Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.

Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.

A few things wrong with that. First is there is no net happiness formula which utilitarians are proposing. Peter Singer has said more than once that he weights suffering far, far higher than happiness.

Second is that every ethical system has screw cases which make the system look messed up. "Do unto others..." it terrible if you are talking about masochists.

(1) the songs were already in my head,

(2) Sting would have two or three cool hooks per song, and this is the important part,

(3) the hooks would played over and over during the song. That meant I could play the song all the way through and get to practice each riff 10 times or more with just a single needle lift.

A prime example: Demolition Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7To6vdg7A)

As an example, I asked claude 3.5 back when that was the latest to indent all the code in my file by four more spaces. The file was about 700 lines long. I got a busy spinner for two minutes then it said, "OK, first 50 lines done, now I'll do the rest" and got another busy spinner and it said, "this is taking too long. I'm going to write a program to do it", which of course it had no problem doing. The point is that it is superhuman at some things and completely brain-dead about others, and counting parens is one of those things I wouldn't expect it to be good at.

https://www.academia.edu/figures/3550818/table-2-operator-pr...

Writing a recursive descent for this would require writing 16 functions, and you'd end up spending most of your time cycling through the functions to finally come across the one which applies for the given situation.

I've written straight-forward expressions parsers as you suggest, but when I had to do it for systemverilog, I used a classic shunting yard parser. You see the operator, compare its precedence against the stack and you know immediately what to do, vs possibly drilling down 16 levels of function calls to figure out what to do.

Another advantage of table-driven expression parsers is you can bail in error cases without needing to unwind countless levels of stack.

The reasons for high oil prices now are a completely different cause.

So I reread the book and my esteem for Kidder's writing went up even more. In the parts of the book where he described Alsing's appearance and demeanor were spot on and captured essential things about Alsing without using a lot of words.

One of the things I recall is Kidder said something like, "Alsing is a tall man, but his mild demeanor and hunched posture presents a much less imposing figure." Sure enough, that is exactly the experience I had with Carl.

Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.

Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.

Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

Say someone wrote this code:

    wire [31:0] a, b, c;
    for(i=0; i<32; i=i+1) begin
       assign c[i] = a[i] & b[i];
    end

    wire [31:0] a, b, c;
    assign c = a & b;

If you are in your terminal home, you also want low prices until the week before you eventually sell your house, as Texas has a high property tax rate to make up for the lack of state income tax.

It is great for getting an overview on a pile of code that I'm not familiar with.

It has debugged some simple little problems I've had, eg, a complex regex isn't behaving so I'll give it the regex and a sample string and ask, "why isn't this matching" and it will figure out out.

I've used it only a little for writing new code. In those cases I will write the shell of a subroutine and a comment saying what the subroutine takes in and what it returns, then ask the LLM to fill in the body. Then I review it.

It has been useful for translating ancient perl scripts into something more modern, like python.

The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.

HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:

    * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media

    * Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud

    * Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest

    * As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair

    * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud

    * Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out

    (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue

    (2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue

    (3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims

Quoting a bit of it:

> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.

The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).

Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:

> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]