Olivier

And ideally, before resetting a password by phone, they’d send a forced “Find My”-style push alert to all registered devices on the account saying something like, “Apple Customer Service has received a request to reset your iCloud password. Please call 1-800-WHATEVER within 24 hours if this is unauthorized.”

Then make the person call back the next day. If you forget your password and the answers to your security questions, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit of inconvenience.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

Jarvis was inspired by works of Bret Victor, especially his talk Inventing on Principle. The central idea is that the feedback loop when you are coding should be the shortest possible, so you can see the effect of your code changes instantly, or almost.

Overall, I like “Lord of the Rings.” However, I do feel that Tolkien kind of rips off “Harry Potter” in many ways. There are several parallels, such as elves, dwarfs, wizards, goblins, trolls, magic (especially invisibility), etc. Sauron is referred to as “Dark Lord” just like Voldemort is. There is also the elder white-haired bearded wizard who serves almost as a mentor, Gandalf, who is reminiscent of Dumbledore. Some of the character names are similar, such as Wormtongue as opposed to Wormtail, too. There is even a gigantic spider (Shelob) at the end of “The Two Towers” that reminds one of Aragog from “Chamber of Secrets.” I even noticed that the plots of both series begin with the protagonists’ birthday. Now I see that Tolkien, this unoriginal bastard, is coming out with “The Hobbit” in December. This would be fine, but why didn’t he just write this book first to begin with? I still like “Lord of the Rings,” though—don’t get me wrong—but I wonder if Tolkien has ever said in interviews whether he borrowed elements from Harry Potter. I’ll be watching the extended DVDs later this week and I think he’s featured on the commentary track, so I look forward to that.