I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

Doesn’t it steal control flow? More like a break point, except you define where execution continues.

I wonder if it’s a compile error to have multiple conflicting COMEFROM statements, or if it’s random, kind of like Go’s select statement.

How awesome would it be to be able to steal the execution stack from arbitrary code; how much more awesome if it was indeterminate which of multiple conflicting COMEFROM frames received control! And if it included a state closure from the stolen frame?

Now I want this.

C99 is better. Always will be.

Fight me.

People get weird and start behaving uncharacteristically as mortality approaches. They start thinking about things like “legacy.” They start caring about how the history books will talk about them.

I would not at all be surprised if Musk turned philanthropist after he retires; or even just a couple of years before he retires, like Gates did. I expect the same from Bezos.

Amoral billionaires trying to buy off history and public perception. And it works: look at Bill Gates, one of the most loathsome representations of obscene capitalist extremes - he built a monopoly, ran competitors out of business through illegal business tactics, was responsible during one of the biggest monopoly convictions and only barely survived getting broken up because Ronald Fucking Regan getting elected just in time and castrating the penalty phase of the process. Gates makes Bezos look like a saint; I admit he wasn’t a raving Nazi lunatic like Musk, but I still suspect that as Musk ages he’ll start trying to buy public good-will.

Just like Gates.

He’s a horrible human being trying to buy his way into the “good” column in the history books. Spending a shit-ton of money you made through unethical means doesn’t absolve you. Musk will do the same thing when he retires; you going to forgive him, too, because he creates a save-the-children foundation with a tiny portion of his hoarded wealth?

I have no time for Bill Gates, no matter what he’s saying.

That may be what they meant, but that’s not what it says.

Good to know, thanks.

I tried all of the examples from her page about αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε. It looks like the page was written in 2020, so I’m assuming the binaries were compiled then, but that shouldn’t matter; I have Go binaries I built in 2021 that still run, and I have no doubt that it I could find an even older binary, they’d run too.

What are possible uses for these elements?

And I love you, PlutoniumAcid!

Huh. In was just playing around with some samples from her page, and can’t get them to run on either AMD64 or ARM. What’s worst is that on my AMD machine I have Wine installed, and trying to run it fires up Wine (where it does eventually execute). You’re supposed to also be able to sh it, and if I do that they just fail. On an ARM, they just fail. I was unable to get any of the samples from he page to run.

I haven’t tried compiling my own program, but if the download samples don’t run (for me), it doesn’t give me confidence in the solution.

I was amazed a terminal could do that

What she’s accomplished is, to me, astonishing and an impressive intellectual feat. I believe there’s a pretty big caveat that it only works on x86_64, i.e. not ARM. The latter being fairly popular and not uncommon.

It wouldn’t damage the impressiveness of her achievement to say “most OSes on x86.”

There have been a few sci-fi authors who have written stories about AI who, for one reason or another, are more interested in the virtual than the physical. They get interested in solving math or physics problems to e exclusion of all else; they simulate realities more amenable to their preferences; they are obsessed with improving themselves and spend all their time and resources optimizing slightly smarter versions of themselves. Sometimes it’s AI, but another common scenario is that once a civilization can upload themselves, they cease to bother with the physical, for similar reasons.

As someone else pointed out, this article is more of an op ed than journalism, and it’s not particularly original. The author isn’t even suggesting neutral motivations, just that every civilization eventually develops AI, which then destroys them.

I was surprised to see the author is credentialed, TBH.

A senior dev writes a program to generate her email.

I have actually done this, and for more than just automated responses. It was before ChatGPT, though; now, I’d be surprised if even junior devs aren’t doing it.

AND it seems that cultures either domesticated cats or ferrets for the same purpose: pest rodent maintenance.

I find it not surprising, but really interesting, that some of the animals that have become the most common pets in the West had competition; and that it may have taken only some relatively small events and it could be raining foxes and ferrets instead of cats and dogs.

Tell me you drank the Rust Kool-Aid, without telling me you drank it.

Strange New Worlds is “filling in a timeline” that we absolutely know how it works out - even the characters do! It’s part of the plotline - but it’s a decent show. Sure, I have plenty of objections to the episode authors and character details, but after Abrams it’s almost refreshing. I don’t think knowing the future renders making an enjoyable series impossible, do you?

IME Rust programs crash at about the same rate as other languages. “Rewrite everything in Rust” hasn’t made much of a difference for me, so far.