WTF-Beta

Have an Epson. Took two days to get it working. It has quit functioning. Will try to get it going whenever I feel like spending a day working on it or hell freezes over. Whichever comes first. Copy Copy is about five miles away. Doug mentioned that he sends all printing to a printing place. He is my hero once again.

Not satisfied with destroying the next generation of scientists and scientific discovery, the Trump administration takes aim at current science. We will need to rebuild lots of scientific infrastructure in 2029, human and physical. I would suggest a confiscatory billionaire tax of, oh, maybe 25% of all individually owned (including tax avoidance trusts) exceeding one billion dollars. Would help with the wealth distribution while enabling the nation to recover from the wanton destruction the GOP is deliberately wreaking.

People will bet on anything.

Some of us could still find a coding job: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Jobs/Remote-Cobol-Programmer

@Axtremus said in Surpassing Dijkstra: I would venture to guess that anyone who has a Computer Science or Computer Engineering degree today knows Dijkstra’s name (though few will remember the algorithm itself). That would be me and you are correct on all counts. We used the book Structured Programming in some class or another; he was one of the co-authors.

Nothing good will come of this.

"AI" as it's known may not go away, and it may be helpful to some people, but it will continue to be little more than an expensive, fancy-pants data retrieval system that steals copyrighted material for profitable ends. Hopefully, our lawmakers will do their job and make sure it is appropriately and strongly regulated and that they put a stop to the wholesale theft. The last copilot-generated search result I looked at (I always prefix my searches these days with "-ai -copilot" but I forgot this time) said something coherent followed by a parenthetical, "According to Wikipedia". Had me LOLing. I recommend the following opinion as a counter to the constant hype... https://unherd.com/2025/08/how-to-stopper-the-ai-genie/?lang=us But as recent tests and studies of LLMs have shown, this technology is not the pathway to AGI that we were promised. The hopes that “scaling”, “emergent properties” and “reasoning” would lead to AGI have all failed. The path to AGI lies elsewhere, if anywhere. As Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, has said: “There’s absolutely no way that autoregressive LLMs… will reach human intelligence. It’s just not going to happen.”

Interesting. I guess it was an ancient and widespread practice.

@Axtremus Yes, fascinating. Thanks.

The Israeli government harvests organs from the Palestinians civilians they kill. I don't know what your link says and I'm not sure I want to know.

To be fair to George 3rd, although he was against your independence, He didn't develop or impose the taxes on the colonies, nor send troops. It was our government, simply trying to finance and administer some kind of order in a vast country; that was far beyond our capability to manage. George was a very cultured and educated family man, before the strain of his role and illness got to him in the 1780's. His thousands of books became the core of our British Library.