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For Earth’s scientists, the ability to merge multiple lasers into one coherent beam like the Death Star’s planet-killing weapon have remained in the realms of science fiction, but based on new research, that limitation may finally be a thing of the past. Good, because those people on Alderaan have really been asking for it
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Quote: Scientists develop a real-life Death Star laser
Quote: ...but based on new research, that limitation may finally be a thing of the past
And the first people it will be used on is authors and editors whose headlines don't match the article? If so, Great!
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I with you on that one. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Programmer interview questions can be particularly challenging to answer because they require a great deal of background technical knowledge or experience. Yes, yes, no, yes, occasionally (in no particular order)
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Hollywood is seeking a new revenue stream in the hot market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). How do I load a blockchain into the projector?
I still don't understand NFTs. I understand the concept and the technology behind it (sort of), just not the appeal. Or the money people are throwing at them.
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'Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die profit’
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Another applicable saying is 'A fool and their money are soon parted.' I may totally misunderstand, but if you buy an NFT, are you really only buying the ('priviledge'?) of having your name associated to the file on a blockchain, and a private key for that transaction? And it is only copied to whichever blockchain the buyer buys it through, so is only visible on the computers of the 'miners' of that blockchain?
If you become a miner of that block chain, does that mean you have full digital access to the movie, because the entire movie is in the chain? I believe so, but my understanding isn't great either. Maybe the private key also unlocks an encrypted version of the movie? But then you aren't dealing with the 'original' bytes! 
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That's basically my understanding of it as well. What you're buying is basically just the transaction in a block on the chain that contains the bytes of the work. That's it. There's nothing stopping someone from selling the same thing added multiple times to the blockchain. Since there's no uniqueness guarantee, in my mind that makes it even less valuable than traditional reproductions.
What do I know though? Tons of people love crypto and I don't see the point in that. Why trade "real" money you can use for money you can't spend anywhere?  It seems like a well-disguised pyramid scheme.
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By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. Fortunately, you can still Bing for it
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"You'll find whatever we damn well want you to find!"
(I have noticed that verbatim search no longer guarantees the results contain all the terms you entered in the search. I'm sure this will make the results even more unusable.)
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Over the next year, the majority of hiring managers in the tech space "plan to increase their use of freelancers," according to a new Upwork report. "You'll get going while the going's still good. You're so very unnecessarily mercenary."
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I love a good bug, especially ones that are initially hard to explain but then turn into forehead slapping moments - of course! Sometimes you just need a wooden stake
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A study shows humans willingly choose physical pain over difficult mental tasks. Which is why we'd rather bang our heads on the desk, rather than debug code?
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 I must be weirder than I thought. I love difficult mental tasks. I wouldn't touch C++ otherwise.
Real programmers use butterflies
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You took the words out of my mouth, although I wasn't thinking of C++ specifically!
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Shouldn't we be suspicious of experiment that inflict pain of experimenters?! 
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Inflicting pain on the experimenters is what they deserve. Inflicting pain on the subjects is a problem. It hope (for the experimenters' sakes) that the local Helsinki Committee signed off on this...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Quote: A 2020 study suggests that thinking hard can actually be more unpleasant than real, physical pain
That, unfortunately, is plain to see these days.
I'm currently reading Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson which talks about the role the brain plays in Endurance sports. As a cyclist, data and gadget geek I'm deep into the numbers for my sport, recording heart rate, HR variability, Muscle oxygen, power, breathing rate, cadence and occasionally blood lactate, all in the name of trying to understand my limiters and ensure my workouts are targeted at the areas needed.
How the brain affects performance is really, really interesting, and anyone who's exercised to the point they've depleted their energy stores such that their brain is no longer getting the glucose it needs understands, painfully, the concept of the brain being the limiter.
I was reading last night about brain training, where they have people complete intensely boring tasks before a workout to (a) measure the effect (you perform well below peak), and (b) to train the brain to adapt to this mental fatigue to restore your capacity to direct your body to keep working under this fatigue.
I was thinking: I bet us programmers are really, really, really good at hours-long mentally fatiguing exercises. It would be interesting to test this.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Businesses could make their employment prospects more attractive by addressing 'technical debt', according to a new survey of software engineers. That's OK. They'll find bad code in their new job as well.
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Hope they find work at that utopian-like place where there's no changes in deadlines, changes in specifications, where time can be taken to implement, document, and verify an important fix before pushing it out, where code reviews are positive learning nurturing experiences, where coding policies are clear and understood by all.... 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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and may they be stuck in the corner, working on old Crystal Reports 
TTFN - Kent
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 Indeed!
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Kent Sharkey wrote: They'll find bad code in their new job as well.
That's the reason I am not quitting my current f***ing job.
Oh sanctissimi Wilhelmus, Theodorus, et Fredericus!
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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have released guidance for hardening the security of virtual private network (VPN) solutions. I'm sure the guidance also works against security agencies?
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