I took calculus in high school and college, and I don't think any of my instructors explained the intuition as well. So sleep-deprived or not, it's a great one!

A write-up on the D language blog on the recently accepted DIP that enhances tuple unpacking.

You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.

The last time I've used a check was close to thirty years ago. I assume ahartmetz's experience is similar.

Many countries have functioning giro systems. The U.S. is just an outlier.

I've never written a check, but I have had to deposit occasional checks. In the last 6 years the only checks I've received were first paychecks at a new job (before direct deposit was set up) and my covid stimulus checks.

I'm in Europe where the situation is different: checks haven't been used in appreciable numbers for 30 years or so. It's all online or paper transfer orders. If you get a pre-filled paper transfer order, you can type (or scan and OCR I suppose) the same data into the online form.

Your grandma doesn't give you a $10 check for your birthday in Europe?

What about manufacturer rebates?

Europe is a big place, but my understanding is that the US is the outlier here and Europe is relatively similar in this regard.

The only time I really saw checks used was when I was a child ~30-35 years ago and my parents used them. I did once cash a check from an elderly relative, but that was very unusual and only happened once. I didn't even know it was still possible to do that, my reaction was more like if someone had handed me a stack of punch cards to run on my computer.

There hasn't been anything an average person used checks for in the last decades in Germany. Except a few elderly people, nobody uses checks and there are no rebates via checks at all.

I live in France and I still have to write a check here and there. Very minor, but still present.

Receiving a check however is even rarer.

To receive money from someone you can just give them your bank account number or if you both have Vipps or similar just your mobile telephone number.

Granny can always give you cash or just send it directly to you account in the same way.

Cash is still fairly common, and manufacturer rebates are basically not a thing. If they were, you'd send them an account number (IBAN = bank ID + account number at bank) to transfer the money to.

In fairness, manufacturer rebates have pretty much (mercifully) disappeared in the US as well as they were basically a scheme to mentally make you account for a lower price you wouldn't end up being rebated for various reasons.

I am in the UK and I have received two cheques in the last year, both for small amounts.

As it turned out, my bank rejected both because they were made out to [middle name] [surname] rather than [firstname] [surname]. Ironically the former is unique (probably) whereas they had another customer with the latter.

The last few manufacturer rebates I have gotten come in the form of a pre loaded Visa card

What's a check? As the saying goes, 'I'm too European for this'.

On a more serious note, the last time I saw a cheque in the UK was my grandfather balancing his cheque book in the mid 80s. It really has been that long since they were in general use in the UK, at least.

Just like with the prevalance of Apple/iPhones, the US banking system is global outlier.

Things you can't do with my banking app you can do with the web site:

- Extract your transactions to excel/csv

- Use OpenBanking

- See all my accounts on screen at once

- Sharedealing

- International transfers

But people are right, banks trust the mobile app more, and realy on it as an MFA device, so even if you use the website you still need the app.

Yep, check deposit was the last reason I might regularly visit a bank (although even before the iPhone, I would use the ATM for that)

I attach a copy of the file and then provide a network location for where it is located. Makes it easy for people to just open up a simple copy to look at it and they know where to go to access the original.

It's packaging an existing product differently than a fully new product. Would still require either new machines or adapting existing machines for it.

I would love to see someone use modern machine learning techniques to make a kick ass Civ AI.

Genuine question - would that be amenable to fast AI? It's less of a problem on modern PCs running Civ4, but on contemporary systems late-game large maps with many AI/units could really drag during turn-processing.

You don’t necessarily need it to learn during the game, it would be enough for it to learn between games. If you’ve played the game long enough there are behaviors you can exploit that wouldn’t work against a human player. They iterated on the AI in Beyond the Sword and fixed some of the more abusable mechanics in Civilization V (e.g. by introducing diplomatic penalties when you camp units next to an AI’s borders), but it’s just inevitable that once you’ve played a game long enough you will find these kinds of exploitable patterns.

The customization available in IV makes it basically infinitely replayable, but the AI makes the trajectory of each game too predictable if you understand the mechanics well enough.

Lots of old strategy games have been revived by introducing new factions that change the game’s meta; imagine if this process was automated by training the AI on recorded games from the entire playerbase, or on games recorded locally to adapt to the user’s unique style of play.

My thinking is that the company creating the game would train the AI in advance (like a generative adversarial network), not that any kind of training would happen on the users' computer. They could periodically send updates or improvements (maybe by having it play in multiplayer or something).

This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.

The lack of people in them was the thing about going to one that always felt weird to me.

I was able to install the D language compiler DMD by providing a .deb file.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...

So chatgpt can install any .deb file you upload to the chat? I wonder if openai intended that kind of thing to be allowed.

At the end of the day, the goal is to make a product that people find useful. How that ends up happening is almost completely irrelevant to the people actually using the product.