The story includes pigs and brain death. It's only natural to be reminded of Trump.

Sounds like this could be a powerful alternative to Photoshop... at this rate, I wonder how much longer Adobe will be around. I was never a fan of their subscription model anyway...

The first fate that popped into my mind was:

#23 - Sichuan Pork with Egg Roll ***

So how do you explain people who drink ONE beer and call it good? It would be really hard to get drunk on one beer, even with supersizing.

Much or the corporate world is trying to push us into a weird perversion of communism. It has all the downsides of regular Communism but in addition you don't even theoretically own things due to being part of the collective society, only corporations actually own things. It's a wealthy exclusive club and you ain't in it.

Because C leaks like a sieve and Rust doesn't, I guess. The phrase 'rust speeds up Python' is just his shorthand way of saying if you think riding the hardware bareback is how to make your code run faster, use Rust. In a bucket, the same way devs used to drop into C for performance-critical bits, a lot of them are now writing those extensions in Rust. Python itself doesn’t get faster — the hot loops just get moved out of Python bytecode into compiled Rust. If you don’t move actual heavy work across that boundary, you won’t see any speedup at all.

Python is a scripting language. Granted, I'm a sysadmin, not a dev, but I've got three decades plus of experience, most of it at a very, very large US defense contractor. The IT world (at least when I was active in it) was partitioned into two mutually exclusive, actively hostile factions -- sysadmins and devs. "Real programmers use C" vs "you can be replaced by a tiny shell script" kind of hostility. I have a BS in CS, yeah, but I hate coding with a purple passion. I learned python through an extremely painful process of osmosis. Python is a general-purpose, high-level, dynamically typed language that (by default) runs on a bytecode VM and depends on a runtime. And it has garbage collection -- that puts it firmly on the scripting side of this dichotomy. I get that devs love it because scripting languages like python (and its predecessors like perl and JS) were designed to control and glue systems together from userland. Still, sysadmins laugh whenever the real language debate comes up -- python is just bash with delusions of grandeur. Academically, if it assumes a running OS and APIs are already there, has GC (even if it's buried in the runtime) it’s a scripting language.

not a good look

There are absolutely areas of employment that we are going to have big shortages in several years down the road because of this.

My wife and I both work in Radiology, and most all hospitals are having some trouble finding radiologists to read images. The cause? About 8-10 years ago it was all over the news that AI was reading medical images and doing a better job than radiologists. That caused a non-trivial percentage of medical students to choose some other specialization, believing that AI would replace enough radiologists that they wouldn't find work.

Well, that didn't come to pass. Sure, AI is being used in some small way, mainly to flag things and bring specific areas of an image to a doctor's attention, but at this point it hasn't actually improved their workflow or the speed in which they can read images. So now we're paying the price with a shortage in radiologists.

Now apply that scenario to almost every professional career you can think of, and imagine the shortages we're going to have 8-10 years down the line when AI didn't live up to the hype in myriad careers and fields. My prediction is trade careers (construction, plumbing, electrical, etc) are going to reach an all-time high (which is actually needed, so that's a good thing) as people pick career paths that can't be touched by AI.

You mean the Pirahã. That’s Daniel Everett’s claim from the mid-2000s, not a new discovery. Even then, it wasn’t that Pirahã disproves Universal Grammar — only that it appears to restrict certain recursive constructions. Restriction is not falsification. Languages vary in what they use, not in what the human brain can generate, which is what this paper addresses. You did read it, right? Your four-digit uid suggests you've been around long enough to be as tired of drive-by snark as I am.

That’s a category error. Chomsky never argued for a hard-wired grammar of English. Just name-dropping Pirahã isn’t an argument. Chomsky's point was that the capacity for hierarchical, recursive syntax is part of our biological endowment.

They don’t get mad, they get tired of hearing the same misapplied talking point 20 years later. The Pirahã case has been examined in detail. Everett’s strongest claims have been challenged and refuted in peer-reviewed work. This isn't the mic-drop moment you think it is. you are recycling decades old culture-war fodder, not engaging with current evidence.

That’s posturing, not argument. Science advances by careful data, replication, and theoretical refinement. Dismissing those who’ve actually done the work as “Experts” isn’t skepticism — it’s contrarian cosplay.

It's basically Itchy and Scratchy Money.

Agreed — on both points. :) Cool indeed. This paper doesn’t hand Chomsky the trophy. What it does suggest is that his “universals of language” may live in more than one layer of the system. Chomsky gave us a handle on the structure layer, but this paper demonstrates that there is also a temporal (read: prosodic) layer built on the physical substrate of breathing rhythms, neural oscillations, and motor constraints. These impose measurable limits on how fast syllables can be produced and how long prosodic chunks can be held. The PNAS paper shows that intonation units (IUs) universally cluster around ~0.6 Hz — about one every 1.6 seconds — regardless of language family. That’s a physical invariant, and that is a remarkable finding: Speech is chunked into units of time that facilitate memory, turn-taking, and information pacing. This is the “universal timing” finding — a rhythmic lattice that seems to hold across cultures and demographics. In a bucket, physics constrains prosody, prosody scaffolds syntax, syntax enables cognition and meaning. That’s not a knockout for UG, but it does mean universals are real — they just come from multiple strata of the system.

Chomsky’s theory that that humans uniquely combine words into hierarchical, recursive structures — rules that no other species exhibits at the same depth, is still viable, but it would seem to be incomplete. He was on the right track -- UG was his attempt to argue for a higher-dimensional blueprint in our cognitive architecture. This paper simply shows that there is a temporal layer as well, that exists one level down — in the rhythm of spoken interaction itself. Chomsky’s model gave us a handle on structure; this research gives us a handle on time. If anything, it suggests UG is incomplete, not wrong: syntax is one invariant, timing is another. Both are necessary if you want cognition and language to emerge in human form.

It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Imagine this. You are a health care worker. You find out that the patient that came in this morning had Ebola and you were definitely exposed.

That patient is dead now. Do you want the shot?

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.