It would be cool to leverage that Street View driving capability to build a multiplayer Gumball Rally/Cannonball Run cross-country car race. Are there continuous routes recorded from New York City to Long Beach? Which is fastest? How long would that virtual drive take in Street View?
> Iran and Houthi rebels used Anthropic's Claude AI to target US warships and build hypersonic missiles — Houthi rebels also used the bot to code ballistic missile guidance systems
Raymond’s selectRandomFromIterator algorithm requires iterating over all the files. It seems like querying the file system for the number of files in a directory should be an O(1) operation. Then you just select random number N between [1, number of files] and iterate to the Nth file.
Why does Raymond assume counting the files is an O(n) operation?
You’re right. I looked it up: getting the number of files in a directory in FAT and FAT32 file systems is O(n). I had assumed the count would be recorded in an inode-like structure but instead the file system must scan a directory table to count the non-null entries.
> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.
Limit the amount of comments you put in the code to a strict minimum. You should almost never add comments, except sometimes on non-trivial code, function definitions if the arguments aren't self-explanatory, and class definitions and their members.
Do not remove existing comments unless they are directly related to what you are changing.
Is anybody else concerned that we've gone from exactly specifying to a computer, using an exact language, what to do, to a more sophisticated form of prayer?
Nah, I'm sure it's fine. What could possibly go wrong with abandoning nearly a hundred years of CS knowledge and hard-won lessons and replacing all of it with the equivalent of trying to convince a sociopathic teenager to clean their room?
“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.
“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.
“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.
Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.
I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
> I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.
This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:
> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.
But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.
In german typography the name for widow is "Hurenkind" wich translates to "child of a whore". I was pretty surprised to hear that word on a regular basis while working in text for print.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge
Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.
The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones:
An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.
How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?
For a foster parent you only need to find someone willing to adopt a child, which already register themself into a list. For marriage you need to find someone willing to marry and to marry you out of random people.
> Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.
We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.
I worked on Microsoft’s Windows QA team long ago. My team used to have “No-mouse Tuesdays”: you were supposed to do all your normal work but only using the keyboard.
I guess that team was dismantled some time ago, with no on carrying the flag anymore. Modern windows is impossible to work on using just keyboard. Some mods & extensions do help. But the native experience is abysmal.
My touchpad doesn't work anymore. Why is it so difficult to connect a bluetooth mouse without a mouse? The "mouse detected, want to connect?" notification shows up ON THE SCREEN but I need to enter a bunch of shortcuts and navigate through multiple items just to be able to click yes.
The keyboard support in "Modern" Windows apps is so random. In the new Notepad, the dialog that appears asking if you want to create a new files shows Yes and No buttons, but it doesn't accept Y and N keys, only Esc and Enter. However, the dialog that appears when exiting without saving does accept S and N for Save and Don't Save. These inconsistencies are everywhere in UWP.
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