As far as I know, even HDDs were pretty resilient to magnets when in their enclosures. I once took a large magnet meant for holding together concrete forms, one strong enough that it stuck to a ferrous surface it could probably support my weight, and stuck it to a hard drive for a full year to see if it'd break. The drive, as well as all of the data on it, were fine.
I've seen months straight of 100F+, and I was in LA for their heat wave last July (120F). I happen to be near Tampa right now and I'd really much prefer a hotter dry heat, where shade actually does something and fans have any chance at cooling you off.
Best I can tell it's only libraries that generate those sort of strings, which could just as well report a different string for Windows 9. The actual Windows API even returns the version information for Windows 8 if the application isn't manifested for 10 and onwards.
Company I joined in 2008 had sold software back in 2005 or so which had the bug, and customers were still running it in 2015 when Win10 came out.
The idea that "sensibly designed software wouldn't have this issue, so it must not exist" is absolutely at odds with virtually everything I've seen in my career.
Absolutely yes! I prototyped a hopper peripheral that doubled as marble storage. It hooked into the gear grid and used the rotation to drive a helical lift to carry the marbles up to the surface, where they'd enter the edge of an adjacent disk.
I ended up setting it aside for 2 reasons:
1) Lack of time -- sad to say but I had to focus on getting the roons core ready. Too much to do!
2) The HDD peripheral -- this is a WIP that compactly stores and emits bitstreams. The way it's designed, it can be set to "reservoir" mode, which emits the continuous marble bitstream like you suggest. I figured it'd be redundant to have both a hopper and HDD, so I scrapped the hopper for now.
The quoted optimization in the post isn't about German strings though, but the C++ style short string optimization (the post references an article describing the difference). A few of the referenced crates do this optimization so the blog is still right to point out that it's completely possible, I just wish it was clearer what optimization they felt was being claimed to be impossible.
An example of a Mossad generated file would be the source file plus a bunch of dead code. The dead code consists of lines from the original file repeated in random locations (plus, if you are using an "entropy file", random lines of code that were successful mutations from previous generations of Mossad).
As it turns out, a lot of student code can look this way anyway. Something crazy like 70% of authentic student code can have dead code in assignment submissions.
> As it turns out, a lot of student code can look this way anyway. Something crazy like 70% of authentic student code can have dead code in assignment submissions.
Having assessed student code this does not surprise me. Source code control late at night for students, especially non-CS majors, tends to be variations of "append a number to the end of the function name" eg. sum1(x, y) sum2(x, y) ... sumTHISREALLYWORKS(x, y).
That said, if dead code was being used to hide plagiarism, which is something I had not considered before, then telling students they would be marked down for dead code would probably be enough to stop it.
> I mean. Should be doing that anyway. Code doesn’t just exist for the computer, but also for humans who have to maintain it.
Harsh! I like to think I am good lecturer.
Depends on the specification of the assignment. In my case I teach data science not software development so the specification is not "bullet proof code that won't break when pytorch releases a new version tomorrow" but rather statistical and data rigour. This is where spent my time when marking, not how maintainable the code is.
CS students turn in MUCH better code, but frequently data is leaking into tests or validation sets etc. making the results either meaningless or compromised.
At the end of the day code quality is strongly correlated to grades.
That seems like readability is even more important! I've taught programming to friends and family my entire life (to anyone who wants to learn), and one thing I always focus on is 'telling a story with comments', explaining how, where, and why data flows through the code. At the end, reread your comments and your code and figure out which one is wrong; then refactor.
I'm surprised that large amounts of dead code is neither an obvious-to-machines nor an obvious-to-humans problem or demerit with submitted assignments -- regardless of plagiarism status. I'd especially have thought such a clunky approach should be caught be a decent plagiarism detection software. It makes me wonder if simply feeding a student's assignment into Claude would be more reliable these days by just asking it, "If you remove all the dead code, is the remaining code likely plagiarized?"
How would that pass in the user study? Did the people reviewing the code fail to see dead code scattered across random locations? Feels like it would be obvious as soon as you opened the file.
It would certainly depend to some degree on the complexity of the assignment. But it's also not that unusual for legitimate, non-plagiarized submissions to have dead code.
Sure, but is it not unusual to have "dead code consisting of lines from the original file repeated in random locations"? That would certainly stick out in any other environment (like a professional one).
I didn't study anything related to computers/software/programming in school, so I don't know what level is expected. But if I was tutoring someone and they handed me something with dead code in random locations in it, it would certainly catch my attention.
1. Students will frequently just try things until it works, move code around, etc., leading to very messy code.
2. Graders often do not look at individual assignments unless there is a reason to do so, often relying on automated test suites. And when they do look, I'd bet their first reaction is something like "I don't know why they're repeating themselves like this, but my rubric only penalizes them for 5 points here..."
Wow, I lasted exactly as long in the simulator as I did in real life, with many of the exact same circumstances (less a global pandemic and family tragedy plunging the hope meter into the negatives).
Interestingly, for the Roman Emperor prompt, Bard never refused to produce an image, though once instead of an image it only produced alt-text for two images, and once it only produced a single image, while for the African Oba prompt, three times it insisted it could not produce an image of that, once it explained that it is incapable of producing images, and once it produced only a single image rather than a pair.
*After typing most of this reply, I went to run more to see if it would ever behave differently, and on the 22nd image it produced an image of a black woman.
