I want to preface this by noting that as an adult, I totally understand the intent behind LOGO, its use as an educational tool, and understand its historic place in computer history.
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
We did LOGO then some sort of watered down BASIC. Both were incredibly useless to my education because at no point was any serious attempt ever made to teach that these were the tip of any sort of computer programming iceberg. We were simply given lessons and assignments and told to things and we just did them without understanding what we were doing. At least with math they had some example applications for everything they taught us.
I'm now completely torn! I always return carts just out of habit as a nice thing to do, but I totally see this as a legitimate reason not to return them! I never worked at a grocery, but I have worked at other jobs where there was that one task that got you out of sight of management so you could take your time and mentally relax for a while. Taking the trash to the dumpster way out back, restocking the walk-in fridge from the basement, etc. It was less about not working, as it was about the freedom.
Then again, they still have to go out to the cart return areas to collect them which takes time, so in that sense leaving carts around just makes their job a bit harder. Hmm. Not sure now!
> "Opinions on his coding style are divided, though general consensus seems to be that it's incomprehensible."
I wholeheartedly concur with popular opinion. It's like writing a program in obfuscated code.
Hmmm... his way of basically making C work like APL made me wonder: Is there a programming language out there that defines its own syntax in some sort of header and then uses that syntax for the actual code?
This shouldn't be a product, but a licensed patented technology like Dolby or CDMA, sold to OEMs and directly integrated into cameras and phones.
It should be an industry standard system for guaranteeing authenticity by coordinating hardware and software to be as tamper proof as possible and saved in a cryptographically verifiable way.
No system like this would be perfect, but that's the enemy of the good.
It's easy to explain: They have no idea what's happening.
Most people can't keep up with the firehose of news and don't really want to. This particular bit of unethical behavior is just one more bit of inconsequential news which will have completely disappeared from the headlines by tomorrow. It basically never happened to 95% of the country, regardless of political leaning.
Secondly, conservatives live in their own highly filtered and mutated information bubble. Good news is amplified, bad news is either downplayed, justified (pure fiction is acceptable) or simply ignored. So even if they do hear about this, it won't be a big deal.
In short, most people won't care, and conservative media will actively work to overlook or more often, rationalize this sort of unethical behavior to the point where it somehow is totally fine. (Simply read this thread to watch it happen in real time.)
The moment of true enlightenment is when you finally decide to once and for all memorize all the arguments and their order for those command line utilities that you use at an interval that's just at the edge of your memory: xargs, find, curl, rsync, etc.
That, plus knowing how to parse a man file to actually understand how to use a command (a skill that takes years to master) pretty much removes the need for most aliases and scripts.
I already have limited space for long term memory, bash commands are very far down the list of things I'd want to append to my long term storage.
I use ctrl-R with a fuzzy matching program, and let my terminal remember it for me.
And before it's asked: yes that means I'd have more trouble working in a different/someone else's environment. But as it barely ever happens for me, it's hardly an important enough scenario to optimize for.
Why would I even attempt to do that? Life is too short to try to remember something like that. Maybe 20 years ago when internet was not that common. Or maybe if you are a hacker, hacking other peoples machines. Me? Just some dev trying yo make some money to feed my family? I prefer to have a walk to the woods.
Hmmm... If skills could create Skills, then evaluate the success of those generated Skills and updating as needed, in a loop, seems like an interesting thing to try. It could be like a form of code creation caching. (Or a Skynet in the making).
The question is whether the analysis of all the Skill descriptions is faster or slower than just rewriting the code from scratch each time. Would it be a good or bad thing if an agent has created thousands of slightly varied skills.
Until LLM models came along, I was convinced the first file format to gain sentience would be a PDF.
It can contain vector drawings, fonts, bitmap images, formatting, hypertext, plain text, rasterization hints (for everything from watch displays to 10 ton multicolor printing presses), layers, annotations, metadata, versioning, multiple languages, interactive forms, digital signatures/encryption, DRM, audio, video, 3D objects including CAD drawings, accessibility info, captions, file attachments and yes, even JavaScript. (And probably more - most of that was off the top of my head plus a quick search to remind myself.)
I'm personally amazed that any application can successfully open and edit a PDF document without creating a black hole in space, so Acrobat's continued suckiness into its third decade doesn't surprise me in the least.
The reason Preview works so well is because deep inside Apple's Quartz libraries used to render, rasterize and composite graphics such as windows, docs and images is a version of "Display PDF". Basically, PDF is a native macOS protocol.
The best of my understanding is that NeXT considered Display PDF the successor to Display PostScript and OS X inherited it. I have no idea how much or how little the latest macOS and iOS rely on PDF encoding for their GUIs now, but I know at one point it was an integral part of the windowing and drawing system and is still in there for processing PDF docs.
It was never an integral part of the windowing system of either operating system. That idea never panned out. Quartz's drawing functions included what was needed for postscript, but the UI was done solely with bitmaps and cached bitmaps. There's PDF APIs in there, but they're not anything special, like being super fast, efficient, or hardware-accelerated.
Earlier in the year I was watching yet another series about a British mob. There were so many murders on the show, I wondered how many actual homicides there are in the UK every year.
Looking it up, there are around 500 homicides each year in England and Wales, and around 30 of them involve guns. In 2023 there were 22 gun deaths total. (For comparison, in the same year the US had 46,700).
Now compare that to the number of shows broadcast every day in the UK that have murders. I think a single BBC murder mystery show has more deaths than the entirety of the country, let alone a single Guy Ritchie film.
It's not just the news media which warps people's perceptions. I bet the same survey in the UK would be similarly skewed.
This has been a thing since forever. I remember in the 80s the complaints about violence in media. That's not going to change. And sensationalist headlines have been part of news since its first inception.
What really needs to change is the education system so that people are able to differentiate reality from media, news and video games.
Counterpoint...there were more than 53,000 stabbings in the UK in the same period. I couldn't even find the same stat for the US. When someone wants to be violent, pretty much any heavy or sharp object will do, making things illegal doesn't really change the total amount of violence. You do get less homicides, but more people with life changing injuries. If it wasn't for the UK locking thousands of people up for Facebook memes, this would probably be a convincing argument. Ironic considering Starmer is a human rights lawyer by trade.
From the statistics I've seen, the US has a higher stabbing homicides per capita than the UK.
Even then, I'd much rather a family member be stabbed and survive than be shot and killed. You're way more likely to survive a stabbing attack than a gunshot. Gunshots are consistently more lethal than stabbings. And you're extremely less likely to die as a bystander to a stabbing than as a bystander to a shooting.
How many school mass stabbings happen in the UK annually? How many school shootings happen in the US every month? We've had around 30 school shootings in the US so far in 2025, and we've only just started the fall semester!
We've had around 30 gun discharges within 4 blocks of a school so far in 2025. That's how they measure what a school shooting is. By the definition of a school shooting you would expect, the real number is low single digits. One of them was the same day Kirk was shot, just one state over.
Fun fact, school shootings currently are about 1/10th of what they were in the 90s when I was in school.
Look, I don't really care about this issue. It just annoys me that people lie with stats about it. Its the kind of behavior that degrades people's faith in experts, journalism and institutions.
I made a point to use the number of shootings resulting in injury or fatality. So no, you're wrong.
There have been over 90 instances of reported discharges around school grounds so far in 2025. Around 30 resulted in injury or fatality. Which, remember, we're still have a good bit of school for 2025 left.
I don't know where you're getting the 90s comparison from. Everywhere I look the statistics show it's worse now than it was then. There was a leak around '92 but it leveled off for a while.
Even then, it's an extremely weak argument to me. You might as well be arguing "we've had lead in the gasoline for decades". It happened in the past as well, so why change it. Maybe we should do something to address the issue instead of just continuing to accept it.
Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way? Because if not, your stats are still ascribing one problem to a completely different problem with different policy solutions. Schools are often on the cheapest land in the area. Where do you think most gun discharges happen? That's right, on or near the cheapest land. That's why counting shootings near the schools yields shockingly high numbers.
But if you want to institute good policy that reduces these numbers, mischaracterizing those incidents is a bad way to do it. And on this issue, the track record of those gathering the data is terrible. I'm not pulling these tactics from nowhere, these are all things that specific surveys have done to manipulate the data. And if you do that, you clearly don't care about reducing the number of shootings.
> Did those shooting involve someone associated with the school in some way?
I'm sorry, but why does this matter in the end? We're still talking about students being injured and killed in schools by shootings during school hours. Do you think the parents really care that much in the end if the shooter was affiliated with the school or not? You're needlessly splitting hairs. Nobody should be discharging guns anywhere around schools. No student should be worried about getting shot in school. It's absolutely insane to me you're suggesting "but what if the shooter was unaffiliated?" Absolute insanity.
I do agree, it's frustrating there's dozens of different definitions of "school shooting". It would be nice if there were good, solid, government statistics in this regard. But one party has consistently fought against the government having a standardized method of reporting and studying such incidents. I wonder which party.
You know what though? Most of the developed world doesn't have to worry about the myriad of different definitions, because for all those definitions the yearly average is damn near zero, not 30 or 90 or whatever.
But as a pre-teen kid in the early 80s? I hated LOGO! I thought it was a baby language and I wanted to get back to doing cool stuff in BASIC. Ten year old Me thought LOGO was soooo dumb - you couldn't make a video game, so what use was it?
It seemed every year we'd have a grade school class using LOGO - for a math lesson, or an art project, or an "intro to computing", etc. I was always a classic 80s young computer nerd snob about it.
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