I had a surreal snow driving experience one time. Driving on probably 20cm of packed snow on a four lane highway. It felt like driving in an open field. The highway was fine. The exits/sorties were the scary part; you had to interpolate between support columns. People were driving at a glacial speed. Even the locals all stayed home for that, it was just the crazy tourists on the roads. Not sure how an automated car would proceed.

It depends on what they are pointing to …(?) I had just switched companies. I was about a year and a half out of school with pretty solid C skills. A senior programmer at the new company who was new to C asked me to review a C module he was implementing. All of the code looked pretty solid. The module used a fairly large struct for tracking its data. Every method in the module accepted a pointer to the struct type or else used a global pointer (too long ago). After reviewing the code, I asked him “Where is the memory allocated to actually hold the struct data?”. Huh? We added a global variable declaration of his struct type and initialized the global pointer with its address and everything worked fine. My tenets when dealing with pointers: 1. When declaring the pointer, the * is part of the type. int* justAPlainOldVariableOfTypeIntPointer; int** justAPlainOldVariableOfTypeIntPointerPointer; 2. A pointer is a leash 3. A pointer is NOT the dog!(or cat but who leashes their cat, it is undignified) 4. When writing or reading code with the dereference operator *, say “dereference “ out loud. 4a. Understand the difference between * as declaration, * as dereference unary operator and * as multiple binary operator or do not try to use them! 5. Same for addressOf & operator. (as well as assignment operator, comparison operator, etc) 6. The compiler enforces type safety. Let it do its job! Unless you are dealing directly with hardware or doing low level memory tricks, you should not need to recast something.

So you're saying it's some sort of pseudo-sudo? :-D "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

Daniel Pfeffer wrote: The major issue,, as far as I'm concerned, is TPM - will a future version refuse to run without it? It runs without it just fine. We're installing it on industrial PC's without TPM with no issues. Software Zen: delete this;

I agree, I'm slightly concerned that it doesn't bring anything useful to the party, rather it muddies the water. Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud.

A bit like the teachers now adding "invisible" text (white-on-white) to their homework assignments to catch the students who copy-n-paste into ChatGPT to cheat on their homework. :D "These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

the real story about "measuring" developer productivity - if anyone ever really truly wanted to know, would tag two things. The people measuring cannot define any reasonable sort of measurement, and two, most development is brand new - almost an art form. Rarely are developers given a tangible target or description of a target. years ago, I worked in a group (actually still do but 1/2 are gone now) developers. The development project started with the ubiquitous phrase - "how long?" to which the developers asked, "what is it you want?" This got an eye roll from product development, management and sales. After falling prey to guilt, the developers threw out estimates where upon they were told, "no, that's too long, it has to be ready for the xxx3 trade show." After the other people's delivery target went zooming by (after a lot of free OT), the entire engineering group were held accountable for missing "their" estimate. 6 months later, we had a number of cubicles open.... So, what's the benefit of "low-code" tools? It's called RAD, tosses something fast in front of the possible customer to figure out what the customer really wants. Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.

raddevus wrote: I watch videos where the person is extremely good at talking and explaining I watch James Hoffman talk about coffee on YT and I don't even care THAT much about coffee. He's just obviously knowledgeable and a good speaker. Just crossing my fingers for another decade before "go away, baitin'" is actual discourse of reality.

Can we just agree that pi will never end. and use all that processing power to find the meaning of life ? CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair

The "Three Laws of Robotics" suggested by Isaac Asimov is now revealed to have an assumption id est said laws can be programmed w/o error. Other than human error now of course we know the mode of said programming id est LLM results in occasional hallucinations.

pr0n, no doubt. Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript

Hmm. My employer has us do 'business conduct' and other training every year. No one is exempt, including the president. It's not too arduous and can usually be completed in an hour or so. Completing the training is a condition for continued employment. I've never heard of anyone being fired for not completing it, but I wouldn't want to work with anyone who was so argumentative and confrontational that they wouldn't comply with a reasonable request. I could see the company creating a policy for using AI-generated material on the job. Intellectual property rights are a significant concern for us in places, and given the cloudy (pardon the pun) nature of much AI training data, it's a reasonable response. As far as governmental regulation goes, I'm sure that's going to be a goat:elephant: from the word go. Software Zen: delete this;

I hope it was a joke as the provided link contradicts “1988” in the first paragraph. Quote: The C# programming language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002

Yeah I'm not a fan. I'm not even all that wild about the namespace MyNameSpace; vs namespace MyNameSpace { } but mostly just because it breaks the code if someone happens to not be on more recent tooling.

The first “virtual” computer thingy I used simulated a deck of punch cards. Line editors over threw the punch cards.

I've been doing this for nearly forty years, I have no problem breaking tasks into smaller subtasks. But there is a point of diminishing returns in breaking them down into smaller and smaller chunks just to fit them into an arbitrary unit of time where you spend more time splitting them up than it would take to just do the task itself. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.    - Thomas Sowell A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.    - Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)

Mycroft Holmes wrote: that got dumped into marketing. According to engineers and scientists, the Earth has come to an end, and humanity built three giant rockets to leave Earth. The first one, as the leading one, is for management and marketing : they are pioneers, the are to take the lead and show the way. The second one, is for engineers : they need to build everything up for settling the rest of the population when they follow up. The third one, a bigger one, is for the rest of the population. The first one is launched, and the management and marketing are launched into space. Then the engineers and scientists come out of the second one, and say: "- OK, they are gone, let's go back to a better life". Do not escape reality : improve reality !

Here is how this works for me. I download a book from my Amazon account and it asks for what device I need the download. The book is downloaded and DRM protected but I can add it to the Calibre library. However I cannot open it on the PC. I can download the book to Kindle and read it fine. There is no way Amazon could remove or alter the book from the Calibre library but maybe the decrypting key on the Kindle could be invalidated. Anyway, it never happened to me. Mircea