Anecdotally, the cassette player that came with the machine had a misconfigured tape head. Because there was no internet nobody knew why it didn't load most of the games I got with the machine. However, saving and loading programs did work. So, I started writing programs from the user manual and game listings from some programming books I found in the library, and saving them on my cassettes. Because the user manual covered not only some tutorial BASIC but also the machine's graphics, sprites, sounds, and what other features I eventually, after getting some hang of writing BASIC, did also realize that what I could create with the machine hardware itself was virtually unlimited. I didn't necessarily know what the commands did with the underlying hardware but I knew if I poked certain numbers into certain addresses I could make my sprites appear on the screen and make them move around.

By the time I got the cassette player fixed by some computer repair shop, learned about tuning the tape head, and I could finally load all the games bundled with the machine, I was seriously hooked with programming and the highly desired games no longer seemed that interesting in comparison. I knew someone sat down and wrote all those games and instead of playing them I could learn to do the same myself.

Been programming ever since.

Failing to recognize the dangers would be an instant fail; knowing that something reeks of undefined behaviour, or even potential UB, is enough: you just write out explicitly what you want and skip the mind games.

What has generally worked for me is paraphrasing the old adage "Write the data structures and the code will follow" over to AI. Design your data, consider the design immutable and let the AI try fill in the necessary code (well, with some guidance). If it finds the data structures aren't enough, have it prompt you instead of making changes on its own. AI can do lot of the low-hanging fruit and often the harder ones as well as long as it's bound to something.

Yet, for now, AI at best has been something that relieves me from having to write a long string of boring code: it's not sustainable to keep developing stuff relying on AI alone. It's also great when quality is not an issue; for any serious work AI has not speeded me up noticeably. I still need to think through the hard parts, and whatever I gain in generating code I lose in managing the agents. But I can parallelise code generation, trying new approaches, and exploring out because AI is cheap. AI is also pretty good for going through the codebase and reasoning about dependencies whether in the context of adding a new feature or fixing a bug: I often let AI create a proof-of-concept change that does it, then I extract the important bits out of that and usually trim down the diffs down to at least 1/3 or less.

AI further helps with non-work, i.e. tasks that you have to do in order to fulfill external demands and requirements, and not strictly create anything solid and new. I can imagine AI creating various reports and summaries and documentation, perhaps mostly to be consumed and condensed by another AI at the receiving end. Sadly, all of this is mostly things not worth doing anyway.

Overall, I cringe under all the hype that's been laid on AI: it's a new tool that's still looking for its box or niche carveout, not a revolution.

I've held the belief that an occasional bankruptcy is basically a sign of healthy competition within an industry: those companies going down literally didn't know how to be any more efficient or they could've survived.

Regarding airline business, a crapload of more people are flying now with better prices than before the industry was deregulated. Sure it must hurt someone at one end, eventually. Part of the business is standing through price wars because someone will always lose: the best companies can endure that. While airline industry probably fluctuates as described in the article there are plenty of other cyclic industries. Churn itself isn't anything new.

Because fixed costs are what they are, I think, is the reason you can drive the business quite precisely to the brink of inoperation: it could literally come down to pure luck between how full your planes happen to be and how close you are to the next payment of some critical loan whether you can take off into the air for another month or so.

I can't remember a phone that died because of the battery since the era of Ni-Cd cells in early cell phones. I don't think I've never discarded a phone with a li-ion battery because of the battery. It's always physical breakage or getting too slow to be usable, because of age.

Sure, I don't spend a cycle per day. Not even every other day. That's probably rare, I get that. But much rather than because of dying batteries I'd like EU to mandate

- the phone should come with full keys so that I can own the machine if I want to - or at the very least the hardware must become unlockable once the support period ends - individual components should be made available for independent repairs - repairs must not need software pairing of hardware components on unlocked devices

because of right to own and right to repair which shouldn't be "rights" but nonnegotiable traits of physical properties like they used to be.

Not sure what the behavior is like on Android, but iOS will throttle performance if your battery has degraded past a certain state. So I'm sure that there are many iPhone users that are replacing their phone due to what they think is poor performance related to the age of the phone, when it's really due to the age of the battery.

For those feeling like this guy is being a dick, that's a normal reaction, but try to understand that this attitude was cultivated and used by enlightened individuals back when many people thought they were making secure software without even salting and hashing their users passwords. People thought md5 was good enough, https was barely being used, people had to be convinced to use ssh instead of telnet and ftp, and so forth. Drilling the idea into people that cryptography and security is difficult and that you should listen to experts had to be done. Don't take it personally.

So yes, as you study cryptography, do keep in mind that it's extremely unlikely that you'll learn enough to come up with something better on your own, that you will very likely make mistakes if you try to write your own implementation of any cryptographic algorithms, and that you should still just use existing libraries and the recommendations of experts on best practices.

He's a perfectly nice guy with a lot to say about information security and its intersection with public policy. But I think it's been plural decades since he basically declared himself outside of modern cryptography (you could call it at the point where he said he didn't "trust the math" of elliptic curves, which he left out of Practical Cryptography, over 26 years ago).

It's not so much that you should or shouldn't take "Applied Cryptography is bad" personally; rather: if you think Applied Cryptography is a useful reference or learning tool, it's pretty important to know that it is not.

YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.

AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.

My phone can pre-download maps into Google Maps for offline use, I've done this in foreign countries where I didn't necessarily have full data connection. There's no reason you couldn't cache the necessary maps on the car's navigation system and let it operate based on that and an incoming GPS signal, never emitting out one bit.

OTOH, if you wanted live data, dynamic routing etc. for your convenience you could explicitly turn data on but then you'd acknowledge it comes with the caveats such as potential snooping of telemetry data.

Admittedly, I would never trust a car manufacturer to actually disable telemetry no matter what they'd promise. So, disconnecting the antennae would be the only reliable method regardless. I wonder if there will ever be a car with a physical radio kill switch like laptops.