Old IBM mainframe scripting in JCL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Control_Language (so "OS JCL", now I suppose) used to have a terrible reputation for this, but I've never actually touched the stuff myself.
Hopefully this means my company of 16 developers, all of whom are white and male, stops getting accused of being racist because ignorant people on the internet don't realise we are English and there are no black developers within 80 miles
> At it's core an LLM is a sort of "situation specific simulation engine." You setup a scenario, and it then plays it out with it's own internal model of the situation, trained on predicting text in a huge variety of situations. This includes accurate real world models of, e.g. physical systems and processes, that are not going to be accessed or used by all prompts, that don't correctly instruct it to do so.
This idea of LLMs doing simulations of the physical world I've never heard before. In fact a transformer model cannot do this. Do you have a source?
I think there is a bit of nuance to this. The UK also has about 500 or so homeless people per 100000 inabitants. In the US the number of people in prisons is about that number per 100K. On top of their huge homeless problem.
There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter when it is offered to them. But people with serious psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in the US and the UK on a yearly basis.
I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that other countries could learn from. Including the business of incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes addressing those issues after they serve their shortish prison terms. And with some level of success.
I'm thinking it's likely the number of supported colors and integer vs floating point precision.
You'll notice that quake textures are very similar to PS1 textures in that they are pixelated and use a limited number of colors, whereas N64 textures have more of a smooth gradient.
Likely also there are differences in the lighting systems as well. This is why I think people compare Quake II or even Quake III Arena to UE1. The OG quake really was a hack just to be the first that did 6 degrees of freedom textured 3D graphics on a PC, which I think they were the first for those exact constraints. My history is a little fuzzy, SEGA certainly had them beat by multiple years on arcade boards but those were all custom, and other games that had 6 degrees of freedom were not textured. It was a busy time !
amazon's internal build tool experiences this same phenomena. engineers are hired based on their leetcode ability; which means the average engineer has gaps in their infrastructure and config tool knowledge/skillset. until the industrys hiring practices shift, this trend will continue.
In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?
If it is congestion it might help to try and find a wifi channel (frequency) that is less utilized by other routers nearby, because they may have signals that sometimes reach stronger into your area than your own wifi.
You can use some wifi survey software to see what channels are in more popular use by your neighbors at the time, and the relative strengths, as well as overlap to adjacent channels.
Most routers are going to automatically search and dynamically change channels to avoid congestion on their own, so you aren't expected to need to do this manually. But sometimes that's what it takes to outperform your router's algorithm in the face of airwave competitors which can easily outnumber it.
If instead you choose a fixed wifi channel on your own router, neither it nor your PC will need to go through any of the occasional auto-channel-changing routine, which itself is an opportunity for discontinuity from either end.
Plus it may take a while but eventually the nearby interfering routers will behave as if they recognize that yours is standing its ground on the frequency you have staked out, and they'll all move away from you. So if you're lucky it can get better through time.
It can be an improvement to disable all but a single 2G or 5G band on the router, plus on the PC too unless you need something like a portable device to pick up all frequencies wherever you go.
Another way to narrow the focus with auto-networking in general is to pick either ipv4 or ipv6, disable the other one and see if that's any better. Which can also be done on router and/or PC.
Plus it's Windows :)
Now that you've got your current versions of drivers and software installed, and browsers updated, if you haven't yet booted to safe mode and back, it's not a moment too soon :) Still quite the frequent miracle-worker since W9x.
Sometimes while in safe mode I like to open Device Manager, show Devices By Connection, and show Hidden Devices. Look around and see if there are any phantom conflicting devices to uninstall. Often will just look under Volume Manager and uninstall all the hidden phantom volumes which can accumulate un-necessarily. I consider them kind of distracting. It's harmless and any useful virtual volumes will re-generate in more current form if the same USB devices are connected in the future.
Returning from safe mode there will be a bit of a re-reckoning but after that it will boot as fast as normal again.
You can further shake up all devices without uninstalling anything if you delete all the .PNF files in C:\Windows\INF. These are just preprocessed INF files and you might benefit from fresh ones here. Don't delete the INF files themselves, they are part of your device driver packages.
You may find there are hundreds of PNFs to delete, but usually only a handful are (not even) "needed" in everyday operation, which will be simply regenerated as encountered. PNFs were actually useful in Windows 3.1.
There are also the .PF files in C:\Windows\prefetch which can carry unfavorable behavior from one reboot to the next. These were only intended for HDDs so they wouldn't seem as unresponsive as SSD, but even with HDD you can't tell the difference. I shitcan them all after disabling Sysmain in Services.msc so the .PFs don't regenerate at all.
Further escalation would be to uninstall the wifi networking hardware itself in device manager while you are in safe mode, then boot into bios and if possible disable the wifi in bios. Power completely down, then restart. If Windows can not detect your wifi it will still be a normal boot and all the built-in Windows networking components will accommodate functioning without any wifi. Then with more restarting (after re-enabling wifi in bios, if previously disabled), Windows will detect wifi and guided by the appropriate INF file go through the procedure of "freshly" installing the drivers you already had before.
Then there's actually installing different wifi drivers, if that's even the problem who knows. So this can often be a minimum of 3 choices, the drivers you had before, a manufacturer's download, or Windows Update which can sometimes have more than one version to choose from itself in its Catalog. Only one of which is possible to be the "best" performer. So the odds are stacked against you from the beginning :(
>if! i use it a lot(?) . . .
You also might need at least 16GB of memory for that even if 8GB was fine a year ago.
>changed dns servers
In earlier W11 (and w10) there was great discrepancy in IP settings like this between the traditional Windows Control Panel vs the Metro style Settings for Network parameters. With Control Panel working as expected no differently than in Windows 7, the "modern" Metro alternative GUI failed miserably to perform very much at all trying to control the same hardware. Only the Control Panel reflected what is found using ipconfig.exe at CMD prompt. "Settings" seems to be fixed now if you are updated enough, but I still trust the regular Control Panel better.
Plus, probably more people than you think could use a trip to the CMD line, for a quick ipconfig /flushdns if nothing else sometimes.
And I'm trying to make it sound like I haven't been at my wit's end too much . . .
Reactionary is a pejorative usually used by Marxists, and implies drawing one side into their false us-vs-them dichotomy where the "them" has a "fair game doctrine" applied to them. Usually other epithets soon follow: racist, criminal, etc.
Not only is it not, as you note, an argument, it's a pejorative label designed to discount and demonize the opponent. It's also likely to be used by someone in a political cult (or "high demand new political movement" if you prefer).
George Orwell had a really fun article on "Politics and the English Language" which goes into some detail on the controlling nature of such language and the people who use it.
On the other hand, there are cases where (beneficial/desired) verbosity prompts copy-paste and tweaking - not due to complexity but from some form of scale or size of the input.
In many cases this is a sign of something that should be dynamic data (put it in a db instead of conf) but that's not always the case and worth the tradeoff in the moment.
I have observed the Makefile effect many times for LaTeX documents. Most researchers I worked with had a LaTeX file full of macros that they have been carrying from project to project for years. These were often inherited from more senior researchers, and were hammered into heavily-modified forks of article templates used in their field or thesis templates used at their institution.
anyone can hide and claim they have no money, better to provide housing to good students with good job. We can call it I don't know, "credit score" or something like that.
FreePascal/Delphi and VB6 are entirely different beasts. For one, FreePascal and Delphi are still under development. Delphi had the following language features added since 1998 (this is just a small selection):
Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (removing Pascal's limitation), type inference, multiline strings.
Besides all of this, modern Delphi can compile code for Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Android and iOS. It seems like there's even a cross-platform library for writing apps that can run on both Mobile and Desktop called FireMonkey.
VB6, on the other hand, is a language frozen in time. It never supported any other platform than 32-bit Windows[2]. It only really works on the new Microsoft Surface Laptops thanks to emulation, but I can also run Nintendo 8-bit games on a Surface Pro 11 using an emulator — that doesn't say much.
Unicode support is also a mess. VB6 always used Unicode internally, but this was implementing during the UCS-2 heyday (so you need hacks to use Emoji for instance). Worse yet, is that VB6 was never really designed to run natively on Windows NT, so it's mostly using using the XxxYyyA family of APIs instead of the XxxYyyW family of APIs. This means that you can only display text in a non-English writing if your system's ANSI codpeage is set to that language (in the past you had to restart Windows to change this, not sure if it has improved). To make things worse, some languages (from countries that were too pair to get ANSI pages in Microsoft during the 1990s). So no Ethiopian languages or Mongolian as the author claims. Windows ANSI codpeages also do not "fully support" Japanese and Chinese as the author claims. Over the years the governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have updated their national standards (which defined tables of characters that should be digitally encodable) and introduced more characters that were previously not mapped. These characters were not new or fake[3] — they were just less common, but still in use. All of these various government standards (like JIS X 0213, GB 18030, Big5-2003) got quickly incorporated into newer versions of Unicode, but the Windows ANSI codepages stagnated and they don't support some of the characters in these codepages. I'm not sure how it's going to affect VB6, but I'm pretty sure that some Unicode CJK characters would just not map into ANSI and would not be displayed even if your system code page is set correctly.
With all of these things considered, no developer who cares about their users should choose VB6 for writing a modern app. I'd also argue that no developer who cares about themselves would do that. VB6 wasn't a great language to begin with. It was better than VB3, but it was still inferior to Delphi even when it was out. Customizing the UI beyond the basics, often needed custom ActiveX components written in C++ or messing around with a lot of raw Windows API calls. Error handling was very painful too. It was never a great developer experience even back of the day if you wanted to do anything beyond the basics.
---
[1] To be fair, Borland's Pascal dialects had value types support since they've implemented object oriented programming (that came in either Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0, I don't exactly remember). Turbo Pascal "objects" could be put on the stack or as pointers like in C++. They even had destructors that would be invoked automatically when the object went out-of-scope, again like C++'s RAII. But the old "objects" kinda botched polymorphism (I don't even remember the details), so when Delphi came out they've been replaced with "classes" that are Reference-only (like Java, but initially without any form of automatic memory management).
[2] VBA was originally ported to Mac, but it is not exactly the same language, lacks the GUI designer and can't run most VB6 apps
>The massive air tanker was built as a transport plane for the U.S. Navy in 1946, and is one of the largest fixed-wing water bombers in the world, with a capacity to carry more than 27,000 litres of water.
Theft is the wrong term, it implies that the original is no longer available. It's copyright infringement at best, and possibly fair use depending on jurisdiction. It wasn't theft when the RIAA went on a lawsuit spree against mp3 copying, and it isn't theft now.
