If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”.
Do rockets count as artillery science? The first rockets basically served the same purpose as artillery, and were operated by the same army groups. The innovation was to attach the propellant to the explosive charge and have it explode gradually rather than suddenly. Even the shape of a rocket is a refinement of the shape of an artillery shell.
Verne wasn’t able to imagine artillery without the cannon barrel, but I’d argue he was right. It was basically “artillery science” that got humankind to the moon. The first “rocket artillery” were the V1 and V2 bombs. You could probably argue that the V1 wasn’t really artillery, and that’s fair, but also it wasn’t what the moon missions were based on. The moon missions were a refinement of the V2, which was a warhead delivered by launching something on a ballistic path.
As for generative AI, it doesn’t have zero fidelity, it just has relatively low fidelity. What makes that worse is that it’s trained to sound extremely confident, so people trust it when they shouldn’t.
Personally, I think it will take a very long time, if ever, before we get to the stage where “vibe coding” actually works well. OTOH, a more reasonable goal is a GenAI tool that you basically treat as an intern. You don’t trust it, you expect it to do bone-headed things frequently, but sometimes it can do grunt work for you. As long as you carefully check over its work, it might save you some time/effort. But, I’m not sure if that can be done at a price that makes sense. So far the GenAI companies are setting fire to money in the hope that there will eventually be a workable business model.
If you use it basically like you’d use an intern or junior dev, it could be useful.
You wouldn’t allow them to check anything in themselves. You wouldn’t trust anything they did without carefully reading it over. You’d have to expect that they’d occasionally completely misunderstand the request. You’d treat them as someone completely lacking in common sense.
If, with all those caveats, you can get this assistance for free or nearly free, it might be worth it. But, right now, all the AI companies are basically setting money on fire to try to drive demand. If people had to pay enough that the AI companies were able to break even, it might be so expensive it was no longer worth it.
The special area of “Etc” is used for some administrative zones, particularly for “Etc/UTC” which represents Coordinated Universal Time. In order to conform with the POSIX style, those zone names beginning with “Etc/GMT” have their sign reversed from the standard ISO 8601 convention. In the “Etc” area, zones west of GMT have a positive sign and those east have a negative sign in their name (e.g “Etc/GMT-14” is 14 hours ahead of GMT).
I still can’t get over that his policies are the result of what he watches on TV. I’m not talking about his watching the Sunday morning political shows. I’m talking fictional movies in prime time that result in new US policies.
At 9pm on Saturday WLRN aired “Escape from Alcatraz”. On Sunday another Trump policy was announced: he was re-opening Alcatraz prison.
This is at least the second time that people have figured out what Trump was watching on TV to cause him to issue a new crazy edict.
That’s not something that can be solved by changing interest rates. To increase wages you need unions and for those unions to go on strike.
I agree. When the heroes are vigilantes, they’re only acting as vigilantes because either the police are corrupt, or the police are overwhelmed.
I am not a Batman fan, and love to joke that if he and the other Gotham billionaires paid a reasonable tax, Gotham wouldn’t be such a hellscape. But, the Batman theme is that the police are frequently corrupt and always overwhelmed, so a civilian needs to step up and protect the people.
Spiderman’s whole deal is “with great power comes great responsibility.” He puts his life on the line to protect people, and mostly from small-scale disasters like a run-away train.
What this comic gets absolutely wrong is that comic book heroes never try to stop someone from changing the status quo if they’re doing it peacefully. The only ones they try to stop are the ones trying to do it by force. And mostly the change they’re trying to make is to bring literal Nazis back to power. I think most sane people would have preferred status quo to Nazi takeover, though obviously the USA is getting there on its own without supervillains today.
Also, often, the status quo they’re trying to preserve is “Earth is not being invaded by aliens”, or “this supervillain is not currently on a rampage”.
As for movies about changing the status quo, that’s really what the whole X-Men comic has been about since it came out in the 1960s. The whole theme there is “mutants aren’t accepted by society, but they want to be, so they put their lives on the line to try to prove mutants are good”. Over the years mutants have stood in for jews, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, etc.
Sometimes the X-Men are fighting off supervillains or aliens. But, often they’re fighting off an oppressive government that is trying to wipe them out. So, the status quo they’re trying to change is “the people hate mutants and the government wants to wipe them out”.
Yeah. You’d think that terrorism would at least require… terror? The supervillains in superhero movies do make people feel scared (though apparently not scared enough to actually move out of NYC despite it being destroyed on a regular basis). But, the heroes don’t make them scared at all. The superheroes make them feel safer.
I don’t remember what did it for me, I switched a while ago. But, I do clearly remember one time when I had the kind of moulded earphones that go really deep in your ear, and I caught the cable on something, and they got yanked out of my ears. That was pretty painful.
Why are you so deep in your own bubble that you don’t believe that someone could simply prefer wireless? If that’s the case, you should get out more, meet more people, expand your horizons.
Ooh, BUUURN! BUUUUUUUUUURN!!!
I’ve never lost one in at least a decade of using them. But, I don’t use the kind that just balance on the edge of your ear.
Wireless means you plug it in occasionally, maybe once a week.
If you don’t value the convenience of wireless headphones, that’s great for you. For a lot of people, the cable is a real pain in the ass. It gets tangled up when it’s off. It gets caught up on things when it’s on, etc.
If you’re listening to podcasts or music, latency doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, it’s a risk. But, there’s also a risk of getting your wired earbuds cord caught on something. I’ve had that happen and it yanked the phone off the table and sent it crashing to the floor. I’ve also had the buds get yanked out of my ears multiple times.
If I lived somewhere where winters were mild, I might still use wired headphones. When you only have to worry about a t-shirt or something managing the cord isn’t too bad. But, when you have to manage a hat, scarf, coat, etc. there are just too many things to get in the way of the cord.
I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.