The British lacking the military strength and will is different from how the tactic would have been had it been executed fully. Ignoring one's views about the founding of America, suppose Britain had executed this war with complete merciless brutality and fielded its entire Imperial might and militarily crushed the rebels thoroughly. Do you think America would have existed then?

If the "Zero Blast-N-Peen" company operating out of "Hooker Circle" with the robot logo showed up in a Fallout game, it would be criticized as too over the top - breaks the immersion too much since it's so absurd.

I wonder how many of these were essentially 1-person consulting LLC's - which meant a probably higher degree of "whimsy", "sarcasm", or "whit" when naming... (and/or a little counter-culture rebelliousness thrown in where possible)

The Dunwich Building could use some fun business cards to lighten the mood.

AI watermarks feel like they're approaching the problem from the wrong side - no matter what it will be possible to remove the watermark (Via manual rewriting, local LLLMs, etc). Instead it seems like we need "proof of human creation". And the only way I see that being possible is hardware-attested proof of keypresses. Which obviously has huge privacy implications, but how else would you actually know that a piece of content was produced by a human pressing keys on a keyboard? The proof would also need to include timestamps for the keypresses, so tell if someone is just copying from another window.

That sounds like an interesting idea, but I think there's always weird edge cases. Like what if I pressed the keys to write an essay that was actually generated by an LLM. It would be hardware-attested, but I just transcribed most of my sentences from an LLM and maybe I even introduce my own typos or sentences because I am half-assing the transcription.

> Like what if I pressed the keys to write an essay that was actually generated by an LLM. It would be hardware-attested, but I just transcribed most of my sentences from an LLM and maybe I even introduce my own typos or sentences because I am half-assing the transcription.

This is what's known as the "analogue loophole" and it's why DRM and the related "attest, strongly, at every link" schemes are ultimately destined to fail.

Lots of people suggesting we need some sort of cryptographic signature that is unique and unforgeable from every camera; it's the only way to _know_ that something wasn't generated with an LLM!

Just point the camera at a sufficiently high-resolution monitor...

You could do that, but a real human doesn't just type things out in one straight shot (modulo typos that are fixed "in-line"). There's going to be editing, pauses, copy-pasting, moving things around, etc. And at worst it puts a cap on how much text you can generate since at minimum it does need to be manually retyped.

There is no need for proof of human creation. That is entirely pointless and irrational. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

Very disturbing comment and not something you should joke about, especially number 3.

Ewing Theory, but for trillion dollar corporations.

I just read this one. The other thing that's going on is that Stephen has a secret mission that requires him to be put on shore in France, so he wants to do that during a new moon. The question is Stephen's adorable way of "encrypting" that question so as not to reveal the mission to the rest of the crew.

Imagine that you were in a big meeting and you wanted an excuse to leave, so you whispered to your co-worker "Do you think my phone can receive messages in this room?" And he replied "Phones are the foundation of modern telecommunication infrastructure and we're in a large city, I assure you that you will promptly receive any messages that are sent to you."

I think it's a mistake to dismiss them just for that reason. He's been dead for 26 years, and you can get the books second-hand, so it's easy to acquire them while ensuring no money goes to him or his estate if that's what you're worried about. They're an absolutely fantastic set of novels, full of joy and adventure and excitement and humor and astonishing erudition.. Tom Stoppard admired him (as mentioned in the article) and Thomas Pynchon even wrote him into a brief scene in Mason & Dixon.

If I can find more media than I could ever possibly consume that a) I'll love to death, b) has a fan community who loves it with me, and c) is written by authors I don't viscerally reject, why would I ever compromise on those?

Vanishingly few works are so good, so life altering, that I'd need to set aside my qualms with the author to read them. Like, I'm sure master and commander is a fine series of books. I'm sure it's many people's favorite series. There's no lack of historical fiction out there though. And more of it is being written every day. It's not dismissing the work, but it's more like making it a low priority. Once I've consumed all the high priority media ahead of it, I'll read it, it's just.... the amount of high priority media is effectively infinite.

None of his personal failures leak through into his books. It's not like reading someone who injects their abhorrent philosophy or ideology into their book and you're worried it will rub off on you. Imagine if you found out tomorrow that the author of your favorite book ever was an awful person - I don't see why that would change how you feel about the book.

Anyway - yes there is a ton of content out there, more than enough for 100 lifetimes. If you have two hours and eighteen minutes the movie Master And Command: Far Side of the World does the source material good justice and is an excellent film in its own right. It's quite true to the books so it is probably a good predictor of whether you'd enjoy the books.

>c) is written by authors I don't viscerally reject, why would I ever compromise on those?

just curious, but how much research do you put into the background of any author to determine if their moral status matches with your requirements?

The issue is that most "hello world" programs are not correct.

While most hello worlds do not check that the message was printed (which I assume writeStreamingAll does for you), dismissing the rest of the differences as "the others aren't correct" isn't really accurate.

Explicitly passing IO in is a fine design choice, but it's not a correctness issue to say others are wrong to not do so.

>While most hello worlds do not check that the message was printed

Should they?

Really depends on what a hello world is meant to be a simplification of.

If hello world is meant to be a simplification of printing large amounts of text to a buffered standard out? Then yes, it probably should be checking errors.

If hello world is meant to be a simplification of low-volume debug logging to prove that code was reached (aka, printf debugging), then the simple alternative hello world using std.debug.print is what you want.

For such debug prints, you don't want any buffering, you don't want it mixed in with stdout (despite the name, stderr is not just for error messages), and you don't really need to check for errors. And std.debug.print does not return errors.

Also, it's easy to make a C program return the number of characters printed and doesn't hurt readability:

    #include <stdio.h>
    int main(void)
    {
        return printf("hello, world\n");
    }

Not sure about op but if I post here from my phone I get those. Example: “quoted string”

huh interesting, I've never realized this, is it iOS or android?

It’s a macOS thing too. I turn it off because it burns me when copying code

iOS

That’s a common trope I see in “old” books (most recently for me in _Old Mortality_) that I can’t recall ever seeing in modern ones - deliberately obscured words intended to convey a notion of realism without naming an actual place or person. I guess it’s the 555 phone number of old books.