Selling prisoners as underpaid slave labor means everyone else now has to compete against companies using that slave labor. It's essentially cutting us twice. We both pay to house and feed the employees/contractors of the company benefiting who then undercuts us by not bothering to pay them.

Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center. The ramifications of doing so create gross incentives.

>Prisons should not be allowed to be a profit center.

That ship sailed post American Civil-War. We've made it part of our culture. Every prison charges their inmates to be there. Per Diems. It used to be tax payers but... they found out they could double dip.

This is the kind of thing it's relatively viable to address legislatively, and which would be well within the overton window if it were given more attention.

archeologists needing a hand from modern experts reminds me, too, of Janet Stephens.

https://classics.rutgers.edu/the-hair-archaeologist-janet-st...

I assumed they meant using the LLM to extract the citations and then use external tooling to lookup and grab the original paper, at least verifying that it exists, has relevant title, summary and that the authors are correctly cited.

Which is what the people in this new article are doing.

I appreciate linux for the inverse reason. Because everything is either a nice text based config file or a command line tool, scripting changes to settings and automating things is a breeze.

That works for technical folks, but it's also a barrier to Linux adoption when too many things require dropping to a Bash terminal and dorking around. Try getting Grandma or Katie from HR to be able to do that . . .

It's a barrier not because it is hard, but because people are not familiar with it. Ask a non-technical user using the GUI to edit their display settings and they'll be equally flummoxed.

Grandma gets her computer setup by family, Katie probably has tech support or a managed device. I've been setting up Linux for friends and relatives and apart from 1-2 niche issues I didn't even have to do any support because stuff just works.

You’re probably right for grandma or Katie, but CLIs are definitely an issue. I know it because they are an issue even for someone like me. And I’m someone who is fairly techy (heck, we’re on HN) and can read the docs/rtfm. I’m more comfortable flashing a kernel I’ve never heard the name of for the first time, than editing some arcane wayland settings.

Simple example, I wanted to customize my gestures in gnome. I installed another app for it on the recommendation of multiple stack overflow and Reddit threads.

I ended up losing the default gnome gestures, and even disabling the app didn’t help.

I only use my windows (10) ltsc installation now. (Where, fwiw, I do have an absolute *ton* of customization/“ricing” apps for everything from custom ux themes to taskbar tweaks. Amazingly, pretty much everything is stable.)

Grandma, if she is on linux I probably set it up for her and left myself ssh access so I can update/fix it for her. Katie from HR shouldn't touch settings she should file a ticket and wait for the helpdesk monkey or IT to fix it.

Frankly, scripting makes it easier form me to help users: "double click on this when you return home. It will put your computer on the correct wifi, give it a fixed ip address, and poison your hosts file so that stupid NAS works and then setup a guest mount for the two SMB share that are still using SMB 1.0"

a pure function doesn't have side effects. it doesn't read from nonlocal state or trigger distant changes nor perform any manner of io.

a pure function doesn't change its inputs, it simply uses them to craft it's outputs.

bringing in an object or function via parameter to perform these side effects still leaves the function impure.

I agree that a return type and a parameter are quite different things in a specific implementation, but on an abstract level, they are basically the same and there is now reason to distinguish between output parameters and the return value other than due to language syntax.

I don't see how mergeing an input and an output parameter to a single in/out parameter makes any difference, other than making it inconvenient for the caller to keep the old state around, which is often what you want. The fact that the callee than can derive the new state from the old state by only specifying the changed values does not fundamentally change anything and is only convenient for the implementation.

closures and objects with a single invoke() method have been considered equivalent in many views for some time.

Exactly, that's why I disagree with parent's comment:

> If there's anything that is not an object, it's a function!

Functions aren't closures. To be a closure it needs to be a function paired with an environment. Functions do not inherently carry their environment with them.

It would be fantastic if it were possible to dictate a headlight height for standard lights. just because your SUV is twelve feet off the ground doesn't mean the lights need to be positioned there.

you can already do whatever you want to the steam deck. it's just linux with a readonly base that gets atomically updated. but you can rip it out and do whatever. it's your hardware.

when I program, I am visualizing the machine I am building in my head. some language semantics are cleaner than others, allowing the bits and pieces to flow together more naturally, composing in elegant ways that do not require pointless effort be spent manually wrangling footguns and minutia.

It can be quite useful to have nondestructive sorting in imperative languages as well. Hence python introducing 'sorted' even though '.sort()' preceded it.