> lines a consistent thickness

A "ruling pen" would help. It's like a fountain pen where you can adjust the width of the ink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruling_pen

One shudders to think of the difficulties of launching and landing space vehicles on these balloon-supported platforms.

At least two...

To put it simply, nobody wants to watch AI slop. This should be obvious!

That might be obvious, but when a significant number of people don't pay enough attention to know something is AI, or simply watch it anyway and then scroll onto the next clip, so it keeps them engaged rather than bouncing them off the platform, it's still doing it's job of retaining attention to push more ads.

Most people I know will claim to not like AI, but they happily continue to scroll their Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok feed that's full of it. Until they delete the app in protest and go read a book, little will change.

I'd say I'm pretty attuned to detecting AI content and I was fooled a few times at inattentive moments. I imagine a lot of people fare worse, assuming they even truly mind whether it's AI or not.

That's why they always teach: "never compare floats for equality."

Or maybe they don't teach that anymore, I dunno.

See link for the Fundamental Axiom of Floating Point Arithmetic: All floating point arithmetic operations are exact up to a relative error of epsilon_machine.

https://www.johnbcoughlin.com/posts/floating-point-axiom/

I certainly teach that. When we work problems involving money, I always recommend students use integers for cents and only convert to dollars and cents when they have to print them.

On the other hand, if you store a small integer in a float it is generally reliable to compare to it. E.g., setting a float to zero and comparing whether the float is zero.

There is still hope for a compiler book. From Knuth's website:

> And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

I don't think there is hope if you look at actuarial tables and Knuth's age. It's not clear to me if he'll be able to finish volume 4. The outline he has seems to have enough material to fill volumes 4C-4G to my eyes, and he isn't exactly cranking out the volumes.

Admittedly, volumes 5-7 wouldn't be as massive as volume 4 (it sort of turns out that almost all interesting algorithms ends up being categorized as being in volume 4), so you probably wouldn't have a half-dozen subvolumes per topic but, it's still too many books down the line, especially if he plans to revise volumes 1-3 before working on anything else.

Have no fear, we'll just train an LLM on TAOCP and have it automatically generate the remaining volumes‽

I hope that God is indeed willing, but the man is 88 years old and he’s not done with the third tome of volume four. It would require a minor miracle for him to finish volume 7 within this lifetime.

I really hope he ends up completing the whole series. I started volume one recently and it is excellent

Neither does python, yet here we are.

It isn't a language to do golf programming, indeed.

Coincidentally, I did a search for "honda generator." One of the sponsored results was a scam posing as a different company!

https://imgur.com/a/3ydKHZe

First they came for the stochastic parrots, but I said nothing, because I'm not a stochastic parrot.

( /s )

> AI agents will soon be processing payroll, placing orders, paying suppliers, creating policies, sending out contracts, creating marketing materials, answering customer questions, analyzing profitability, filling out compliance forms, reconciling accounts and posting on social media.

Dystopian fantasy.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.