Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another week, gone. Life seems to be flying by at an accelerated pace and I’m not fond of it.
I continue my React Native and TypeScript work, at work. I’m refactoring a bit of UI code to be shared in the project. It’s been a good experience. I’m definitely a fish out of water but making progress.
We’ll see what next week brings.
Hope you enjoy the links.
Katie Ledecky left swimming rival Ariarne Titmus in her wicked wake, revving through the La Defense Arena pool waters toward a record ninth Olympic gold medal with another 800-meter freestyle victory Saturday in Paris.
YAY KATIE! 🇺🇸
Jay Famiglietti • The New York Times
The Central Valley of California supplies a quarter of the food on the nation’s dinner tables. But beneath this image of plenty and abundance, a crisis is brewing — an invisible one, under our feet — and it is not limited to California.
One quarter of the food on the nations table. That’s a big deal.
The big challenge moving forward is how do we get enough water to the Central Valley to continue to raise all those fruits and vegetables to feed everyone?
Yet again, we ignore climate change at our own peril.
That’s a great question. Cppreference is correct, and for all class types the answer is simple: The object is initialized on line 1 by having its default constructor called.
But (and you knew a “but” was coming), for a local object of a fundamental built-in type like int, the answer is… more elaborate. And that’s why Sam is asking, because Sam knows that the language has kind of loose about initializing such local objects, for historical reasons that made sense at the time.
Of course Mr. Sutter goes into great depth to explain how the declaration int a; is handled by the C++ compiler (how it’s supposed to be handled according to the standard.)
Remember C is a subset of C++. That was intentionally part of the goal at the time. To get folks to adopt C++ all the C code that had been written needed to continue working.
So, what does that mean for int a; in the question?
It means that declaration doesn’t really initialize a. It just gets whatever value is at that address. Let’s say there was a string represented by the memory now assigned to that declaration and the string began with the letter the ASCII letter ‘a’. Any guess what the value of ‘a’ would be? It would be 97.
In other words, ‘a’ is random.
I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world.
This is surprising in a good way but I wish we didn’t have two competing decentralized protocols for the social web. It’s fine, I suppose, but having Blusky and Mastodon work with each other would be amazing. Threads still hasn’t delivered full integration with Mastodon, but Micro.blog has, WordPress has achieved some integration points, and Ghost is working on theirs. Tumblr would also be a nice addition but it’s now in a “keep the lights on” mode.
More Fediverse integration, not less.
Michael Andretti’s denied attempt to join the Formula 1 grid has been granted a DOJ investigation. American firm Liberty Media, which owns Formula 1 Group, denied Andretti Global’s entry to F1 earlier this year. The denial by F1, following a six-month review of the team’s application, which included a commitment from General Motors, claimed that it didn’t believe Andretti could field a competitive car in the series.
This has been a bit frustrating to watch. I would love to see another American company on the grid and I’d really love to see Guenther Steiner in charge of it! 😃
It would also put an American manufactured power unit on the grid from Cadillac. 👍🏼
Nadine Yousif and Michelle Fleury • BBC News
A US judge has ruled that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on online searches and related advertising.
This is going to ripple throughout the industry. Does Apple lose their $20 billion fee from Google to be the preferred search engine? I guess we’ll find out.
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1[1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
Programming is definitely part science part insanity. I spend my days agonizing over coding choices, bouncing between feeling kind of smart to feeling a complete idiot.
It’s just the way, at least for me. 😃
Hanaa' Tameez • Nieman Journalism Lab
MTV pulled down MTV News in June. After Deadspin was sold, many of its archives temporarily disappeared. This week, Flaming Hydra reported that The Awl’s archives are gone. And those examples are just from the past couple of months; in 2021, the authors of a Reynolds Journalism Institute report found that just 7 out of 24 newsrooms they interviewed were fully preserving their news content.
This is kind of sad, isn’t it? Journalists losing their work because a publication shuts down.
Then we had the recent kerfuffle with TUAW where someone purchased the site and content, ran it through and AI, and republished all the content under the original authors names with different profile pictures. That’s slimy.
It’s no wonder authors are backing up their own work. I certainly would and do. I have 23 years of blog posts.
It’s amusing to see Apple using “please” in their prompts, and politely requesting of the model: “Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.”
This is an interesting piece. Go read how Apple is approaching AI. I love their prompts including words like “please” and “do not hallucinate.” Classic! 🤣
Charlie Savage • The New York Times
A bipartisan American Bar Association task force is calling on lawyers across the country to do more to help protect democracy ahead of the 2024 election, warning in a statement to be delivered Friday at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago that the nation faces a serious threat in “rising authoritarianism.”
If Trump loses in November the country needs to be prepared for all kinds of slimy efforts to take the election for themselves.
I have no clue what they’re going to do, but it’s coming.
Generative AI has very quickly been adopted across various sectors. However, this has led to increased global electricity consumption that is only predicted to increase further as the technology expands, with many tech companies already at risk of defaulting on their net-zero commitments.
This is a new type of arms race between the big players. They have to do it but they’re not going to make money from it for a long time and oh by the way they’re going to strain the crap out of our power grid. Why? Shareholder value. So while your power is out and you’re baking in the heat of summer or the cold of winter they’ll be happily churning out their next iteration of a fancy pachinko game that isn’t really intelligent, it’s just a super fancy decision tree being jammed into everything because AI.
Each and every AI company should be regulated and be required to generate two times the power they consume, at no cost to the consumer, to offset their consumption. Darned digital vampires.
Stephanie Apstein • Sports Illustrated
U.S. Athletes Are Taking Full Advantage of Free Healthcare in Olympic Village
It’s amazing what a country can do for their citizenry, isn’t it? Healthcare for all, I say! Some things need to be done for the good of society. Healthy, educated, people are an amazing thing. It will allow us to invent and solve big problems. It’s good all around, in my opinion.
