Tootfinder

Wishing C had the ability to do compile-time polymorphism.
Like, I have base class Foo with Bar/Baz derived from it.
I want to be able to put a method DoSomething() in Foo and call it on a Bar or Baz object in a template, without putting a vtable in Foo or incurring the overhead of a virtual method call.
You can sort of get this effect by having Bar/Baz be separate classes with no common base and make the template just call T.Foo() for parameter T, but this eliminates som…

I've finally seen the match. A good win, but my god, West Ham is terrible. I have no idea why Nuno took that job.
As much as it hurts, I applaud Slot's courage to sit Salah. I hope he has more to give, but this was perhaps overdue. That this didn't happen a game or two earlier is because Salah has earned the right to battle inconsistency.
Wirtz was spectacular. Should have scored and absolutely should have had another assist. The midfield passing in tight spaces was g…

"As explained in chapter 11 of Meyer’s book, assertions are meant to check the correctness of a piece of software; that is, its ability to perform the tasks defined in their specification.
Because, you do have a specification, right? Right?"
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/asser…

Assertions
Colin Powell passed away during the preparation of this article. In one of the most memorable and abhorrent chapters of his career he gave a speech in the United Nations trying to justify the unjustifiable.

QUOTE
Unusual Machines' CEO, Allen Evans told Forbes,
when asked what experience Donald Trump Jr. had that appealed to the drone maker:
“He had a strong alignment with investors through 1789 [Capital,
JD Vance's a venture capital fund]
and otherwise who are very interested in MAGA or on-shoring or making America great, et cetera.
So the engagement is really the outreach to the groups that are interested in what we’re trying to do,”

Not everyone agrees...
https://youtube.com/shorts/gcO8dHeKjU0
But I think this assessment may overestimate the competence of the administration (they won't just crash things because their heads are just that full of shit), and may underestimate the ability of the administration (or really, the heritage foundation or other fash planners) to just make some shit up work around any limitation. The use of private donations on the ballroom and to fund military ops is a pretty clear test of that.
No matter what, the government will be shut down. All the things you care about will either be eliminated right now, or slowly over time. That's been happening since the 70's, and even faster since the 90's, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's happening now.
That's the scenario to prepare for, and you should prepare for it even if democrats somehow get control of the government again. Much of the public sector has been privatized and destroyed under democratic administrations.

With the usual caveat about intelligence-ascribing and agency-hiding language like “knows” and “gaslighting:” this from @… is notable.
Why? It’s not as if Google doesn’t gather your IP-based location when you use their search…but they make no secret of that. Of •course• OpenAI has the ability infer your location. But they say they don’t, and yet apparently do, and are covering it up. •That• is notable.
https://vox.ominous.net/@occult/115630527105953949

Do you have the ability to write code for Apple platforms? Do you know what MDM / device management is? Do you understand what Compliance is? Do you care about being able to use a Mac or iPad or iPhone for work or school?
Does the idea of dealing with the bugs that can crop up from things like "this needs to be reliably managed like a server, but a human randomly sleeps it mid-process and when it wakes up it's in a different country!" sound interesting to you?
If so - come be my direct co-worker!
Need to be able to be based in/work within the US, but the team itself is fully remote. Multiple positions open.
Feel free to DM me with questions
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200628824-0836/software-engineer-test-infrastructure

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

I was just thinking about how the fact that #Musk named his AI "Grok" is evidence that he "reads sci-fi" in the same way he "plays video games." Like, he claims to do it but when it comes time to show the evidence it's clear he does not actually "grok" it.
Like... To grok something is to have a layer deeper than simply knowledge, but mathematically encoding statistical relationships between words is pretty obviously not even understanding much less qualifying as "groking" it. In the book, the ability to grok something is also the ability to annihilate that thing with a thought. Just pretending that an LLM actually *was* something that could become AGI (which it's not), this name would imply the AI would have the power to annihilate reality. That's bad. That's a bad name for an AI.
And why would a greedy fascist name something of his after something an anarchist communist space Jesus taught to the hippie cult he started? There are so many layers of facepalm to this. It's some kind of php-esque fractal of incompetence.
Like, there's no reason to talk about this but my brain does this to me sometimes and now it's your problem.