> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.

You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.

It's even more absurd now when the big AI companies train their LLMs on torrented books.

Don't you know that it's okay to steal IP (and skirt laws in general) when you're a big company with lots of money?

One torrent is a crime, breaking all the laws by downloading terabytes of books and processing them is a trillion dollar business.

The torrenting was the only thing they were found to have done wrong, which makes sense.

Imho the problem is the fixation on parser generators and BNF. It's just a lot easier to write a recursive descent parser than to figure out the correct BNF for anything other than a toy language with horrible syntax.

Imo BNF (or some other formal notation) is quite useful for defining your syntax, my biggest gripe with BNF in particular is the way it handles operator precedence (through nested recursive expressions), which can get messy quite fast.

Pratt parsers dont even use this recursion, they only have a concept of 'binding strength', which means in laymans terms that if I'm parsing the left side of say a '' expression, and I managed to parse something a binary subexpression, and the next token I'm looking at is another binary op, do I continue parsing that subexpression, which will be the RHS of the '' expression, or do I finish my original expression which will then be the LHS of the new one?

It represents this through the concept of stickiness, with onesimple rule - the subexpression always sticks to the operator that's more sticky.

This is both quite easy to imagine, and easy to encode, as stickiness is just a number.

I think a simpler most straightforward notation that incorporates precedence would be better.

I would argue the opposite: Being describable in BNF is exactly the hallmark of sensible syntax in a language, and of a language easily amenable to recursive descent parsing. Wirth routinely published (E)BNF for the languages he designed.

The problem with recursive descent parsers is that they don't restrict you into using simple grammars.

But then, pushing regular languages theory into the curriculum, just to rush over it so you can use them for parsing is way worse.

> But then, pushing regular languages theory into the curriculum, just to rush over it so you can use them for parsing is way worse.

At least in the typical curriculum of German universities, the students already know the whole theory of regular languages from their Theoretical Computer Science lectures quite well, thus in a compiler lecture, the lecturer can indeed rush over this topic because it is just a repetition.

> make each unit responsible for detecting its own faults and shutting up if it can't guarantee correctness

Does this mean you have to trust the already compromised system?

For errors due to radiation the probability is extremely low, since it would need to flip the same bit at the same time in two different places.

Then why 8 instead of 3?

8 is 2 to the power of 3

How do you know that op doesn't know what he is talking about?

I have written code for real time distributed systems in industrial applications. It runs since years 24/7 and there never was a failure in production.

I also think nasa is full of shit.

Well for one, if you follow their profile and a few more clicks, you get to their resume, and while it's an impressive one and I'm sure they know a lot of shit I don't, what's notably missing is anything even remotely close to Aerospace, rocketry, guidance systems, positioning, etc.

For another, if an engineer has an axe to grind with a public facing project, I would expect them to just grind the thing, not echo a bunch of the same lame and stale talking points every layperson does (bureaucracy bad, government bad, old tech, etc.). I'm not saying NASA in general and Artemis in particular are flawless, I'm just saying if you're going to criticize it, let's hear it. Otherwise you just sound like another contrarian trying to get attention, like a 14 year old boy saying Hitler had some good points.

We have a lot more software developers than 50 years ago and intelligence is still normally distributed.

What’s your point?

The average coder in the 1970s was a lot smarter than today. Think about the people who would be interested to start a career in this field at that time.

Oh I see what you mean. I agree 100%

I think people mean so many different things when talking about agile. I'm pretty sure a small team of experts is a good fit for critical systems.

A fixed amount of meetings every day/week/month to appease management and rushing to pile features into buggy software will do more harm than good.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

I'm not sure you really understood my comment. A large portion of the kind of value I'm talking about comes from attempting the hard thing. If these chickens do not hatch that will be tragic, but we will still have learned something from it. In some ways, we will have learned even more, by getting taught about what we don't know.

Anyway, let's all hope for a safe landing tonight.

It depends on by what metric you define what is optimal.

For the health system or public transport the nash equilibrium of offer and demand is not what feels optimal to most people.

For manufacturing s.th. like screws, nails or hammers; I really can't see what should be wrong with it.