That’s actually amazing, and I think I just spawned a new project.

(Y’know, to distract from all the other ones)

Sure?

We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement.

Ah yes, a famously bubble-free period. /s

Talking to old-timers, and reading history, it sounds more like revolving hype cycles have been around for the whole industrial age. TBF they do touch on that timeline later and correct themselves a bit.

Some were dumber than others. Foo-as-a-service wasn’t even a new concept, that’s just called renting shit out!

But it’s actually grown. It fully didn’t exist 70 years ago.

LLMs don’t just memorise their training data, though.

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”

Honestly just the fact you can become a coder and get paid for it is impressive, by the historical human society average.

Like 99% of the recorded ones are going to be one empire or feudal lord fighting another. History was just like that until the last couple hundreds of years.

Since then, there’s been a few much more clear-cut cases, like WWII or Ukraine, but those are unusual. There’s still been a lot of asshole-on-asshole fights like WWI, Russia Empire vs. Japan, Iran vs. Iraq, Napoleon vs. everyone…

Obviously we talk a lot about the just ones, because they legitimately teach us things, and also simply because it makes for a better story.

Edit: The basic thing you said about arms races is totally valid, but the struggle between different ideas and own own better and worse natures is itself kind of a perpetual cycle, and I thought I should point it out.

I mean, which boundaries and wishes are reasonable is itself a disagreed on concept. In warfare usually both sides are assholes.

Not exactly. Share price is some multiple of expected future yearly profit, depending on accompanying variability/risk.

And sometimes share prices or profits suffer and technology doesn’t care. Ask Blockbuster.

Interesting. My experiences with FORTRAN made me expect the worst.

But what if you don’t get it?

Ed. /s

(Except actually I guess that could happen)

Wow there’s some really bad deals here!

History is full of trendy hustles, but people aren’t usually dumb enough to keep falling for them forever. Probably that will apply to these, too, and a lot of shitty subscriptions will go the way of the Juicero.

It’s worth mentioning renting rather than owning isn’t an intrinsically bad concept. Owning your own bus probably doesn’t interest you, and while streaming costs are going up, it’s still a better deal than buying a DVD you watch once.

You have to think when the infamous “own nothing and being happy” quote was coined, they were imaging there still was a nice diversified portfolio of investments in the background, which amounts to owning a small piece of everything.

I had this happen recently. Very satisfying.

I did add some more comments and change names, though, since stuff I thought was obvious at the time wasn’t totally.

Ocean mine.

Many sea mines of that era are actually activated by disturbances in magnetism! They’re pretty good about not going off unless something large and metal rolls up, since that’s their purpose, although anything really old is suspect of not working as designed. That’s why when somebody digs up (or just kind of has) an old bomb they detonate it on site instead of trying to move it.

WWII also saw acoustic mines used. Contact mines were and are around too, and I would guess if you don’t crush a trigger the same answer about only going off when conditions are met applies.

Modern low-sensitivity explosives can survive an actual plane crash without going off, and will burn instead.

helmet (why not just move the whole sentence into the text, OP?)

SSTF covered everything from here on pretty much perfectly.

On the off chance your helmet does successfully take that kind of punishment, and the blast wave is absorbed enough to not hurt the soldier, there still will be a bunch of hot gases escaping in every direction which isn’t great. Better than no helmet, though - the trick is just noticing the grenade, stopping, removing your helmet and gently placing it over top before it blows up, which is why that move isn’t actually a thing.

TBF, something’s already gone funny if you’re finding pipe bombs on the street.

How dare you break the jerk! /s

From what I’ve heard about Windows, it works more like the Simpsons “Barney coming up behind Moe” meme.

So, as it should be, Tux.

It kind of is sometimes, but at the same time it’s hard to do education any other way.

Which I think just illustrates that take-home essays aren’t a great way to do things now, if they ever were.

Skill issue. Used an implied “of them”, which is idiomatic in the language, but forgot to update the value of “them” first. Without that, taking the first value is compliant with the standard.

/s, but only if we assume us programmers have common sense. ^/s