We've been afraid of computers now for at least 40 years, if not longer.

I think it's multiple factors and not just ChatGPT.

1. Stack Overflow has engendered a community that is hostile and rude unless folks create carefully crafted questions. So less questions are making it to the site.
2. SEO farms have overwhelmed the search engine results, sometimes with SO's own content.
3. The recent sale of Stack Overflow to Prosus killed a lot of momentum for me. I deleted my account when I heard the news. While I trusted SO's previous ownership and stewardship I don't have the same faith in an investment company doing right by its users.

I'm sure ChatGPT figures into this equation as well but there's way more suspects than the infamous one. It's a tiresome narrative and I think doing more research is required before blaming everything on stochastic parrots.

Rock and Roll? The only rock & roll that I'm aware of is the senior special at the local diner where the rolls are as hard as rocks

Remember to tip your server.

It's something when a 6-digit UID is considered "long-time".

From an apparently epochal reader / contributor.

This is now my go-to site for crappy Web 2.0 clipart.

Bookmarked!

That's exactly what I was thinking. If $350 means I don't have to worry about two devices mucking up the stream, I'm sorely tempted to pick one of these up.

It's not about copying the content, it's about being able to actually USE the damn content.

I have a couple benchmarks i've run over the years, in multiple languages. For CPU intensive jobs on the same machine:

C: 1
Java: 1.1-3
javascript: 117

Javascript is in IE8 on win xp.

Javascript on IE has restrictive time limits for execution, though there are work arounds.
But If you have 8 cores, you're still 14.6x slower than C.

IMO, Java, which already runs in the browser, is the better solution. That said, compared to C, Java also has huge memory requirements.
It would make more sense to allow mutli-core execution in Java in the browser.

Performance is important

My benchmarks show that guile is a pretty slow. For example, on one machine, it was 238 times slower than C. So, instead of a 3.6 GIPS machine, we'll all go back to 15 MIPS. Who here wants to use a 486/66 again? Who here isn't old enough to remember when Intel had numbers for chip models? Perhaps the long jump support could be removed and half way decent performance could be put in. I mean, what good is a functional language when it's faster when you code loops?

I was researching LISP a couple years back and ran into a great quote. It talked about how a student had written an elegant matrix multiply function in LISP, which had the misfeature of being incredibly slow. It caught my attention because i'd written a nearly identical function, and was amazed at how poorly it performed. The author made the comment that no C programmer could make such a mistake. However, he totally failed to give the slightest hint on why the performance should have sucked. And, he continued to rant about how (compiled) LISP was as fast as C.

Javascript is finally getting some performance. Firefox 3.5.7's javascript is only 25.6x slower than C. The recent browser wars show rapid progress.

Readability is important
That said. I know dozens of languages. I understand my 30 year old BASIC programs without much effort. I was a bit more clever with my 25 year old C programs, so they're a bit tougher. LISP is one of only two languages where i actually took a class. But none of my LISP or scheme is halfway comprehensible two weeks after i've written it. Forth is a bit better, taking a couple months. Procedural languages are simply easier. At the end of the day, you spend most of your time in maintenance. If it isn't broken, then the requirements are changing. Oh, and time is money, just like Einstein said.

Thank you, Rob, for an awesome ride. I'm glad to have gotten the chance to meet you as a colleague, and I look forward to your next gig.

I've long said that's what was killing Ford when I was there. There was no thought about what was happening next quarter, let alone 5 years down the line. It was all about making the numbers this week. That's what lead them to cede the small cars to the foreign companies, and concentrate solely on SUVs, which pretty much tanked the company when the SUV market fell over (that and the bad press about the Explorer, but that's another story).

Seriously, outside of just being paid advertisements and shills for the syndicated programming, there's not a lot of reporting going on for local news. The product is just terrible to watch, at least in our area.

I'm sure at some point they're going to say that the Internet is killing CNN. On that, I can fully agree: Reading comments from Twitter, voting on stories via Twitter, and showing cat videos from Youtube will definitely kill CNN dead.

Awesome. I should really check out slashdot.org sometime. :)

Readable websites that don't have inline ads in them, unlike the article linked.

The Shuttle has a 1 in 50 chance of failure. That's not exactly the right benchmark. 1 in 500 isn't particularly good.

I use lossless compression for my music, because I like the higher quality over MP3 files.