The neighbours’ seven-year-old suggested using a VPN to get around age checks. I don’t know if he knows what one is, but he’s definitely seen adverts for them.

I’m surprised their response wasn’t, “you’re all on the side of predators; it’s as simple as that”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/29/peter-kyle-nigel-farage-extreme-pornographers-online-safety-bill

I’m not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn’t it turn “it works on my machine” into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: … "?

Some of the GoF patterns over-emphasise inheritance, but by-and-large, you don’t build large systems without either using or rediscovering software patterns, whether they’re OO, FP, or what-have-you.

No, it didn’t.

You haven’t read it, but that’s what you reckon? Okay.

As to the other point: JKR’s stuff is trite and derivative, but I do think that some of its “problematic” aspects are likely just because it’s regurgitating European fantasy tropes, which themselves may (originally or later on) encode antisemitism and so on.

And when it comes to it, subjecting any popular series to close reading with an eye for affront is likely to show up its flaws. Just think of all the janitors who blew up with the death star.

But Brown’s stuff is utter garbage (not to mention just ripping off “the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”, which was pretty awful to begin with) - if you have the chance to pick it up second-hand I’d encourage you to see if you can finish it.

“If it was “terribly written” it wouldn’t have made the success it did”

Dan Brown’s millions beg to differ.

If people like HP stuff they might want to try Dianna Wynne Jones’ stuff: earlier, better, and didn’t have the same fortunate exposure.

The point of Java is to be a language for 90% of programmers. The vast majority of software development is not sexy, doesn’t require a PhD. Java was intended to be a commoditising language and in that it succeeded wildly.

Training, decent modern equipment, understanding and managing risk, gear redundancy, and wear a frickin’ helmet (esp. when belaying).

Yeah, there are some yahoos, but there’re also people who drop dead playing table-tennis.

With massive OOO pipelines, what’s the alternative?

Sounds like a really bad decision - forced error due to some other reason to back out rapidly. What an awful tragedy.

I was under the impression that Musk was going to “fix” Boeing’s delivery of AF1. I think his suggestions included relaxing the security clearance for new hires and getting everyone working 60-hour weeks.

News of that all went very quiet after the announcement though.

He had a number of unchaperoned calls with Putin. I think it’s more likely that he’s acting in fear of an unpleasant death; sometimes direct credible threats work wonders.

I’m not sure if that opening sentence is fatuous or not. What errors in any industrial enterprise are not human in origin?

That’s actually the idea. It’s not general precrime, it’s a decision support tool for predicting recidivism when deciding parole cases.

That doesn’t mean it’s not on decidedly shonky ground statistically speaking.

570 recorded homicides between March 2023 and 2024.

Data on “hundreds of thousands” of people can’t provide the distinguishing markers to even have a stab at this.

It can reliably predict when people are black, though.

Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it’s like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I’ve seen of production cobol) a “common trick” in lots of real-world deployments.

Whilst it’s gotten a lot better in the -17 and -20 iterations, the fact that there was recently a doorstop book published solely on the subject of C++ initialisation semantics is pretty telling.

I really like what Herb Sutter’s doing around cppfront; I still wouldn’t use C++ unless I absolutely had to.

To add something to this: linux has avoided internal SPIs for a long time. It’s often lauded as one of the reasons it hasn’t ossified.

However, some subsystems have a huge amount of complexity and hidden constraint in how you correctly use them. Some of that may be inherent, but more of it will be accidental.

Wrapping type-erased shims around this that attempt to capture (some of) those semantics shines a light onto the problem. The effort raises good technical questions around whether the C layer can be improved. Where maintainers have approached that with an open mind, the results are positive for both C and Rust consumers. Difficult interfaces are a source of bugs; it’s always worth asking whether that difficulty is inherent or accidental.

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/2025021954-flaccid-pucker-f7d9@gregkh/