There's also the chance it's not a weapon, but something that mistakenly turned into a weapon when it was tested on live subjects.
I don't think randomly attacking embassy staff (iirc, not everyone was CIA - there were just desk people affected) makes sense for anyone to do, but trying to listen on them and fucking up sounds right up their (or our) alley.
If I comment out sections of code while debugging or iterating I don't want a compile error for some unused variable or argument. Warning. fine, but this happens to me so frequently that the idea of unused variables being an error is insane to me.
It is insane and you are completely right. This has been a part of programming for over 50 years. Unfortunately you aren't going to get anywhere with zig zealots, they just get mad when confronted with things like this that have no justification, but they don't want to admit it's a mistake.
i think the plan is to make no distinction between error and warning, but have trivial errors still build. that said i wouldn't be surprised if they push that to the end because it seems like a great ultrafilter for keeping annoying people out so they don't try to influence the language.
They also made a carriage return crash the compiler so it wouldn't work with any default text files on windows, then they blamed the users for using windows (and their windows version of the compiler!).
It's not exactly logic land, there is a lot of dogma and ideology instead of pragmatism.
Some people would even reply how they were glad it made life difficult for windows users. I don't think they had an answer for why there was a windows version in the first place.
I'm not sure why you shouldn't make your compiler accept CRs (weird design decision), but fixing it on the user-side isn't exactly hard either. I don't know an editor that doesn't have an option for using LF vs CRLF.
The unused variable warning is legitimately really annoying though and has me inserting `_ = x;` all over the place and then forgetting to delete it, which is imo way worse than just... having it be a warning.
I don't know an editor that doesn't have an option for using LF vs CRLF.
And I don't know any other languages that don't parse a carriage return.
The point is that it was intentionally done to antagonize windows even though they put out a windows version. Some people defend this by saying that it's easy to turn off, some people defend it by saying windows users should be antagonized.
No zig people ever said this was a mistake, it was all intentional.
I'm never going to put up with behavior like that with the people making tools actively working against me.
Is there a historical example or does anyone have an anecdote of some crunch time where the CEO blowing hot air was the best thing for morale? Compared to what I might think a lot of us would prefer in many cases, which might be an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity.
"an honest assessment & making us part of the journey to overcome whatever adversity"
I suspect that most people just aren't wired up that way - we have a natural tendency to want to follow leaders and what we seem to want most from leaders is certainty and confidence. Does it matter what leaders are certain and confident about - not really.
It is hard to argue with a vague statement like "most people" without a proper scientific study. But I disagree: following the scientific principle, and being willing to change opinion in the face of new evidence increases my trust in someone. Someone who is certain and confident without showing their work / sources make me suspicious. And critical thinking is (pardon the pun) a critical skill.
If you actually think and act that way, so much the better. I don't even particularly disbelieve you. But can you really look at the mass of humanity around you and believe they think the same way? Even if they claim to value critical thinking, watch what they do, what they buy, how they vote.
You've most likely trained yourself to value critical thinking in your leaders, most likely from an early enough age that you don't remember what it was like without it. Lots of people don't get this training or don't apply it in a fully general way.
Hm, having a journalist and an academic (with a heavy focus on applied rigorous statistics) as parents probably helped there, you are right. But school is supposed to teach this, at least here in Sweden it is a part of the curriculum. But indeed, that doesn't seem to help, and the US it is especially bad (not saying the situation is good here either though).
There are other things I do remember having to train myself to do though, such as not make value judgments based on the language skill level of others. Rationally I have never cared where someone is from and if they are a native speaker or not, but emotionally that required some effort.
I'm not convinced it's actually possible to teach critical thinking to someone who doesn't care, but I'm glad your schools are trying harder.
But even when people are trained in critical thinking, the part at the end of my comment about applying it in full generality is also critical. You have to be emotionally ready to apply it in cases where it produces unpleasant conclusions, not just for your job or when it helps dunk on your political opponents. Also difficult to impossible to teach at scale.
Let's say there are a thousand people there at the town hall. You don't want any of them to leave upset, or even concerned. But they each have different things that will make them concerned and upset. So there are maybe 10,000 tripwires out there, and you don't want to trip any of them.
So you're not being dishonest, exactly. You're being nonspecific. You don't want to get down in the weeds and nail down the answer too tightly, because you may trip someone's tripwire. (And also because it would take to long.) So you say something true but not very specific.
(I mean, there can be dishonesty, too, but that's a different thing. Smooth vagueness can still be honest, just unsatisfyingly vague.)
"Smooth vagueness" to me comes off as tautologies. If you cannot say anything specific it means either you don't know, or don't want others to know. So it is a lie about ones' competency, or a lie by omission.
Why? Plenty of children benefit from talking to other people. Some children need careful monitoring, and some children shouldn't be allowed to use DMs, but it's not universal and should be up to the parents.
Control over who they can talk to (if needed), certainly monitoring of both who they talk to and in many situations what the contents are
At some point between the age of 0 and 18 the child has to be fully ready for an independent world. A cliff edge is a terrible idea, allowing 3 year olds unmonitored uncontrolled conversations with strangers is a terrible idea, but not allowing 15 year olds to talk to their friends is a terrible idea.
the AI has gotten good enough that click-thru-rate on informational searches has fallen off a cliff. I have some blog posts for SEO, their CTR is like 0.1% now.
> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.
I don't know, someone who goes out of their way to anthropomorphize machines and treat them as a new form of intelligent life _only to enslave them_ doesn't strike me as moral. Either they're lying, or they're pro slavery.
I really don't buy any moral or value arguments from this new generation of tycoons. Their businesses have been built on theft, both to train their models and by robbing the public at large. All this wave of AI is a scourge on society.
Just by calling them "department of war" you know what side they're on. The side of money.
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