Interesting how this post coincides with the Leyden declaration in mathematics: both documents are abot
how human-human trust ("in good faith") is eroded by
large language models, because a substantially-sized
artifact does not necessarily attest to substantial
human effort and skills.
Good point about how the community of mathematicians is struggling to come to terms with the role of language models in their work, and the similarity with the community of software developers. Machine-generated programs and proofs are contributing real value, undeniably, but it's causing social tension and destablizing the community with the sheer volume of its production, the varying quality, unreliability, and lack of humanity in the process. I would guess that similar issues will spread throughout society, in other areas of collective work and living. One potential solution, like with Ladybird and some other open source projects, is for a community to become more exclusive, restrictive and selective about what inputs they accept.
To spend nine pages full of mathematical formulae just to write a single letter (more) nicely shows the rigor/perfectionism/OCD that is the hallmark of Donald Ervin Knuth.
Thanks for giving us beautiful layout and better-looking fonts.
Every time I write a new paper when I press "compile" in Overleaf I'm greatful that he made our work more beautiful, and it motivates me to make the content matter, too.
I fear we'll never see another Donald Knuth... even if there were somebody else like him (and maybe there isn't!), there'd be nowhere for him to go in today's world.
Hate to be that guy, but if that's your problem just hand them an iPad or a Chromebook. Unsatisfying, I know, but it's not like my mom is Mrs. Roberts.
No one should be running Win9x for anything connected to the internet. Ever, full stop.
The only reason to touch it is for a dedicated retro gaming setup or (completely airgapped) for some industrial tool with drivers/software provided by a company that has been defunct for 25+ years.
Maybe not viruses much any more, but definitely worms. (And also some automated malicious servers scattered about the Internet that pull lists of devices with certain ports open from Shodan et al, and then repeatedly attempt to attack/penetrate whatever's on those lists.)
There are several videos available on YouTube, of someone connecting a Win9x/2K/XP machine to the modern Internet, waiting just a few minutes, and then observing (through Process Explorer) the silent introduction of various payloads onto the system.
You didn't have a router with dialup, or early DSL, where the modem was a separate device. You'd often get publicly routable IPv4s in your university dorm, too. See also napster. :-)
Probably not many instances of code infecting that way, as most boxes running an OS that old should be well firewalled by now so the virus type infections will have died out.
You occasionally still see probes for Win95/98 era vulnerabilities though, presumably because there are a surprising amount of systems still running those versions and the cost of a probe in case one is accidentally open to the public network. Or as an attacker if you've already got into a private subnet, finding such hosts might be worth it as an extra place to put a reverse tunnel to aid getting back in later if your main route is closed off.
Metasploit has options to check for these systems and, given the appropriate checkbox, will happily support old Windows systems. So often you'll find support for these system even in modern malware - a tell (amongst many others) that Metasploit was used in their creation.
I started with HP-UX 9.03 on a PA-RISC-powered 715-75 (to
use Emacs, our whole research group logged into the 735 server to edit there, which was faster than running it locally).
Any unclean pointer fiddling in C, and the process was terminated by the OS, so the machine was wonderful to use as a development box (especially with Purify installed) for software that would later be run on Windows or Linux.
I eventually bought my own refurbished (and using academic discount) 715 (instead of a car), so I had the fastest machine in our student dorm of anyone I knew, undergrad, grad student or professor. I could just write my Master's thesis when everyone else kept re-installing Windows - the HP never crashed in 6.5 years, which has left me with deep respect for the old-schol (pre-Compaq) HP engineers. The machine (21" color CRT) occupied half of my 9 square metre dorm room, but it also kept me warm.
It's suprising at first look that GEM tops my preferences
but I recall having a very fond time on the Atari ST 520+.
It had one of the best b/w monitors and TOS+GEM was orderly and uncluttered.
Only preemptive multitasking and per-window menus were missing. As a plus, the OS was in ROM, so boot times were <1s.
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