ChatGPT's threat to Google isn't that Google can't match it--it's that it changes the approach to search results from displaying lists of results where it's "natural" to insert sponsored listings to a more conversational approach where ad opportunities will be rarer (or at least entirely different).

If users prefer the newer, interactive approach to exploring search results, Google's long-standing business model will require a significant update.

In my mind you might as well place sponsored content into a conversation and hide it maybe even better than in search results as a list.

Product placement.

This has caused me to realize that I need to replace my old model of vi:

> command mode has primacy; insert mode is a time-bounded special case

with:

> insert mode is every other mundane editor; use the Esc key to enter the matrix (i.e. command mode)

> Command mode

I think you mean normal mode.

By definition, each program only produces the digits of one number. It's okay for more than one program to produce the same number. Am I misunderstanding your point?

I didn’t realize the initial state of the tape was part of the definition of a Turing machine. I was picturing having the same operations applied to different tapes, but that’s not the definition so I’m wrong.

I _do_ work at Microsoft, and judging by the recent crop of promotions (early September) there was still plenty of opportunity for white males (and everyone else).

(That was the joke.)

Still worth linking because that is quite an obscure reference.

I think the TLA you were looking for is TRA?

Is this a totally different thing than Dr. Fill [1]?

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/american-crossword-puzz...

It is. The results section indicate that BCS performs better than Dr. Fill by a significant amount.

I'm curious how well this performs on the New York Times Thursday puzzles, and specifically whether or not it can handle rebus answers where multiple letters can exist in a single square.

Or something like November 26, 2020, with what is kind of an anti-rebus and letters that span more than one cell, or January 27, 2022 with musical notation for repeated letters in a word, or February 7, 2019 which involved writing outside the puzzle grid.

Thursdays can sometimes hurt my head.

Stephen Wolfram has really grown on me over the last 10 years or so. He came across as obnoxiously arrogant for the longest time (so much that I still (defensibly) refer to "A New Kind of Science" as "Stephen Wolfram is a MF'n Genius Even If He Does Say So Himself").

These days, he live streams Mathematica design reviews on YouTube and Twitch. The conversations are fairly balanced and he clearly has a decent eye for designing the best god damn computational notebook system on the planet.

Admittedly, campaigning to name what could possibly maybe someday be the next big upgrade to physics after himself ("the Wolfram Physics Project") while he's still around and it's still in development is MIGHTY BOLD. But there's some really really interesting outcomes from the work that they've done so far.

If nothing else, it's a slam dunk proof of how physicists already think of "the speed of light" as actually "the speed limit for causal interaction". You essentially get all of the implications of both special and general relativity out of modeling causal interactions without even attaching it to any sort of specific physics.

I love that he wrote this essay (typical Wolfram long form essay that takes multiple sittings for me to digest) using puzzles and games as the subject of aforementioned causal modeling. Super fun, and also insightful!

As terrible as rescinding offers is, offering severance and job placement assistance is a very interesting approach to minimizing how terrible.

They're offering resume reviews and interview coaching to people who have passed through their entire interview pipeline. I don't see the point.

VS Code, while not a fully-fledged IDE, is really good at suggesting code completions across platforms. As others have mentioned, Rider is also a wonderful fully cross-platform IDE (better than Visual Studio at some things).