes of discussion: Would it make sense if those GPUs were top-of-the-line for years? Like if TSMC were destroyed? Even then, I don't understand …

> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so. What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? Wha…

Is it going to translate C into good Rust code, or just C with a Rust accent? Think transpiled C in Javascript. Soon LLMs will be able to write Fortran in any language!

"you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ witho…

Could Commodore have made a financially successful low-cost Amiga laptop circa 1991 - 1993?

Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI? "Here's a bug report, fix it." "Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's trigge…

AI can draw blueprints of a house. The house may look aesthetically pleasing, but if it can't hold it's own weight, the design is flawed. There's a difference between an executed i…

Wouldn't it be nice if popular libraries could export to .so files so the best language for a task could use the bits & pieces it needed without a programmer needing to know python…

And how many factories capable of casting steel cannons were in the south?

Same if the King can say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" then pardon the soldiers that do.

I'm Canadian and remember repurposing AOL floppy disks that came in the mail circa 1996. Never used the service though.

If annexed and somehow given democratic rights, I suspect Canadians would form a protest party with the goal of budgetary shutdowns in the House of Representatives... Zero support …