If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
I used to think that Trump was just dumb. But, recently I’ve become convinced that he’s actually able to seem smarter than he actually is. Meaning, he appears to have an IQ of maybe 90, but he’s faking it because he’s actually closer to 80. His various coping mechanisms allow him to seem smarter than he is, but that “smarter than he is” still doesn’t bring him up to average.
Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”.
Do rockets count as artillery science? The first rockets basically served the same purpose as artillery, and were operated by the same army groups. The innovation was to attach the propellant to the explosive charge and have it explode gradually rather than suddenly. Even the shape of a rocket is a refinement of the shape of an artillery shell.
Verne wasn’t able to imagine artillery without the cannon barrel, but I’d argue he was right. It was basically “artillery science” that got humankind to the moon. The first “rocket artillery” were the V1 and V2 bombs. You could probably argue that the V1 wasn’t really artillery, and that’s fair, but also it wasn’t what the moon missions were based on. The moon missions were a refinement of the V2, which was a warhead delivered by launching something on a ballistic path.
As for generative AI, it doesn’t have zero fidelity, it just has relatively low fidelity. What makes that worse is that it’s trained to sound extremely confident, so people trust it when they shouldn’t.
Personally, I think it will take a very long time, if ever, before we get to the stage where “vibe coding” actually works well. OTOH, a more reasonable goal is a GenAI tool that you basically treat as an intern. You don’t trust it, you expect it to do bone-headed things frequently, but sometimes it can do grunt work for you. As long as you carefully check over its work, it might save you some time/effort. But, I’m not sure if that can be done at a price that makes sense. So far the GenAI companies are setting fire to money in the hope that there will eventually be a workable business model.
If you use it basically like you’d use an intern or junior dev, it could be useful.
You wouldn’t allow them to check anything in themselves. You wouldn’t trust anything they did without carefully reading it over. You’d have to expect that they’d occasionally completely misunderstand the request. You’d treat them as someone completely lacking in common sense.
If, with all those caveats, you can get this assistance for free or nearly free, it might be worth it. But, right now, all the AI companies are basically setting money on fire to try to drive demand. If people had to pay enough that the AI companies were able to break even, it might be so expensive it was no longer worth it.
Everyone around him must hate him so much, to allow him to go out in public looking like that.
“The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends.”
This is Zuckerberg, claiming it’s normal not just to have only 3 friends, but fewer than 3. This is telling on yourself even more than “Women’s orgasms aren’t real because no woman I’ve ever been with has had an orgasm.”
If he counts his wife in that list of “fewer than 3 friends”, how many friends does he actually have? I get that being ultra rich means that often you can’t be sure who’s actually your friend, and who’s just there for the money. But, still, he should at least be able to count a handful of friends. I’ve known my 2 best friends since before I was 5 years old. Surely if Zuck had a normal childhood, he should have people who were his friends long before he got rich, who he can be sure aren’t just there for his money. If he doesn’t, it strongly suggests he was either a pretty awful kid, or he led a really weird life growing up and was isolated from anybody who could have become a friend.
The special area of “Etc” is used for some administrative zones, particularly for “Etc/UTC” which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with “Etc/GMT” have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the “Etc” area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g “Etc/GMT-14” is 14 hours ahead of GMT).
And Trump weighs 224 lbs with 4.8% body fat.
Yeah, that I can get behind. His Texan shtick was an obvious act. But, even without that, I don’t think he had an IQ of 100. Like most politicians he had good emotional intelligence, and an ability to connect with people. Still, it was clear that even pretty basic concepts were a stretch for him.
I’m sure there was another similar incident in the last few months when some “policy” came out of the blue, and someone connected it to something else that had just recently been on TV. But, finding something like that is nearly impossible. What do you search for, “crazy policy ideas, Trump, 2025” There are just mountains of BS to sift through.
I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of what station was airing the movie. He was flicking through the channels and saw one that was interesting.
He was mindlessly flicking through the channels until one seemed interesting.
I feel you could call Bush a smart man
No.
I still can’t get over that his policies are the result of what he watches on TV. I’m not talking about his watching the Sunday morning political shows. I’m talking fictional movies in prime time that result in new US policies.
At 9pm on Saturday WLRN aired “Escape from Alcatraz”. On Sunday another Trump policy was announced: he was re-opening Alcatraz prison.
This is at least the second time that people have figured out what Trump was watching on TV to cause him to issue a new crazy edict.
Why don’t you like flatpaks? I’ve basically never had any issues with them, but maybe I will in the future.
As for distrobox, what’s the confusion? Were you trying to do something advanced? Or, was there an issue with mapping things between the host and distrobox? I haven’t really pushed the envelope, but the only issue I’ve had is that I wanted my shell history to be different between the distrobox and the host, so I had to tweak my zsh startup files to detect if I was in a distrobox and save history in a different place.
As someone who started with Slackware in the 90s, it took me a while too.
I switched over to Bazzite from Windows 10 on my main PC because I wanted something I could game on. But, even though most of my games work great on it, I haven’t played that many because I ended up just happy to have a Linux system I could use for projects I’d been putting off.
It’s true that if you’re used to a plain Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora system, you have to do some things differently. But, in exchange you basically never have to worry about installing a package because there’s been a vulnerability discovered or something.
The happy medium I found is using distrobox on Bazzite. Inside a distrobox, you can use apt or whatever to manage the software you want. You can even export things from the distrobox to the main OS – like, say you installed a GUI editor in the distrobox, you can have it available as if it were a normal app in the main immutable OS.
Distrobox might help you switch if you’re feeling hesitant. OTOH, if you want to fully grok the system before switching, or want to be able to customize the images you’re installing, that can take a while to figure out.
I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.