I’m almost afraid to ask what Golden Dome is? If it’s SDI 2.0, we need to stay away in droves. I think there’s some merit in sinking a bit of R&D into dealing with emerging threats like drones, and maybe upgrading the ancient DEW line radars? But if this is another Star Wars missile shield over the entire continent proposal, that was a costly boondoggle in the 80s and I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t be one again today.
I saw a meme going around about our guy in Canada who met a similar fate. It compared him to a toilet, noting that while both are full of shit, the toilet at least has a seat.
This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.
In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.
The Made In Canada Facebook group now has 1.2 million users, which is pretty insane considering the population of the whole country is 41 million.
Thanks, I’ll give that a shot.
Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.
I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.
It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.
I’m so looking forward to what JUICE uncovers! Europa has been centre stage and is getting its own dedicated mission, but the more we find out about those outer moons, the more fascinating they get. Ganymede is the largest in the solar system and has its own magnetic field. And Callisto being an ocean world? It wouldn’t surprise me if Ganymede is also.
Well the gist of the interview was that American intelligence services are in chaos right now after their top-level management got expelled and their “eye is no longer on the ball” in terms of threats from Russia, China, etc. with new personnel being brought in who have no clue what’s going on.
Ouch. Well if you wanna take your chances in Canada, definitely advertise your senior COBOL dev skills! ;)
Lol yeah she’s in insurance! I bet you could probably also infer from the fortran that I work for a science-y outfit.
My wife was telling me at her work they’re desperate for cobol programmers, as they’re all retiring boomers leaving behind a giant code base. At my work, it’s legacy fortran that’s all over the place, but we’re a much smaller company.
That’s the point, when programming with immutable structures you always pass the mutability onto the enclosing structure.
I guess the point I was trying to make here was if the data type is already mutable, there is no point in sticking it in a list just so you can replace a reference with an identifier. You’re just adding an extra level of indirection. But sure yeah, if the type is inherently immutable, you have to do something.
A list is an antipattern here IMO. Just wrap it in some dedicated object (see e.g. Java’s StringBuilder).
Interesting. I’m not aware of anything like StringBuilder in the standard library for either Python or JavaScript. Looks like it wraps a list of characters and tries to behave as string-like as possible? You could presumably write your own class like that or download an implementation from someplace.
I guess in most cases in my own code, where I need a mutable string is usually as part of a larger data structure which is the thing that gets passed around by reference, so it’s easy enough to replace a field within that.
For building up a string, I would tend to use an io.StringIO in Python with file-writing calls, but those aren’t meant for sharing. What you don’t want to do is use the += operator a lot on strings. That gets expensive unless strings are mutable (like they are in say C++'s std::string).
Well, but then you’re basically just pushing the mutability onto the container, since you need to be able to replace elements within it.
It’s a good strategy at times though. Like say you’re working in a language where strings are immutable and you want a string you can change. You can wrap it in a list along the lines s=['foo'] and pass references to the list around instead. Then if you go s[0]='bar' at some point, all the references will now see ['bar'] instead.
As others have pointed out, there is the issue of breaking references to objects.
There can also be a lot of memory thrashing if you have to keep reallocating and copying objects all the time. To some extent, that may be mitigated using an internment scheme for common values. In Python, for example, integers are immutable but they intern something like the first 100 or so iirc? But that doesn’t work well for everything.
Any container you want to populate dynamically should probably be mutable to avoid O(N²) nastiness.
I think if there’s a silver lining to the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs in North America, it is that it will hasten adoption of ebikes, which imo solve more problems than EVs in any case.
His point that ebikes replace cars—not conventional bikes—tracks for me. Mine has basically replaced our second car and I use it, as he indicated most people do, for commutes and short errands.
His point that an ebike has an energy footprint comparable to a 4000 mpg ICEV is an incredible metric. I wonder where he pulled that from? I know that my ebike battery has 1/150th the capacity of what goes into a Tesla. Granted, I wouldn’t expect a comparable range so there’s a bit of apples to oranges there. But if you then work in that EVs are already much more energy efficient than ICEVs, I guess you could arrive at a number like 4000.
Whatever the case, my experience with ebikes is that they are pretty close to free transportation in terms of operating costs. There may be a few unexpected expenses beyond the initial sticker cost of the bike in terms of accessories (particularly high quality locks) and some winter gear if you’re in a colder climate, but those are one-time purchases for the most part.
My brother told me this story of the raccoons living in his backyard. The mother had figured out how to defeat a new supposedly raccoon-proof garbage can and lined up the cubs to demonstrate. The first two watched with rapt attention while a third had a kind of dazed look. The mother then came back and smacked him in the head before showing them again. That seems like a pretty good indication to me that she had a good grasp of the mental state of her cubs?
Oh ok. Thanks for the clarification. I couldn’t remember the exact details.
Wow, I did not know about the OLED with the bigger screen and presumably better battery life. I really want one now!
I know someone who’s going in for a colonoscopy. Maybe they can get the two-for-one package with a reading tossed in?