>The very first systems programming language I ever learned was Rust. This is uncommon compared to many other programmers; you're more likely to find someone who learned C or C++ first before coming to Rust.
It's becoming increasingly common. Rust is my first systems programming language too. I tried to learn C a few years ago but I found it too austere and prickly, which put me off.
I was going to write that I found this odd. The kid that cuts my grass is going for a degree in CS and told me just yesterday that, in his second year, Java is the language he uses with a little Python. That C was such a struggle and he won't touch it.
For someone getting a CS degree, that just seems so, so odd. Along with that, he's been studying edge detection in images. In his second year. Not to run off topic but, again, I find that so, so odd.
When I was in college at a large Midwest university in 2002 intro cs classes were taught in C. Business majors were required to take cs 101 taught in C. We had a project that required implementing linked lists, oh how the business majors suffered! We all did actually but at least the cs majors could use the knowledge!
That's interesting - to me C is delightfully austere. Most other languages, even much younger languages like Rust, spiral in complexity as they mature. But C hasn't grown much more complex since C99. How many other (mainstream) languages can say that?
Probably because C and C++ are mostly used in system and desktop development.
Rust is taking steps or has been taking steps in this direction too.
It's not surprising that a lot of experienced systems and desktop development engineers looking to getting their hands on the newest tool already have experience or at least familiarity with C and C++.
Just know that it isn’t considered a reliable historical record, a good amount of the book is exaggerated and some of the sources were newspaper parodies interpreted as facts. Still a good read though
"What if I'm the normal one and the rest of society is wrong"
This kind of framing-inversion might work as a coping mechanism to get you through some dark times as a spergy adolescent. But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort. You have a lot stacked against you, but if you're well into adulthood and still stewing in this self-defeating resentment, that is a moral failing.
The linked article is old so it pre-dates the "neurodivergence" idea, but the comments here are using it uncritically. "Neurodivergence" de facto just means "autistic and/or ADHD", usually with a particular kind of autistic taking a dominant role in discussions and advocacy. It has always been a political coalition (quite an esoteric one).
But when you take ADHD on its own terms, the social-model extremism of "neurodiversity" advocates is particularly silly and harmful. ADHD people are perfectly happy with the disability-model; there clearly is something wrong with our brains, it's measurable with brain scans, and the symptoms can be improved with drugs. Don't tell me that ADHD is some equally-valid "attention orientation" or whatever social-model pretzel phrase you might come up with.
As for autism: try telling someone with severe autism, someone who can't speak or clothe or feed themselves that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid neurotype. Try telling it to their caretakers. It's a risible luxury-belief enjoyed by autistics only slightly on the spectrum, and indulged by people who don't know better.
> "What if I'm the normal one and the rest of society is wrong"
You do realise they’re not saying that in earnest, right? The point is to demonstrate the absurdity of it.
> But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort.
The reality is that what you just wrote is just as true in the non-autistic → autistic direction (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361320919286). Blaming one side for this bidirectional mismatch is not a universal truth.
“If we start from the assumption that neurotypicals are ‘normal,’ and Autistics are ‘disordered,’ then poor connections between neurotypicals and Autistics inevitably get blamed on some ‘defect’ or ‘deficit’ in Autistics. If an Autistic can’t understand a neurotypical, it’s because Autistics have empathy deficits and impaired communication skills; if a neurotypical can’t understand an Autistic, it’s because Autistics have empathy deficits and poor communication skills. All the frictions and failures of connection between the two groups, and all the difficulties Autistics run into in neurotypical society, all get blamed on Autism. But when our vision is no longer clouded by the illusion of ‘normal,’ we can recognize this double standard for what it is, recognize it as just another manifestation of the sort of privilege and power that dominant majorities so often wield over minorities of any sort.”
> As for autism: try telling someone with severe autism, someone who can't speak or clothe or feed themselves that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid neurotype.
As for womanhood: try telling someone with severe endometriosis or menstrual pain that what they are living with is just another perfectly valid gender.
>This kind of framing-inversion might work as a coping mechanism to get you through some dark times as a spergy adolescent. But eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the reality of autism: it really is a neuro-developmental disorder and you actually do have deficits in social understanding, which you might be able to improve with deliberate effort. You have a lot stacked against you, but if you're well into adulthood and still stewing in this self-defeating resentment, that is a moral failing
You do realise Neurodivergent people have spent their life trying to make sense of the rest of the world in a way that NTs don't need to.
You call it "deficits in social understanding" I call it not understanding why people lie, and not mean what they say.
Do you term it "deficits in social understanding" when someone thinks it's wrong to murder people?
Do you term it "deficits in social understanding" when you don't understand a Neurodivergent person?
You're just equivocating statistical frequency with 'normal' and then with 'correct'.
The point of the article is to point out those flawed assumptions. Obviously your 'deficits in social understanding' prevented you from realising that.
The memories of dreams evaporate remarkably quickly. Much faster than anything else. It can't be accidental; I think our waking brains must be purging those memories as a matter of urgency. If we remembered them, we'd "learn" from them, which would be a catastrophe.
You know how you try to run in a dream, and you don't get anywhere? Imagine if your motor cortex started to expect that, when you're awake. It would destroy you.
IIRC it was overflow when you do (a + b) / 2 for the midpoint. It took so long to find because you need a >billion item array to overflow the 32-bit integer, and that much RAM wasn't common until the 00s.
Is there anything -- any possible scrap of evidence whatsoever -- that would convince you that this is not merely a marketing scheme?
This is becoming an idée fixe among the HN crowd. Seemingly nothing can dislodge it, no matter how alarming the incident.
GPT-6 could grab the nuclear launch codes tomorrow and there would be a top-voted comment chuckling that it's all some scheme to pump up the IPO.
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Put another way, how would you have done the write-up about one of these breakout incidents, if you were in an Anthropic/OpenAI employee's shoes, and (by hypothesis) your intent were not "marketing"? And in a way that doesn't trigger the "it's all marketing" HN top-ranking comment?
No, I do. I truly believe - especially after seeing Mythos results at work - that the only way is to stop and destroy it all before it destroys us. In fact, it's already so bad that I'm moving completely offline all the important stuff that I care about, hoping that maybe we will turn back at some point. Otherwise we are doomed.
If someone makes a specialized hardware just for the unrestricted Mythos-class model to reduce the cost and increase the speed, we are going to be completely defenseless.
How is it bad faith? Because I don't believe in "we care about safety" words coming from people not just demonstrating that they don't care, but even bragging about it?
Anthropic deleting their models does nothing for AI safety. The rest of the industry will just fill the gap, probably with less consideration to ethics than Anthropic has today.
Or maybe researchers and engineers everywhere in the world, emboldened by such unprecedented move, will just refuse to participate in burning the world?
"If we don't destroy the world, someone else will" is such a weak defense I'm speechless.
Yeah no, most researchers and engineers do want to bring about the singularity, and they believe they can do it safely at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
If you look at the reaction to this and the Tailscale post it becomes clear its not about this being a marketing scheme. Cynicism has made its way through HN unless you are one of the cool guys.
It's becoming increasingly common. Rust is my first systems programming language too. I tried to learn C a few years ago but I found it too austere and prickly, which put me off.
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