Overpriced pornstar-branded fleshlights aren’t the only masturbators in town and it’s not like there’s no life-like dildos either. The long and short of it is that the mechanics of a lubed hole are superior to that of a hand and you’re not looking at the entry point all the time so noone actually cares what they look like.

Yes, the branded stuff does exist, humans, male female, doesn’t matter, enter parasocial relationships news at 11. Can you imagine how well Justin Bieber dildos would sell.

Slaves nowadays usually refers to either American-style chattel slavery or Roman-style slavery, both of which were systems much different than Serfdom.

But yes serfs will likely have built it, or were involved with the build under direction of hired stone masons, on order of a noble and with resources a noble paid for, under the general societal rule that serfs were to spend a certain amount of days a year working on infrastructure stuff as part of their taxes. For more details you’d have to dig into the law at that time at that particular place but those kinds of arrangements were incredibly common in Europe in the middle ages. You tended to be able to buy yourself out of having to work, and also pay your way in silver or gold out of paying in grain, livestock, etc.

While we’re talking about Devil’s Bridges, Hamburg has one, too: It was built to make crossing the devil’s ford easier, so called because there were so many accidents there people couldn’t explain it otherwise. A carpenter was contracted, who is said to have made a pact with the devil, that the bridge may stay, at the price of the soul of the first living thing to cross the bridge. On inauguration day, then, the local reverend blessed the bridge and set off to cross it, when out of the bushes a rabbit appeared and sprinted across the bridge. A statute memorialises the occasion:

…the less exciting explanation is that back when Holstein was still under Danish rule there were two bridges close together, and the double bridge then turned into the devil’s one. dövelt -> Düvel in Low Saxon makes a lot of sense but is boring.

Nah it’s a different axis. Rust doesn’t have a GC, you do need to think about memory, it’s just that the compiler generally enforces things for you. You learn to think like borrowck thinks because you don’t want to get yelled at. Going back to C then you suddenly mistrust a lot of code a lot more, and rightly so.

Unsafe Rust may be similar to C, though even though there’s wibbles like the borrow checker still running, you still get more guarantees about the code than with C. Safe Rust can, on occasion, look more like Haskell than C.

Are they both systems languages? Yes of course otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about using them in the kernel. Makes no sense to extend the possible comparison candidates to include Prolog, arbitrarily making look C and Rust more similar by introducing a far-off comparison point.

Contact your data protection officer, they collected data that did not need.

There’s a marked difference between using headphones to cancel out deafening noises while you’re working, and using them all the time to get rid of everyday noise. There’s also a clear difference in age, once you’re a pilot and start wearing those things you’re fully grown, while the affected here are quite younger, having used those headphones extensively while their brains are still way more plastic.

“Noise-cancelling is dangerous in general” is something you read into the article. It’s not actually there. What it’s saying is “young people should watch their use of noise-cancelling headphones as the auditory system needs exposure to noise to properly develop”. That’s it. It’s a “young people, have an eye on this” thing, not “burn your headphones”.

What are you even talking about it’s okay to just wildly speculate.

I said no such thing. Here’s a wild speculation: You have noise-cancelling headphones and somehow interpret the article as a personal attack. Ok that wasn’t wild it has actually some basis. This is wild: You’re an alien from Alpha Cenauri trying to sow misinformation about the existence of zero-gravity space in your solar system. I’m Schizotypal, dare me, I can go on all day like that if you want to.

They’re reporting on what the audiologists observe and believe to be the case, and clearly label it as such: A belief, with further study necessary. People thinking they could be affected by this might take action after reading the article, true, and the action would be – easing off on using sound-cancelling headphones. That could, in the end, not help. What would be the harm done? Neither the science was misrepresented, it was portrayed as incomplete, “here’s our educated guess”, and the recommendations one can draw from that guess are quite inconceivable to cause harm themselves.

Have a look again at what the Hippocratic oath states: First, do no harm. They’re keeping to that. Ease off. You can tell a patient to try dialling back on their coffee consumption before having conclusive proof that that’s what’s causing their jitters: Less coffee won’t kill them.

It’s kind of fascinating. In Germany recently the idea of a federal education ministry has been floated and the general answer was “no”. Other states don’t want to have to deal with CSU politicians trying to get “the purpose of the school is to instil fear of god” into law applicable on their turf, that BS can stay in Bavaria. The federation is co-responsible for tertiary education (university etc) because they have responsibility when it comes to research so they can set, in practice, some standards regarding secondary graduation but that’s it.

Even then, as a democracy, you can only do really mild tariffs as companies won’t trust the tariffs to stay high come the next government. You instead subsidise, in whatever form, including things like long-term supply contracts. If you want to push domestic ball point pen production, just order your administration to prefer buying domestic ball point pens if they’re within what 20% of the import price, then slowly reduce that rate but keep the preference to make sure your ballpoint pen industry is productive, efficient, and competitive. Make it a 10-year supply contracts the next government can’t just cancel. If you’re the US, give them to teachers to give children.

BIC probably produces lighters in the US, they have a couple of locations there. It could also be razor blades or ballpoint pens though and the lighters are coming in from Mexico. Or surfboards. Still can’t believe they produce surfboards.

Or BIC might exit the US market, the French aren’t exactly known to be forgiving or accommodating. If you make their US factories pay 25% on the flints they’re importing from another factory elsewhere they might just say fuck it, let’s burn this place down, we’ll go somewhere where these lighters aren’t hit by 25% retaliatory tariffs.

There was never even a shred of proper science behind the autism causes vaccines thing, and it was a very very very very minority opinion.

Does gravity exist on Alpha Centrauri? Ask any physicist, they’re going to say “yes”. You’re then going to stand there, saying “we have not actually made the necessary experiments on Alpha Centauri itself, we do not have conclusive evidence, all those people are peddling pseudoscience”. Never mind that all that we know about physics leads us to the extrapolation that, yes, gravity exists there and we have no reason to think why there isn’t gravity there. Could that extrapolation be wrong? Yes. But it’s also a silly thing to insist onto working into the plans of a colonialisation spaceship. All you’re achieving with that is having it never be built, bogging shit down in unsubstantiated scepticism.

her audiologist believes

(emphasis mine). Belief is colloquial speech for working hypothesis. Her prescription will have been along the lines of “ease on those headphones, go to a forest or park and just listen, use them only if you really feel them to be necessary, try to expose yourself”.

“Nothing can ever be acted upon unless we have a meta-study examining fifty double-blind studies” is pseudoscepticism.

Nope it’s a very reasonable hypothesis. “Symptom X suddenly occurs frequently. That started when people started doing Y. According to our understanding, Y has a direct impact on the functioning of X”. Causation has still to be established formally but it’d be quite surprising if it was mere correlation, as in it would overturn the understanding audiologists have about how things work.

Bluntly said: If you never train filtering out noise, then you suck at filtering out noise. That looks dead obvious, if it’s wrong, then in a very, very interesting way. General relativity vs. Newtonian mechanics kind of interesting.

Both are in there, and neither of those are wrong. Generative AI does have serious limitations when it comes to detail control, and it’s also used a lot by people (not necessarily executives) who don’t respect or understand art – even to create things that they then consider art.

The thing is that we’ve had the same discussion back when photography became a thing. Ultimately what it did was free the art of painting from the shackles of having to do portraits.

One additional thing is that I recommend extremely against trying to try and develop art skills by generating AI. Buy pencil and paper, buy a graphics tablet, open Krita or Blender, go through a couple of tutorials for a few days you’ll have learned more about what you need to know to judge AI output than what hitting generate could teach you in a year. How do I know that the eyes in that AI painting have an off-kilter perspective? Because, for the life of me, I can’t draw them straight either, but put enough hours into drawing to look at both the big picture and minute detail. One of the reasons I switched to sculpting.

Nah pretty much any country should have regulations about things like max power allowed, deliberate interference etc. anywhere on the spectrum. Just because the law says “these bands are for everyone to play around with” doesn’t mean that you can just EMP the whole thing.

Those are good approaches, I would note that the “90% is written” one is mostly about code comprehension, not writing (as in: Actually architect something), and the requirement thing is a thing that you should, IMO, learn as a junior, it’s not a prerequisite. It needs a lot of experience, and often domain knowledge new candidates have no chance of having. But, then, throwing such stuff at them and then judging them by their approach, not end result, should be fair.

The main question I ask myself, in general, is “can this person look at code from different angles”. Somewhat like rotating a cube in your mind’s eye if you get what I mean. And it might even be that they’re no good at it, but they demonstrate the ability when talking about coffee making. People who don’t get lost when you’re talking about cash registers having a common queue having better overall latency than cash registers with individual queues. Just as a carpenter would ask someone “do you like working with your hands”, the question is “do you like to rotate implication structures in your mind”.

Not in any way a new phenomenon, there’s a reason fizzbuzz was invented, there’s been a steady stream of CS graduates who can’t code their way out of a wet paper bag ever since the profession hit the mainstream.

Actually fucking interview your candidates, especially if you’re sourcing candidates from a country with for-profit education and/or rote learning cultures, both of which suck when it comes to failing people who didn’t learn anything. No BS coding tests go for “explain this code to me” kind of stuff, worst case they can understand code but suck at producing it, that’s still prime QA material right there.

config.sys generation represent.

I’m perfectly comfortable with C, it’s a neat, small, language. I actually understand the whole of the semantics (at least the POSIX ones). I also happen to speak x86 assembly quite fluently (as long as it’s not SIMD noone speaks that fluently, last time I actually wrote assembly in earnest x87 was still relevant). The thing is though I’m more comfortable with Rust, even if I don’t understand absolutely everything: Because it’s less mental load. I don’t need to worry about so many things at once, don’t have to keep a thousand assumptions in mind that that pieces of code I’m not currently working on are making.

No, driving a unicycle instead of the metro doesn’t make you a better commuter. It makes you a better unicycle driver.