b) Text generation essentially means passing the Turing test, which for a long time was the bar for general intelligence. Locomotion does not necessarily require general intelligence.

I'm not sure how much influence a First Language has - the biggest impact might be whether someone decides to continue learning to program. I'd also worry that we might lose something if all computer scientists are too similar. There are lisp believers, and there are those who swear by C; and I think the field of CS would be less rich if either were missing. Given that, it's a good thing that there are a variety of languages taught as first languages, and I'd like to see the variety widen (I don't know of any CS degree which begins by teaching Forth).

My expectation is that when I think I've found a bug in the programming language implementation I'm using, it's actually me that's mistaken (or at least that language lawyers consider me to be mistaken). Hearing about someone who has encountered multiple bugs (in regular use, rather than running a fuzzer or being directly involved in implementing the language) makes me very wary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...

My understanding of that section was that Ukraine were using it to find launch sites in occupied parts of Ukraine - they go on to describe how they helped someone who had been doing the tracking:

[From article]

> We emailed back and forth and provided documentation on how to run the predictor locally.

Edit: my recollection of which parts of Ukraine are occcupied was wrong, leaving me rather confused about who they thought they were helping.

> False. If they were threads they'd have their own PC. They do not - only the warp has a PC.

They are using the term SIMT as it is normally used[1]. The "single instruction" part means that there is only one PC shared across multiple 'threads'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_t...

That would overestimate the number you need to remove excess exhaled CO2, since you could throw out the parts you can't eat rather than letting them decay and release CO2 indoors.

I'm not convinced that this is much more true than the claim "correct code doesn't scale". If you add to your code in a way depends on a new property for correctness, and the code was not previously written with awareness that the new property was necessary, then you need to check through the rest of your code and make sure that the property is maintained. Formally verifying things is painful because it actually makes you check this.

Instead, we live in a world where we use software that is not completely correct. Browsers have remote code execution vulnerabilities because people who make browsers decided it's more important that javascript can run quickly, and that new standards get implemented, than that we avoid such vulnerabilities at all costs.

> right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands

https://openai.com/brand/#:~:text=right%20angles

If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.

Once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

It's an interesting observation, but it's playing games with the meaning of "mean latency" and I'm not sure this is a very helpful way to look at requests to a web service - slightly slowing the fastest responses to requests would improve your time-weighted mean latency.

It's a better metric for looking at outages - instantaneous outages don't affect anyone, and time-weighting correctly discards them. On the other hand, average outage length is a very suspect and gameable metric unless accompanied by uptime %.

Thanks for putting this clearly. I had not given this argument enough thought and respect previously. Would you agree if I said this is about maximizing the amount of useful information given to the reader (even if it deviates from approximating a printed page) and a perceptual colour space is the way to measure that information?

I should mention that I can find plenty of resources that suggest you should use a different font for dark-on-light vs light-on-dark (although I'm aware I'm not a good judge of the quality of said resources). This is not necessarily opposed to your point, since your reasoning can be extended to conclude that identically shaped printed text subject to blurring in linear colour space would be perceived differently depending on whether it's light-on-dark or dark-on-light (including when it's naturally blurred due to imperfect eyesight).

> Note that the Wikipedia article is wrong, given that photoshop uses a nontrivial gamma exponent

If we set text rendering aside, and consider something like games which prioritize photorealism rather than legibility, would you agree that linear colour space is the sensible one to do antialiasing in? This is for essentially the same reason you should do image resizing in linear color space, for which Wikipedia's citation [6] provides a convincing demonstration.

[6] https://www.ericbrasseur.org/gamma.html?i=1

I disagree with you here. Text rendering specifically is incredibly complicated, but for antialiasing in other contexts, the problem can be seen as trying to approximate what would be seen if the display had higher resolution and the viewer has blurry eyesight. In this model, a linear color space makes sense - if 60% of the pixels within a region on a higher dpi display would be lit, then that is best approximated* by a single pixel emitting the same number of photons as those pixels would (which is 60% as many photons as there should be in the situation where all pixels on the higher dpi display would be lit).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing#Anti-ali... .

*there are better filters if you're looking at more than one pixel at once

> Using perceptual blending, the antialiasing will be exactly the same efficacy in both cases. Using blending in linear space, these two test cases will look very different and render incorrectly!

Whatever color space you do your blending in, 40% black onto white should look the same as 60% white onto black.

You have to precisely follow a sequence of instructions without the experience to understand their purpose, or any idea of how to fix things if you make a mistake.

Web technology is an exception to this. People already have a web browser, and ignoring mobile devices, browsers come with a js REPL.