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Comment Re:A good step, but... (Score 1) 32

Sure, go far back enough (and yes, I was on computers at that time) but surely he's not saying, "Man, computers were better when you could only run one process at a time, and the operating system let you do literally anything" etc etc and if so, the answer to that is, you can still do that if you want .. you just can't do it *inside* somebody else's software architecture. You still own the hardware, do whatever you want.

Comment Re:A good step, but... (Score 1) 32

huh? it's trivial to write any code you want and run it on your phone

But with respect to your "dawn of the PC era", unless you wrote the operating system, you couldn't write and run code that could do anything and everything your computer was capable of - only code that could do what the operating system would permit you to do.

That's no different today.

Comment Re:Bosses' folly (Score 3, Interesting) 107

Some of us have been there since the start (and looking at your uid, I'm guessing you have too). My name is in kernel commits from around the 98, and I was using Linux before then of course. I was even a Minix user on my ST at university.

Torvalds was anti source control. Others weren't and yep - started using Bitkeeper. Linus considered this "problem solved - you use what you like, I don't have to". Then he started using it. Then the reverse engineering debacle and then the "Well I'm not using any of the others, I'll write my own then" thing with git.

It certainly isn't down to him that people then started using it as the "if all you've got is a hammer" answer to everything - he's completely blameless in that. But I'm talking about the same kind of people that overused the Design Patterns book (one of the authors of which I've also met, although to my shame I can't remember which one - this was a corporate course and lecture being given at IBM Watson), the same kind of people that turned the very simple agile principles into the corporate behemoth Agile process-ridden abomination it became...those kind. They used git because of the hype, not because of the use case.

Comment Re:Bosses' folly (Score 5, Insightful) 107

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

This is pretty much the opposite of what most commercial software wants to do. It wants a single master, with known commits, so that a single known version gets shipped in the end. This is the exact opposite of what git was meant to be, yet it gets used there anyway. I notice the summary talks about a centralised system - yep, that's what you want for commercial, not a distributed multiple master.

Comment It's all old (Score 1) 20

I like this stuff but...
  • Blade Runner (film not book) - 1982, 44 years old
  • Godzilla - 1954, 72 years old
  • Star Trek - 1967, 59 years old
  • Star Wars - 1978, 48 years old

Even the Marvel stuff dates back to the 60s. I think pop culture is a bit stuck in a rut - there are good sci fi series out there, and new ones need to emerge as major cultural touchpoints as well. It's all feeling a bit retread at the moment.

Comment Re:Summary is referring to EV plus Hybrids (Score 1) 149

so don't do charging stations, do battery replacement stations. Hot swappable batteries does away with the charge time and makes a whole new subscription business model for the service stations to move to and not die. The Govt. could specify a standard battery compartment and hookups, allowing for a HUGE 3rd party market. Just imagine the AmazonBasics[tm] battery line that catches fire as often as AIs hallucinate.

Submission + - LLM-inspired study sheds light on how brain cells encode the meaning of words (medicalxpress.com)

alternative_right writes: To investigate how the brain encodes the meaning of words, the researchers first recorded the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus of 10 people who were listening to stories. Their recordings were collected using tiny wire electrodes that were implanted in the participants' brains as part of clinical monitoring procedures for epilepsy.

The team then used mathematical models to analyze the language used in the stories and the brain recordings. This allowed them to examine whether information about the meaning of words could predict the recorded neuronal activity.

"We recorded responses of hippocampal neurons while individuals listened to narrative speech," wrote Melissa Franch and her colleagues in their paper. "Using an encoding model approach, we find robust encoding of semantics, even after controlling for phonemics and grammar. Individual words had complex selectivities that included multiple words in multiple semantic categories."

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