If you think programming in Win16 (or whatever we want to call it), you should try teaching people to do it. I worked as a commercial trainer on C and Windows way back when - C and the Windows API were no bed of roses, but the different memory models were mind-numbing for us tutors and the poor punters, many of whom didn't know C!
Well, most of the addressing modes of the Z80 used a 16-bit register pair (i.e. 0 to 64K-1 bytes) to address, the 6502 used a somewhat stranger set of addressing modes, but once again you could address 0 to 64K-1 bytes.
I think what they mean is that this sort of competition makes sense because it's about humans competing against each other, so that, even if we could have LLMs do it, the human version is still what captures our interest. In a similar way, we don't look at chess tournaments with computers playing against each others, but we look at chess grandmaster challenging each other. Even if it has been decades now that computers can beat grandmaster.
Badly designed things get replaced. For example unique_ptr replaced auto_ptr. I'm not sure if the language standard actually supports the term "deprecation" though.
Edit: Also not sure what can possibly be downvoted here.
ISO/IEC 14882 contains many uses of the word "deprecation", including all the sections of Appendix D that explicitly lists all of the deprecated and removed features of the language and library.
Well, if this is supposed to be something like C++, and if "new" is dynamically allocating memory, then simply don't do that - this kind of thing has been solved years ago.
> but the notes have the most beautiful verses in the history of literature, even more beautiful, far more beautiful than the poem.
An example, perhaps?
I've always found the poem full of beautiful things (makes you wish Nabokov wrote more poetry), and the commentary by Kinbote full of mad, hilarious nonsense. But each to his own, I suppose.
a pleasure! like i said, my first reading echoes yours and most others. my second reading echoes Nabokov's derisive snort towards the first. all the same, both deal with the dual-ity of objective/subjective, both within the poem (real/reflection) and without (canonical/interpretation). here abridged, Nabokov reveals the temporal dysphoria embodied by King Kinbote and his wife Queen Disa, as well as the self-hatred of gender dysphoria culminating into self-realization and the most delicate expression of self-compassion:
There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after the first bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes.
I am thinking of lines in which Shade describes his wife. Sixty-year-old Shade is lending here a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Disa at thirty bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet. Actually it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace, it represented a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
The heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends. Worries assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her.
The dream was a constant refutation of his not loving her.
this is the greatest verse in the history of literature. the greatest of sensibilities expressed in any form. it presents Kinbote as self-evident reality (simulacrum), not Professor V. Botkin's nor Nabokov's delusion, that allows Shade to paint Disa from Sybil. the same Kinbotes serenading Disas by a hospice bedside, by a photograph, by a mirror, by a grave. i switched the order for effect, as the last bit about self-compassion is a genius dual negative sleight of hand. the bit about writing poems echoes an interview with Robert Frost (whose symbolist poetry Shade reflects and Kinbote subverts): "If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything." here is some mad, hilarious nonsense from Kimbote lampooning Eystein's trompe l'oeil replacing a painting with what was painted:
Eystein had resorted to a weird form of trickery: he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. This device had something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein's talent, but the basic fact that "reality" is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.
the notes are far more beautiful than the poem for the fact that replacing Disa with Sybil is replacing a painting with what was painted, where Disa is the "plain unretouched likeness" of Shades' painting, and without Kinbote's mad, hilarious nonsense the poem is a mere "idealized and stylized picture." without Kinbote, Shade merely licks the symbols of Frost on the windowpane. because Kinbote is the Shadow of the symbol slain, uniting the viewer and the view.
imagine subverting the greatest symbolist poet with the invention of postmodern simulacrum before it was cool.
Bonus:
The shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.
I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
I spent years reading a little in bed before falling asleep and I wish I had never started doing that. I've conditioned myself that reading leads to sleep and now it's very difficult for me to read for long because a few pages in I start to feel sleepy.
Same, but I don't think it's the conditioning itself, it's just being comfortable. I can't watch/listen to a video of a presentation either and struggle sitting in at presentations.
how scary is the decay of cognition? i'm 29 and i already noticed the amount of energy i had on my early 20s on everything, stamina to read, watch movies, exercise, recover from the exercise etc. compared to what i have now. guess it's a slow downhill till i mature to old age but still. shit. i hate the linear time
It's important to factor in lifestyle factors here.
By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
The famous JAMA cohort study[0] of 120k people showed some 5x difference in all cause mortality and morbidity between sedentary and highly active individuals, showing effectively no upper bound.
The NHANES study[1] is another one that showed huge jumps in slowed aging with proportionally (to calories) increased fiber consumption.
There's a lot of these. I recommend Dr Michael Greger for a lot of them summarized. He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet), but he references and cites every statement he makes and is generally a very good communicator.
There is a YouTube channel called Viva Longevity! that invites research authors and generally presents longevity/health information in a way that is very thorough and sincere.
> He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet) […]
A large contributor towards leaning towards plants (or awareness thereof) was probably Michael Pollan with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." tagline:
43, I've never felt better or smarter, the wisdom vs intelligence ratio is real, and you learn to take better care of yourself over time. I am definitely old, but it's less in the brain than I would have expected when I was younger.
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
I'm in my mid 30s and I already feel the time contraction. I have noticed that weeks are going by incredibly quickly, and months and years have started to feel like they slip by faster and faster. I live a fairly busy life, and I enjoy it, so I am not walking around with regrets, but it is concerning sometimes that it seems like an entire season has gone by without me really realizing it.
My understanding is that the median point in most people's subjective experience of life is in the late teens to early 20s. The cruel irony of retirement at the end of life is that it's effectively one long summer afternoon when you're a child, in terms of subjective experience.
I think you have to give yourself the grace of realizing it's research. Nobody comes into the world with a manual, and even people with great intuition in taking care of themselves run into unexpected challenges
I find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.
> I don't even like to think about setting up a project or dev environment.
That's a strong burnout indicator/symptom (or maybe you just don't enjoy it anymore), not necessarily something age related.
In fact plenty of people seem to fill their days with more work as they get older, where their younger selves would have chosen to do as little as possible.
My experience dating someone younger. She was still in college and I was already working full time. I noticed that if we stayed late night on the weekend, she would make the sleep back during the week, may be in short spans, here and there. But once you work full time, you cannot. At work, you have be up and ready all day. So you carry a sleep debt for a long time. Once, she started working full time, she was as tired as me.
It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s).
What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.
I'm not the OP and I imagine all cases are different, but my dad was a software developer who had early cognitive decline in his 60s (he died of vascular dementia recently) and he used to talk about it a lot. He said it was like his tolerance for complexity kept closing in.
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.
> the usage of Nabokov's book as a demo for hypertext
I get what you are saying, but should just point out that the Kindle version of the Penguin edition provides hypertext links from the poem to the deranged narrator's commentary. I remember reading a paper edition sometime back when, and being able to flip via hypertext is definitely superior to paper page flipping. And I'm someone that loves paper books.
This is a truly amazing and very, very funny book. If you haven't read it, you are really missing out.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite experience with flipping vs linking when it comes to books like _Pale Fire_. It's a lot more difficult for me to read the end notes on kindle, especially when it cross references more than one other end notes. Just couldn't keep my head straight as where I had been already. I had to buy a paper copy of _Pale Fire_ after fidgeting on my kindle (which I usually prefer) for a while, and I just kept two bookmarks (one in the poem section, one in the end notes section), and find other end notes ad hoc. The physicality of the pages helped me navigate back and forth.
I think hypertext is best for things like Pale Fire, where the linked text is long (it is a novel, after all), but I must admit that I like paper footnotes are good for things like the SF novels of Jack Vance, so you stay on (more or less) the same page, and you can ignore (or even re-imagine them) if you like.
It's one of my favorites. But I prefer to reread with two bookmarks, just as I did when I first encountered it (and just as I did with Infinite Jest years later).
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