The Swumbles Big Jumble naming scheme can probably be traced to ZX Spectrum games coded by 15-year-olds in northern England in 1983 or so

Wouldn’t this be about the time anti-SLAPP laws come down on Musk like a tonne of bricks?

Modifying the built-in Uyghur-detection algorithms to instead detect Palestinians was probably conveniently easy

“Hand-written assembly” is not more powerful than any other Turing-complete language (including Perl and Python), just more painfully slow and prone to human error to write. (Perhaps if you have a special case requiring speed (such as the processing being done in a tight loop in a financial trading app and the results needing to beat rival trading systems by milliseconds or something equally esoteric), it’d make sense, but in that case, a modern compiler (for, say, C/C++/Rust or similar) would yield comparable results, and if a lot is riding on those milliseconds, you’d eschew code and build a FPGA that pulls the data out of memory buffers in hardware or similar.)

So these days, the only use case for hand-writing assembly language (other than low-level OS/firmware programming or compiler development) is performative Feats Of Strength, where the challenge is the point. And in that case, you’d be trying to do something heroically challenging, like writing an Atari 2600 demake of Baldur’s Gate or something.

zee-shell or zed-shell, depending on dialect

13/10 no notes

Orcs gonna orc

Didn’t he move to Japan and attempt to set up a far-right party there?

Such a compilation is unlikely to be published. There’s a phenomenon known as the Werther effect, in that as soon as suicide is mentioned in the news or popular culture, the suicide rate goes up (presumably as the awareness of it tips those who have been on the verge). As such, news publications have guidelines to avoid mentioning suicide as a motivation (often, the only tell will be a footnote at the bottom of a story giving the phone number of a suicide hotline). If such a compilation came out, it could be expected to trigger a wave of suicides, if not a small but noticeable permanent increase in the frequency of suicide, so I imagine few publishers ok r booksellers would touch it.

Maybe some of Europe’s surfeit of demo coders had to make their money somehow, and one of them persuaded a pharmacy that paying them to make them a sign with graphics that spin in eyecatching ways would be a good idea, and the rest was history?

New Brendan Eich just dropped

If he does end up in The Hague, the IDF raid to free him will turn out to have been conducted with extensive UK assistance.

From what I understand, it’s slow because along much of the route it uses legacy rights of way with level crossings. Brightline West will have all new grade-separated right of way, which will allow higher speeds.

Is it the case that the US fundamentally can’t do what, say, Spain and South Korea and Algeria have been able to, and that they have been able to do with, say, NASA, the military and numerous private corporate logistics systems, or just that they haven’t done it yet?

Once the US has one working world-class HSR line (probably Brightline West, or possibly CAHSR), the appetite for more lines will increase. HSR will have become something that is common for Americans to ride when not on holiday to Japan or Italian hilltop towns, and reflexively dismissing it as “it wouldn’t work here because we have too much (space/liberty/big cars)” won’t work anymore. New plans will be proposed (a midwest network connecting Chicago to Cleveland and St. Louis?) and old ones (such as the Texas one) dusted off. And the Canadians will notice and jump on the bandwagon (given that a big chunk of their population would be reached by a line from Detroit/Windsor to Quebec City makes it a no-brainer).

The eagles of liberty fly together

It’s a good thing that communist parties are immune to having sexual predators in their ranks.

Needs a few earlier movements, including Art Deco/jazz moderne, Bauhaus and midcentury modern/googie

When you’re Winnie The Pooh, everything looks like a pot of honey

Great news! With this level of control, surely the withering away of the state and the communist utopia prophesied by Marx can’t be far away now!