This misunderstands the announcement completely.
What the announcement is saying is: previously, if you wanted Gemini to have access to text and chat apps, you also needed to enable Gemini Apps Activity, i.e. the feature that saves all Gemini interactions to the cloud. Now, the settings to enable or disable app access from history tracking are fully separate, so you can have app access enabled (if you want) even if the Apps Activity feature is disabled.
That doesn't have anything to do with the announcement. What the announcement is saying is: previously, if you wanted Gemini to have access to text and chat apps, you also needed to enable Gemini Apps Activity, i.e. the feature that saves all Gemini interactions to the cloud. Now, the settings to enable or disable app access from history tracking are fully separate, so you can have app access enabled (if you want) even if the Apps Activity feature is disabled.
Do you mean Dan Luu, or one of the studies reviewed in the post?
Yeah, I understand that Option and Maybe aren't new, but they've only recently become popular. IIRC several of the studies use Java, which is certainly safer than C++ and is technically statically typed, but in my opinion doesn't do much to help ensure correctness compared to Rust, Swift, Kotlin, etc.
I don't know; I haven't caught up on the research over the past decade. But it's worth noting that this body of evidence is from before the surge in popularity of strongly typed languages such as Swift, Rust, and TypeScript. In particular, mainstream "statically typed" languages still had null values rather than Option or Maybe.
Note that this post is from 2014.
Partly because it's from 2014, so the modern static typing renaissance was barely starting (TypeScript was only two years old; Rust hadn't hit 1.0; Swift was mere months old). And partly because true evidence-based software research is very difficult (how can you possibly measure the impact of a programming language on a large-scale project without having different teams write the same project in different languages?) and it's rarely even attempted.
Notably, this article is from 2014.
It's valid usage if you go waaay back, i.e. centuries. You also see it in some late 19th/early 20th century newsprint and ads.
No, because the thing they are naming is "The Github Dictionary"; they're not applying scare-quotes to the word "dictionary" implying that what they've written is not really a "dictionary".
The ribbon that was introduced around... 2007, I think? Or is there a substantially different one now?
https://askubuntu.com/q/641049
TL;DR: it's supposed to send email to an administrator, but by default on some distros (including Ubuntu), it isn't actually sent anywhere.