I always wondered if it would be feasible to make the headlights produce polarized light (e.g. vertical), and have windscreens filter out that polarization... I guess it would only work if the scattering of light off of whatever is being illuminated sufficiently depolarizes the light. Anyhow, I thought it was a neat idea when I was a teenager.

There might be some issues with retro fitting the world's existing road vehicle fleet, but that's a deployment detail. :p

If you polarized the light and windshield to 45° off vertical, opposite direction traffic would have their windshield at 90° to your light…

This might cause issues with polarised sunglasses

I guess Scumbag College's University Challenge performance must have edged them out.

Funny to see Emacs with a Y for small... one of the humorous expansions of "Emacs" I once read was, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping", alluding to how bloated it was perceived to be.

I was also surprised by “This site […] usually loads in just a few hundred KB”, because “a few hundred KB” is a lot of text. :)

There's not really a standard definition of an AI PC, but if there's anything beyond marketing, it would take the form of a neural processing unit, which supposedly makes some AI-related task fast by providing hardware acceleration. Cited examples include voice recognition and "training models", although I'm pretty sceptical about the later being at any significant scale.

I suspect what it will actually boil down to in many cases is having recall enabled by default and an always-listening voice assistant.

It's long gone the time people should stop doing business with Oracle.

Exactly.

Much of the discourse around this topic has described ideal testing and deployment practise. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley or investment banks, but for the sorts of companies I work for (telco mostly) things are very far from that ideal.

My view of he industry is one of shocking technical ineptitude from all but a minority of very competent people who actually keep things running... Of management who prioritize short term cost reduction over quality at every opportunity, leading to appalling technical debt and demoralized, over-worked staff who rapidly stop giving a damn about quality, because speaking out about quality problems is penalized.

> the situations in which you need to use it are likely cursed.

So true, and yet so common.

I used to use it on HP-UX in the 90s.

You forgot all the other prompts that ssh might produce before the password prompt (e.g. add new host to known hosts yes/no). There are more possible prompts than most people realize.

This isn't a script that we'd send on an unmanned, inter-planetary, mission. This could be something that can save the tedium of typing password on a daily basis. If it fails, well, we still have a reason to be alive: press ^C.

Darn. If only there were a tool that can interactively answer prompts...

You can skip the new host prompt with ssh -o options.

It /was/ nice and quick. Thanks for putting the demo online. It was quick to tell me complete nonsense. Apparently 7122 is the atomic number of Barium.