I'm not sure the man is capable of reflection. I think all we can say is that he's reliably unpredictable. Perhaps he will do something different this term.

That's really interesting to read. I'm a man who has absolutely zero interest in interacting with babies and infants, but kids who can talk and ask questions can be pretty funny and cute even. My wife doesn't understand this at all.

I was the same way before having my own children. Then a switch flipped.

100% same.

And I was 51.

Yes, and without understanding how it works, I'm left wondering whether it's even safe to use this way. Will creduce execute mutated versions of the input script, potentially deleting my files or eating my lunch?

it will execute whatever script you pass it (immutable) and mutate whatever other files you pass it

I think the question is, how do you know C-reduce isn't going to mutate your test case into calling `remove("/path/to/my/important/file");`

Yeah but you could have a shell script that does

    rm -rf /foo/bar

and in theory it could reduce it to

    rm -rf /

The passes are very heuristic, so that doesn't seem like something you can rule out.

(and I actually want to run it on shell scripts! )

While I've used c-reduce before, I've never done it in a way where it could be destructive. However speculating based on what I do know. I think the 2 things I would do would be in the interesting-ness test, grep for already known harmful instructions and force them to be uninteresting (returning 1). And then if I was still unsure of the potential harm of the program and I had to run it to determine if it's interesting or not (segfault or something similar). I think I would hoist the binary/script into a docker container and run it there. That way the log and result can still be checked, but it's access to actual file system is minimized as much as possible.

TLDR; C-Reduce just gives you text to run/compile, if you're worried about things like that sandbox as much as possible.

So just run it inside of a Docker instance.

> people wouldn’tve been doing it if it hadn’t worked

That's a bold claim!

Yeah. Maybe someone who got rubbed with snow got randomly better completely unrelated to the treatment and then superstition run wild with that coincidence.

Or maybe people understood initially that you should do the rubbing next to a fire. And then the rubbing only has positive efect because it lets the person administering it feel when the heat is too much, and naturally adjusts the distance to prevent burns or injury from too fast warming up.

Or maybe someone told people to do it because they thought it might help and never bothered to check if it does anything or not.

Or maybe people did know it does nothing but there was no other option and doing something about the injury felt better than doing nothing.

Maybe it was doing mechanically nothing but the care and personal touch had a beneficial effect due to placebo.

Maybe it made the injury worse, thus more likely that they amputated and paradoxically that saved the injured from worse outcomes like gangrene.

There is so many other possibility than “if they did it it must have worked”. Who knows.

I think it remains to be seen.

I see you also have a pair of Bose headphones.

I mean, it gets the point across and they're not claiming to be "GNU coreutils". Maybe some derivative name would be better for uniqueness.

But perhaps it happened not out of the goodness of their hearts, but for unfathomable reasons like warding off antitrust lawsuits.

My guess would be that it was personally advocated for by someone who has enough influence within Apple to make it happen. Possibly someone on the hardware team, as I hear that the people developing the Apple Silicon processors run linux on them while they're in development.

This used to be one of the best things about Apple when Steve Jobs was still running the company: you'd get a bunch of features that a purely profit-focussed "rational business" would never approve, just because Steve wanted them. And I suspect Apple still has some of that culture.

On the internet it seems antitrust law can just be used to explain every. Antitrust actually has a pretty strict legal definition. And not a lot of thing fall into that. And if it Antitrust did apply, it would apply far more to the IPhone.

It would take an outright legal revolution in the definition of antitrust for this to be even a remote possibility, and frankly that is not happening.

Not all lawsuits need to be legitimate. They just need to be plausible and expensive to influence corporate decision-making.

Apple has plenty of money and lawyers. If they are 100% sure they win, they have no reason to be afraid of such a lawsuit.

By your logic, Apple could also be sued for not doing it. See how your logic doesn't add up?

In college, I took a discrete math course with the world's most unprepared, distractible professor. It was incredible. He would come in with nothing planned in particular, we could ask about concepts from the textbook and he would invent a problem on the spot. Then he'd run through various problem-solving strategies until one worked. I learned so much about how a mathematician thinks from this class.

This was in sharp contrast to my calculus classes where the results were basically thrown at you fully-formed. If you're lucky, you might get to walk through a proof with the professor, but you're never going to see how they mentally navigate the search space.

Sounds great, much better than rote drugery imo!

> that realistically could easily replace any entry-level or junior developer.

This is a massive, unsubstantiated leap.

The issue is it doesn't really replace junior dev. You become one - as you have to babysit it all the time, check every line of code, and beg it to make it work.

In many cases it is counterproductive

I’d take pair programming with a junior over a GPT bot any day.

I'd take coding by own damn self over either a junior or a gpt bot