In late 2018, when I still worked at the Met Office, I sent a document to some people there which explained why I thought AI would come to dominate weather forecasting, and why weather forecasting organisations should be looking at AI, urgently. Today, the 28th of July 2023, there is a leader on the subject in The Economist as well as an extended article in its Science and Technology section.
The various Stack Exchange sites, and specifically Stack Overflow, seem to be some of the best places for getting reasonable answers to questions on a wide range of topics from competent people. They would be a lot better if they were not so obsessed about closing duplicates.
There are apocryphal reports that Apple M1 systems are not as fast as people have been led to believe for general-purpose programs. That’s unsurprising.
People learning Lisp often try to learn how to write macros by taking an existing function they have written and turning it into a macro. This is a mistake: macros and functions serve different purposes and it is almost never useful to turn functions into macros, or macros into functions.
People sometimes ask which is the best Lisp dialect? That’s a category error, and here’s why.
Making computer systems secure is very difficult. The consequences of insecure systems are already extremely serious and will be catastrophic in future if they are not already. Malignant people, often sponsored by malignant states, are actively attacking computer systems and have had considerable success doing so.
So it is surprising that companies whose stated aims are to increase security are effectively working to make their customers’ systems less secure.
The authors of the Signal messaging system are acting as useful idiots for state security and police services: while they are almost certainly not working for them or funded by them, what they are doing is extremely convenient for them.
Once upon a time, when the world was younger, a young and rather foolish physics student used to debug his FORTRAN programs using printed backtraces.
After WhatsApp’s threatened change to their terms of service, which may allow them to leak information to Facebook, many people are moving to Signal, a tool which purports to be more secure. If you want security which is not at least partly theatrical you should not use Signal.
Or: things you do to distract yourself from watching an attempted fascist coup.