C++: C with blackjack and 40 year old hookers. Anyway, only the rich can inherit diamonds or something. Or perhaps not, my memory is corrupted. I’m open to any pointers though…
The C++ feature set is a giant tome written in an unsteady hand and bound with suspicious leather. You’re supposed to study it deeply, use as little as possible, and ideally have a backup plan if things go wrong for this plane of existence.
We still use on-prem Exchange with Microsoft Office at work, and it’s really becoming a problem. Microsoft already auto adds shortcuts for 365 (which we don’t use and doesn’t work with our setup), and the “Mail” app (which also doesn’t work with out setup), and now I have to explain to people to use the regularly titled Outlook icon and not the “Outlook (new)” icon (which again, won’t work with our setup).
You’ve missed the point; group policies are being ignored and break with every other update as Microsofts cadence and quality assurance continues to enshitify.
Have you seen the film Dark Star? Bomb number 20 gets stuck in the release bay with the detonation countdown still running, so they have to spacewalk out and convince the AI not to explode.
They put new AI controls on our traffic lights. Cost the city a fuck ton more money than fixing our dilapidated public pool. Now no one tries to turn left at a light. They don’t activate. We threw out a perfectly good timer no one was complaining about.
But no one from silicone valley is lobbing cities to buy pool equipment, I guess.
I’ve seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa’s water system. I’m struggling to imagine that’s enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I’m kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.
A large data centre can use over 100 MW at the high end. Certainly enough to power a swimming pool or three. In fact swimming pools are normally measured in kW not MW.
We are a small software company. We’re trying to find a useful use case. Currently we can’t. However, we’re watching closely. It has to come at the rate of improving.
Whilst it’s a shame this implementation sucks, I wish we would get intelligent traffic light controls that worked. Sitting at a light for 90 seconds in the dead of night without a car in sight is frustrating.
That was a solved problem 20 years ago lol. We made working systems for this in our lab at Uni, it was one of our course group projects. It used combinations of sensors and microcontrollers.
It’s not really the kind of problem that requires AI. You can do it with AI and image recognition or live traffic data but that’s more fitting for complex tasks like adjusting the entire grid live based on traffic conditions. It’s massively overkill for dead time switches.
Even for grid optimization you shouldn’t jump into AI head first. It’s much better long term to analyze the underlying causes of grid congestion and come up with holistic solutions that address those problems, which often translate into low-tech or zero-tech solutions. I’ve seen intersections massively improved by a couple of signs, some markings and a handful of plastic poles.
Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.
Throwing AI at problems is sort of a “spray and pray” approach that often goes about as badly as you can expect.
I can see the headlines now: “New social media trend where people are asking traffic light Ai to solve the traveling salesman problem is causing massive traffic jams and record electricity costs for the city.”
You need to really specify what is meant by “AI” here. Chances are it’s probably some form of smart traffic lights to improve traffic flow. Which is not all that special. It has nothing to do with LLMs
Honestly I’m not sure, we had circular sensors for a long time, about the size of a tall drinking glass, now there’s rectangular sensors they just put up about twice the size of a cell phone and they have a bend, arc, to them, I know they weren’t being used as cameras at all before, no one was getting tickets with pictures from them, it’s a small town. What exactly the new system is I’m not sure, our local news all went out of business, so its all word of mouth, or going to town hall meetings.
It’s funny because this is what I was afraid of with “AI” threatening humanity.
Not that we’d get super-intelligences running Terminators, but that we’d be using black-box “I dunno how it does it, we just trained it and let it go.” Tech in civilization-critical applications because it sounded cool to people with more dollars than brain cells.
Me too. If I can use it, I prefer C# — that is — if I’m not doing systems programming, I don’t have to worry about legacy code, and mainly I’m supporting Windows then it’s really quite cozy.
update: i just looked it up and they are not. Visual J++ is a predecessor to C#. Nevertheless, the name “Visual J++” in all its Microsoftian goodness(?) is as good a descriptor as any for what C# turned into
So more an iterative family member, which I suppose was more what I’d expect with how Microsoft hisorically handled programming languages. Still interesting! Thanks for the fact-check!
I like C# too. I feel like I shouldn’t because of how Microsoft it is, but I can’t help but see it as a better put together/structured Java when I use it.
I feel the same, but to me, it’s more understandable than the other C derivatives. I just understand it better. I’ve been thinking of diving into rust lately.
The graph goes up for me when I find my comfortable little subset of C++ but goes back down when I encounter other people’s comfortable little subset of C++ or when I find/remember another footgun I didn’t know/forgot about.
When I became a team leader at my last job, my first priority was making a list of parts of the language we must never use because of our high reliability requirement.
Sure, strtok is a terrible misfeature, a relic of ancient times, but it’s plainly the heritage of C, not C++ (just like e.g. strcpy). The C++ problems are things like braced initialization list having different meaning depending on the set of available constructors, or the significantly non-zero cost of various abstractions, caused by strange backward-compatible limitations of the standard/ABI definitions, or the distinctness of vector<bool> etc.
No you are right! Honestly it was several years ago and I struggled to remember exactly what I came up with before I left.
In our application we for example never use dynamic memory allocation. It has to be done very carefully so we don’t crash. Problem is there’s lots of sneaky ways one can accidentally do it from the standard library.
That’s one thing that always shocks me. You can have two people writing C++ and have them both not understand what the other is writing. C++ has soo many random and contradictory design patterns, that two people can literally use it as if it were 2 separate languages.
C is almost the perfect subset for me, but then I miss templates (almost exclusively for defining generic data structures) and automatic cleanup. That’s why I’m so interested in Zig with its comptime and defer features.
You may also like Odin if you haven’t already started zig. It’s less of a learning curve and feels more like what c should have always been. It has defer and simple generics, but doesn’t have the magic of comptime.
I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.
I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …
Then some hackers get in and reprogram the AI CEOs to value long term profit and employee training and productivity. The company grows and is massively profitable until some venture capitalists swoop in and kill the company to feed from the carcass.
You start out with negative knowledge in C++, then as you just hear the name for the first time, you get your balls stepped on, jizz, and then get post-nut clarity.
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