The term 'Voluntary Exit Offer' reminds me of the suicide drug Quietus in P.D. James' Children of Men, which the government offers to people who no longer wish to live.
30% was the quoted number for the acceptance rate of the earlier VRP, which was mostly long tenured employees who were at retirement age, or close to it. I would be surprised if this gets a significant acceptance from the younger employees. OTOH, older employees who didn't accept the earlier VRP and were regretting that decision may jump at this offer.
C++ is probably the largest, most complex programming language to ever exist. I, as a former C++ compiler developer, find it hard to keep up with the language changes. What chance does an average user have?
To use the subset that makes it a better alternative than C, aka "Typescript for C", and ignore the rest.
Hopefully we would have moved on into fully bootstraped alternatives, but open source has decided to build their alternative languages on top of LLVM and GCC instead, with some minor exceptions.
Note that I am starting to have a "find it hard to keep up with the language changes" similar feeling with Java, C#, Python and TypeScript.
This is already a good norm. A substantial portion of the new language features really aren't meant for business logic but instead help library developers anyway.
I have the same opinion. C++ was my first programming language I used at work. I feel that I was relatively proficient with it, but it was around 2005 I think. Since then I've mostly used other languages. Right now I feel I can use C with ease, in fact I periodically use it. But C++? I don't even dare.
I guess it's fine if one specializes on C++ programming only. But when one needs to use different languages and C++ is used sporadically, I feel like it might be substantially harder than other languages.
The problem with C are the parts that C++ already provides an alternative, regarding bounds checking, generic code with preprocessor tricks or now that _Generic thingie, stronger typed enumerations, heap allocations without sizeof math, automatic resource cleanups.
I would feel the opposite. I dare not write a program in C. The mentality of RAII and destructors for resource management is so ingrained that attempting to track resource use and lifetime in C would be nightmarish.
It's a very complex language, but I also find little reason in using any of its more niche features; however, I essentially just write C with RAII and templates when it comes to C++, so I'm probably abnormal.
For instance, I can now avoid SFINAE in C++20 and beyond, which was always the ugliest part of C++ templates to me. C++20 concepts simplified most of my metaprogramming needs.
Reading boost libraries was like reading brainfuck. In fact most of std lib source felt that way too. I never reflected on this since I stopped doing C++ 15 years ago - but yeah I have not worked with a language that's worse to read since. Maybe macro heavy lisp ?
Extreme accretion/scope-creep of syntax (and features) across all languages continues, C++ is probably one of the most extreme example of this.
Everyone's trying to bring in the shiniest new toys from all other languages. So-called "modern C++" is an unbearable menu of every possible flavor of procedural, functional, OOP, templates, strong/weak typing, metaprogramming, and so much more. End result is a Frankenstein mix of C, Fortran, Pascal, Python, F#, Scala, C#/Java, Visual Basic, LUA, TCL, Rust, and what not... and that's before we even talked about the STL/STD situation in C++.
The only correct way to work with C++ is to agree on the most minimal subset of features needed for consistency and productivity in your codebase, stick to those and avoid adopting 95% of the crap that's being brought in. Ignore the noise.
Sorry for the nitpick, but ossification means the opposite of how you're using it here. It means existing structures / practices becoming frozen in place, by analogy with real ossification which is where flexible cartilage hardens into rigid bone.
I've never used LLMs for C++ but I notice that it likes to use every available feature on other languages. Is Claude-generated C++ incomprehensible as a result?
The way to deal with a bad HOA is to get on the board. Normally, HOA boards attract the most petty minded people because most of the normal people living in the community are too busy but if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
> if a bunch of like-minded people get on the board, they can bring sanity back.
This sounds good, but I don't think it generally works. The problem is that the petty minded people are also the ones who don't have anything else to do with their time, so they can expend all their effort on being petty. Whereas the normal people have other things to do with their lives, and simply don't have the time to deal with all the pettiness, and if they end up on the board, they now don't have a choice: their lives are basically hostage to the petty people who keep taking up their time with bogus issues that can't just be ignored because the structure of the HOA requires some kind of response.
They also have a manual, non motorized version. I am building this currently for eventual use, with modifications, in a point diffraction interferometer.
Having access to dark skies doesn't mean you automatically appreciate them. I suspect this may be one reason we lost them so easily. As I child, I grew up at 5000+ ft with dark skies and the Milky Way was often visible. Funnily, no one seemed to be aware of it. Once I learned what it was (from a magazine), I pointed it out to a grown up and they dismissed it immediately as a cloud. Much later I learned that clouds from dark sites look dark, not light.
I just came back from a trip to Yellowstone, staying at an RV Park in Idaho that had designated themselves as a dark sky RV park, which mean no external lights after 10pm. The night sky was glorious with the Milky Way visible almost from horizon to horizon. I wish more city dwellers could experience this so we could do something to tame the completely unncessary and wasteful light pollution.
The effort to reduce electricity theft has had an interesting side effect. One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods. This also makes them safe for monkeys to use as 'roads' with the result that roving gangs of monkeys move from neighborhood to neighborhood with ease and also have access to the upper floor of apartment buildings because of the proximity of the power lines. I saw this in person a few years ago.
Well the planet is theirs as well, so one may argue that putting up live wires that can electrocute them is quite cruel in the first place, especially given the lack of any preservation of their natural habitats in most places.
Actually they could have touched the wires as long as they touched only one and nothing which was earthed, but that might be pretty complicated to learn by trial and error, especially if error often means death.
Isn't it pretty unique to learn from seeing? My cat certainly doesn't understand "monkey see, monkey do". In this case it's about literal monkeys of course, but I'm not even sure all of them have this capacity. Probably also some birds and dolphins and such could learn this way, but not most animals with 'friends' (or late friends)
Infrastructure projects, whether big or small should always factor in local ecosystem. For example, highways built with with overpasses and underpasses are a great help to animals.
Agreed. And nothing is stopping folks from running underground cables except crying about it being more expensive (i.e the true cost vs side effects to other populations so long as it doesn’t affect the consumers).
It’s as though all wealth and progress hinge on taking from others.
> One of the ways to prevent theft is to insulate the power lines going into neighborhoods.
This is going to be less effective going forward due to insulation piercing connectors, which simply clamp around an insulated conductor and pierce the insulation to connect to the conductor underneath.
A suitably insane person could also just strip the insulation from a small segment of the conductor, one phase at a time, and hand wrap a splice conductor around the live one and tape it up.
Great news for the monkeys though! I would not want to witness a monkey making contact with two uninsulated conductors on different phases, yeesh.
A couple years ago in Nepal, a large group of monkeys passed by a window next to my table at a restaurant. They were casually strolling on the power lines.
Oh, I see the problem. You clicked the "View e-book version" link. That goes to the publisher's store. As far as I know they never had a PDF, just a special web version.
Click the book's title in the paragraph above that, where it says this:
> Agarwal, Anant, and Jeffrey H. Lang. Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Elsevier, July 2005. ISBN: 9781558607354.
That takes you to a PDF.
Sorry for not being more specific. I didn't even notice the "View e-book version" as I only went to the site to remind myself of the name of the book, saw the title was a link, and clicked it. Then I thought "Why is MIT linking to a pirate copy of a book from one of their own professors?", and did a little Googling to get some backstory.
reply