Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea.

As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising.

Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks.

Five years from now? There be dragons.

"But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!

Can still be replayed, but would likely require special hardware to do so.

Rust's contribution is static resource-use-correctness. Of course, it also implements the other features very well. But if you do not talk about these things in precise terms, it will be harder to convince people to embrace Rust adoption.

Thankfully, Rust is not doing bad for itself in terms of adoption, so what do I know! :)

But it is what kept me from using it for a long time.

I've started writing Rust in the past year and... honestly... I LOVE it.

But what kept me away from Rust for a long time is this talking point of rejecting incorrect code which is so obviously wrong it made proponents of Rust sound very cultish to me.

Rust cannot prevent incorrect code, nor is this possible (halting problem).

What Rust can do is enforce a very specific type of correctness, which may be termed resource-use-correctness. Basically it can enforce that every resource that is used, is properly opened, is properly accessed, has (one writer) OR (multiple readers and no writer) at a time, and is properly closed. It can do this for memory, files, sockets, as well as arbitrary constructs of your choice.

This ability is extremely valuable!

But it is also quite easy to write incorrect buggy programs in Rust, for the very simple reason that it is very easy to write incorrect buggy programs that do not misuse their resources.

Unfortunately, I find this confirms all my fears.

Whether or not ripgrep, fd, sd, et al. have some bugs left in them or not, the fact remains, when they do work (which is 99%+ of the time for most users), they are significantly more pleasant to work with. More pleasant = more use = more eyes = the bugs get fixed in the long run (as GNU should know from it's history!).

I wish everyone all the best, but I really do see a lot of these tools going the way of X.org in the next 10 years. Or, more likely, the way of csh.

> However, I will note that understanding the programs require some complex topics, specifically formal languages and automata. I am not entirely surprised that some of the documentation can be a bit difficult to understand.

And it has every right to be, when it is discussing these topics. But not polluting the global namespace and not using global variables is not an advanced request!

Very much so! I'm not saying the way school approaches books is good, I'd wish there would have been be a lot more time dedicated to reading the darn things. :)

My point is that, if you find reading enjoyable and do it as sort of a hobby instead of a chore (I did, and a bunch of my friends did too, so this wasn't just a me thing), you can get a lot out of the books even at that age.

Of course you understand them more later, but it also goes both ways, you also understand life situations a bit better because you've seen them before in books.

To my shame I've never read Dickens, but I did read the Romanian canonical authors (I am Romanian), and a lot of them, the ones I liked, gave you a very real sense of the life of the people at the time.

Ion, for example, is basically a tragedy about the titular character scheming to marry a woman whom he doesn't love (but who loves him) because he's poor and she's "rich" (owns land). And the book really shows you how important and spiritually so it is for the main character (and therein, for the average farmer at the time) to work his own land, to sweat and toil over his land. How he collapses to his knees and kisses the dirt when he finally gets it etc.

High schoolers can get most books with adult themes, and most books require very little context, since they are filled with passages upon passages upon passages of description.

> How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?

Because they literally say it!

    “Not that I am afraid of myself, but I dread other people’s remarks.”
    “How can I promise to be wiser … if I am tempted?”
    “My father’s opinion of me does me the greatest honour; and I should be miserable to forfeit it.”
    “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

    “To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit, or finer success.”

I don't think waiting 20 years to acquire a much vaguer and much less correct understanding of the context from YouTube/TikTok/TV cultural diffusion is very wise.

Is there any effort from the GNU organization to solve long-standing issues and pain points such as locales?

As it stands I am generally averse to using GNU tools because my feeling is that they will be slow, clunky and exhibit arcane behavior in particular edge cases. ripgrep is significantly faster than GNU grep -R; fd than GNU find, etc.

For example, before LLMs were common, I once had to spend an entire day getting GNU flex and GNU bison to generate code that was: a) properly prefixed with a custom prefix, not yy_ et. al and b) did not use global variables.

I would have understood if, for backwards compatibility, this was gated behind a --sane flag or similar, but the GNU manuals were, at least at the time, under the confusing impression that what I was doing was advanced usage and used semi-fancy terms like "re-enterant" to describe what should be the normal behavior. I had to toggle several different knobs, some working for macros, others for functions, and the knobs were different for flex and bison.

POSIX locales in particular are an anti-feature, and I say this as a non-English native, so uutils adding support for them feels like bug-compatibility with GNU, not feature-compatibility.

Other issues involve the dynamic linking requirements of glibc and of the nsswitch in a world that would increasingly prefer to link things statically.

I am really saddened if the reaction is just that GNU is the old and stable is the main argument here. Because when you read many GNU documents and manpages, written years ago, you get the feeling that the original authors were looking to do things properly, make breaking changes where they were sane (hence POSIXLY_CORRECT), innovate (Emacs), and overall would not have been particularly swayed by the "old and stable" argument of traditional Unix distributions at the time.

The Rust community seems to be the one making exciting innovative stuff nowadays. uucore is more complimentary as well, ripgrep and fd are much more interesting. Sure, there may be certainly kinks, as you pointed out. But Rust programs can be debugged. Can GNU programs innovate?

One of my main uses for my Pixel Watch is reading notifications, and even for a 2-3 line text message I have to scroll to read it because it gets cut out by the roundness.

And that the client and provider can sign a contract forbidding the provider to disclose the information except under a warrant.

I'm not expecting a $0 markup, but Arduino prices are simply unreasonable for what they offer, especially if you live in a lower income country.

The Arduino SDK is the simplest to use, sure, but the Pico framework (I don't have experience with the Espressif one) is extremely good, and the Pico's PIO is a godsend. I used it to implement 3 wire SPI (data bidirectional on the same wire) at almost 'real-time', which is to say, at half the speed of the hardware SPI controller (half the speed because the interface clock is put up one cycle and down the next; this also gives enough time for data shuffling).

Why does the Arduino SDK necessitate a huge markup on Arduino boards, when $0 of every computer I buy to run Linux on goes to GCC?

Unfortunately the only country that ever left proceeded to shoot itself in both knees, light itself on fire and jump in a pool of gasoline. For NO reason.

The restriction is only annoying because there is no way to trivially link against an older "minimum requirement" ABI.

That sounds like more work than spinning up a Docker container though. I'm imagining

    gcc --glibc-target=2.31

iOS and Android do backwards incompatibility all the time. If you find a mobile app that hasn't been updated in 10 or 15 years, you won't be able to install it on a modern device. But, iOS and Android ship apps to billions of users, nobody complains about ABI stability and nobody uses a Win32 compatibility layer.

glibc already has decent UX in that it doesn't allow you to load an app built for a newer version on a host with an older version. Unfortunately, the message is not user friendly at all "could not load @@GLIBC_X.YZ@@foo()", instead of something more readable, but the restriction is, in itself, good.

The problem is that there is no system to trigger backwards incompatibility at any point, nor is there a simple way to target an older Glibc version without spinning up a docker container.

And glibc is a HELL of a codebase, I would NOT want to be responsible for implementing those features, so I understand why they're not there. But 'our Linux build for our game we are still selling and advertising as working on Linux is no longer compatible with new Linux distributions, so let's rebuild it' is a much easier decision for a developer, publisher, etc. to make than '"some" Linux users are reporting issues with our game, should we dedicate resources to investigating this?'

Yeah, that took a long time for MS to get to not suck after Windows 8, but touch and tablet interactions on Windows 10 and Windows 11 work perfectly well.

I live in Romania, and the people that were rushing to pirate Windows in the 90's after communism fell because they couldn't afford licensing weren't doing so because of any US imposition, but simply because they wanted to use personal computers, and Windows was the best OS for most people at the time for that purpose.

Just like when phones came around they rushed to buy Nokia phones; when smartphones came around they rushed to buy Samsung phones; when they wanted DLSRs they bought Canon and Nikon cameras and now that they want easily transferable digital cash and cheap tech trinkets they opened up Revolut accounts and order stuff off Temu.

Not because of any "influence" or "position" of Finland, South Korea, Japan, the UK or China, but simply because they are the best offer on the market as perceived by consumers.

What tech does Europe lead in? To be fair there are still some fields, like Aerospace (Airbus), Lithography (ASML) or Pharmaceutics (BioNTech). But on the consumer tech market, the phones, laptops and streaming services people want? The EU has no presence. Even the auto industry is going to be eaten up by China, because Europe simply pivoted too late to EVs. I know someone who works at Renault and they're just terrified of the cars that are coming out of China.