Going by wikipedia, the incubation period can be up to three months. That isn't a particularly significant span of time if we're measuring how likely someone is to suffer an unexpected death. It's long enough that the possibility exists, but that's about all you can say.
> while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that the game’s style was “a little too much ‘ADHD’ for me. I look at those games and it’s like, wow, I feel like I’m playing a slot machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and that… it’s a little too much.”
Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.
It's weird. The "records" in question appear to be those kept by the Smithsonian:
> The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program has no record of any eruptions of Hayli Gubbi during the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began at the end of the last ice age, about 11,700 years ago.
But I'm fairly confident that the Smithsonian's records don't go back more than 700 years.
unsigned add(unsigned x, unsigned y) {
unsigned a, b;
do {
a = x & y; /* every position where addition will generate a carry */
b = x ^ y; /* the addition, with no carries */
x = a << 1; /* the carries */
y = b;
/* if there were any carries, repeat the loop */
} while (a);
return b;
}
It's easy to show that this algorithm is correct in the sense that, when b is returned, it must be equal to x+y. x+y summing to a constant is a loop invariant, and at termination x is 0 and y is b.
It's a little more difficult to see that the loop will necessarily terminate.
New a values come from a bitwise & of x and y. New x values come from a left shift of a. This means that, if x ends in some number of zeroes, the next value of a will also end in at least that many zeroes, and the next value of x will end in an additional zero (because of the left shift). Eventually a will end in as many zeroes as there are bits in a, and the loop will terminate.
Alive2 does not handle loops; don't know what exactly it does by default, but changing the `shl i32 %and, 1` to `shl i32 %and, 2` has it still report the transformation as valid. You can add `--src-unroll=2` for it to check up to two loop iterations, which does catch such an error (and does still report the original as valid), but of course that's quite limited. (maybe the default is like `--src-unroll=1`?)
Alternately: Self-made wealth is so frequently derived from evil that those who are born rich and come good owe penance for the sins of their forebears.
Yeah I'm not convinced Microsoft can do software anymore. I think they're a shambling mess of a zombie software company with enough market entropy to keep going for a long time.
They did engineer a good browser: original Edge with the Chakra JavaScript Engine. It was faster than Google Chrome and had some unique features: a world-best, butter-smooth and customizable epub reader. I loved it for reading - it beat commercial epub readers - and then Nadella took over and said Microsoft is getting rid of it and Edge will move to Chromium and Microsoft will also get rid of Windows phone. Modern Microsoft will be Cloud/AI and Ads. That was so depressing.
You could say the same thing about all Microsoft products then. How many full time developers does it take to support Windows 11 when Linux is available, SqlServer when Postgres is available, Office when LibreOffice exists?
And so on all under licenses that allows Microsoft do whatever it wants with?
They should be embarrassed to do better, not spin it into a “wise business move” aka transfer that money into executive bonuses.
Microsoft gets a lot of its revenue from the sale of licenses and subscriptions for Windows and Office. An unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions tells me that the segments responsible for those two softwares have revenue of about $13 and about 20 billion per quarter respectively.
In contrast, basically no one derives any significant revenue from the sale of licenses or subscriptions for web browsers. As long as Microsoft can modify Chromium to have Microsoft's branding, to nag the user into using Microsoft Copilot and to direct search queries to Bing instead of Google Search, why should Microsoft care about web browsers?
It gets worse. Any browser Microsoft offers needs to work well on almost any web site. These web sites (of which there are 100s of 1000s) in turn are maintained by developers (hi, web devs!) that tend to be eager to embrace any new technology Google puts into Chrome, with the result that Microsoft must responding by putting the same technological capabilities into its own web browser. Note that the same does not hold for Windows: there is no competitor to Microsoft offering a competitor to Windows that is constantly inducing the maintainers of Windows applications to embrace new technologies, requiring Microsoft to incur the expense of applying engineering pressure to Windows to keep up. This suggests to me that maintaining Windows is actually significantly cheaper than it would be to maintain an independent mainstream browser. An independent mainstream browser is probably the most expensive category of software to create and to maintain excepting only foundational AI models.
"Independent" here means "not a fork of Chromium or Firefox". "Mainstream" means "capable of correctly rendering the vast majority of web sites a typical person might want to visit".
They did incur that cost… for decades. They were in a position where their customers were literally forced to use their product and they still couldn’t create something people wanted to use.
> As far as anybody can tell, mathematics is way older than literature.
That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down, then it's very recent because writing is very recent.
But it would be normal to consider cultural products to be literature regardless of whether they're written down. Writing is a medium of transmission. You wouldn't study the epic of Gilgamesh because it's written down. You study it to see what the Sumerians thought about the topics it covers, or to see which god some iconography that you found represents, or... anything that it might plausibly tell you. But the fact that it was written down is only the reason you can study it, not the reason you want to.
No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.
The person who hears that poem in circulation and records it in his notes has created literature; an anthology is literature but an original work isn't.
> No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.
Sure they have, by virtue of writing it down. It becomes literature when it hits the paper (or computer screen, as it were).
(Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing", in which case I guess we illustrate the overarching point of value in shared symbols and language and the waste of time in stating our original definitions for every statement we want to make)
> Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing"
You're close. I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.
Here's a quote from the fantasy novel The Way of Kings that always appealed to me:
>> "Many of our nuatoma -- this thing, it is the same as your lighteyes, only their eyes are not light--"
>> "How can you be a lighteyes without light eyes?" Teft said with a scowl.
>> "By having dark eyes," Rock said, as if it were obvious. "We do not pick our leaders this way. Is complicated. But do not interrupt story."
For an example from reality, I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.
Similarly, the word for writing a poem is "write", whether this creates a written artifact or not. And the poem is literature whether a written artifact currently exists, used to exist, or never existed.
(Though you've made me curious: if the Iliad wasn't literature until someone wrote it down, do you symmetrically believe that Sophocles' Sisyphus is no longer literature because it is no longer written down?)
You know, I'd have to say that responding to a comment that says "Japanese font foundries are about to be replaced with generative AI" with a plug for your generative-AI fonts is about as on topic as you can be. I challenge you to describe a reason why that's a bad response.
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