this is already the case with scrabble; there is a strictly defined scrabble word list that determines whether a word is acceptable or not, and it often leaves out words that you might find in some other dictionary that is not the official scrabble one (collins for most of the world, or a custom dictionary for american scrabble)
Yes I like this one. It’s similar and even more C-like, in that it discriminates between classes, class instances, functions, methods vs constructors, etc. (Cicada does not).
my two favourite works of his are "night watch" and "going postal". it's honestly super impressive that they were written so long after he started to decline and were still so good.
I'm currently in the middle of a complete chronological reread of the discworld books, just finished "thud" and "wintersmith" back to back and while they were definitely weak in places it's amazing how much of his genius still shone through. feeling a little apprehensive about the later books though, I remember some of them being really bad, especially "snuff" :(
Night Watch is definitely as good as the peak 90s City Watch books. Thud had bits of standout quality too. Some of the weaknesses of later books might be less pure weaknesses and more people distinctly remembering the same characters encountering similar characters with a similar message before.
> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.
Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.
As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.
The bit about mammals is wildly off base too. Boom and bust dynamics are built into most animal populations (i.e. red tailed deer in the northeastern US). Pretty much the only examples I can think of that don't experience those cycles live in very isolated environments like caves or have very long lifespans and large parental investment but even then the dynamic is only dampened, not eliminated entirely.
no, i remembered it being a quote from some famous scientist, and googling a bit now I see it was stephen hawking:
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Interesting that he would consider software a new life form. I think our organizations are really the higher life form above Apex humans.
When we have computer systems acting as corporation owners, and we begin to thrive in working for those corporations… That’s really going to change the picture.
perhaps, though also "humans are the plague" is a popular trope in science fiction. e.g. this one is from pratchett, in a conversation between rats in "the amazing maurice and his educated rodents":
You will have worked out that there is a race in this world which steals and kills and spreads disease
and despoils what it cannot use, said the voice of Spider.
'Yes,' said Dangerous Beans. 'That's easy. It's called humanity.'
hilariously, the last time I had a new windows machine and opened up edge to download firefox I got some sort of message about giving edge a proper try first.
I've never used an AI in agent mode (and have no particular plans to), but I do think they're nice for things like "okay, I have moved five fields from this struct into a new struct which I construct in the global setup function. go through and fix all the code that uses those fields". (deciding to move those fields into a new struct is something I do want to be doing myself though, as opposed to saying "refactor this code for me")
I wrote the following and then realized maybe it is just a quirk of the example in the reader that the ‘set’/‘=‘ pair comes at the end of the chain. If so, it is just a unique syntax sugar for a function, I don’t think it is, so I’m leaving my comment as I wrote it letting this act as a caveat:
Although I don’t particularly like the ‘|’ to be used for chaining functions, I certainly know that it has been a long term syntax coming from Unix. My only issue with the ‘|=‘ is that it should be unnecessary. The only reason I can see that the special operator is required is that the ‘set’/‘=‘ syntax pair is a non-functional keyword ‘set’ with an (I think) overloaded keyword ‘=‘. If the equal sign was an ordinary function (i.e. a function that take a value, and an identifier, associates the value and the identifier, then returns the new value like the Lisps and derived lands) it could just be used arbitrarily in chains of functions.
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