Ugh. It's called engineering because in the beginning each university built or bought one computer. That machine was either owned by the mathematics department or the electrical engineering department (for hopefully obvious reasons). Fast forward a few decades and we have the twin disciplines of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

I would argue that they are substantially different in definition, but blurred together in practice.

Computer Science is a science. It is not focused on building things; rather on learning things.

The "dot com boom" and subsequent 25 years had such an employment need that everything turned into "programming means FAANG means I am rich"

Business Data Processing and Management Information Systems is more applicable to a majority of the 'software engineers' today.

Ok I'll say the same thing.

Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).

So you're suggesting that Israel would drop a nuke on a Western country imposing a boycott? Somehow, I doubt it.

Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?

Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.

I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.

and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.

The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say

Why is it likely ? Why not Russia ? I’ve heard it’s Russia ?

Because Epstein had ties to Israel and not to Russia. There might be a similar ring run by Russia as well, who knows.

Epstein definitely had ties to Russia. I don't know how to assess how important those were but they did exist

Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?

I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:

Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.

He has ties to all powerful people as his clients, but he has ties to Israel that look closer to them being his employer.

Without some pretty good evidence, it sounds like conjecture, which is fine, but nothing of substance is being presented here.

Of course. A very valid way to view it, and the same way I would've viewed it in 2016 if you told me there was a global elite pedophile ring that helped get Trump elected.

he's referring to the fact that epstein is a mossad agent and that compromised world leaders are being blackmailed to support the genocide

Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.

Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.

Bad phrasing on my part. That is one of many reasons

This is all covered quite well in the documentary "Blackadder II".

In some ways I'm sympathetic to this: after all I'm trying to make money by being that person who does know stuff. But honestly that capability never seemed to be terribly valued by the people with the money. Anyway, it would be nice to see some examples where AI tools didn't "know" about architecture or intent. My experience has been they know plenty. More than most human developers. They do tend to follow certain fashions, which can be overridden by debate, or by introducing new fashion via skill text. But that's today. Surely these tools are only going to get much better in the next 10-20 years. I'm skeptical there's going to be a line of thinking that "it's smart but doesn't know the things humans know" long term. Whatever it is that we think only humans know today will be learned by the tools tomorrow.

I have the $100 subscription and it pretty much does allow me to endlessly prompt Claude to fix bugs (and other stuff).

There's nothing to prevent people from having a blockchain subject to court jurisdiction. In fact probably all blockchains are anyway, modulo the problem of enforcement.

Live captions on what?

Any audio?

Here's my regular engineer explanation:

TLA+ is a specific kind of formal verification framework for software. The overall idea is that you can "prove" that some software works, rather than the typical "seems like it works" we aim for.

But under the covers, all formal verification schemes are (imho) best viewed as "very fancy testing". There are a few kinds of this fancy testing. TLA+ is the kind that can auto-generate all the relevant test cases for your code (there's more to it than that, but this definition works for now). So now instead of "I wrote a bunch of test cases, all that I could think of, and they pass" you have "I used TLA+ so I know I'm exercising all the possible test cases and they pass".

Here's the problem though: to achieve that trick, you have to write your code in a special language (TLA+). It isn't a tool that can be just pointed at regular production code.

So what you get to "prove" is a translation of your actual code into TLA+ code. It may be possible to auto-translate one to the other (I asked the original author if they did that, but no reply yet). Usually it's a manual process. Therefore you have "proof" but not quite as you know it, because you proved something different than what runs. But still more useful than a wet finger raised into the wind.

For this reason it's typically only used on narrow risky pieces of code (quorum voting is the canonical use case).

This makes sense to me but if I continue with the "fancy testing" analogy it seems like there is no accounting for interactions beyond the system itself: it has perfect unit and integration testing but only for a myopic amount of global state.

I am curious about the limits of what one can expect this language to solve and therefore the types of programs/domains to which it is more/less suited. Why is determining quorum the canonical use case?

> But under the covers, all formal verification schemes are (imho) best viewed as "very fancy testing".

This is misleading. Testing and formal verification are vastly different.