An anonymous reader shares a report: Ever since the federal government began issuing the Dietary Guidelines in 1980, it has told Americans to limit themselves to one or two standard alcoholic drinks a day. Over time, the official advice morphed to no more than two drinks a day for men, and no more than one for women. No longer [non-paywalled source]. The updated guidelines issued on Wednesday say instead that people should consume less alcohol "for better overall health" and "limit alcohol beverages," but they do not recommend clear limits. The guidelines also no longer warn that alcohol may heighten the risk of breast cancer and other malignancies. It is the first time in decades that the government has omitted the daily caps on drinking that define moderate consumption -- standards that are used as benchmarks in clinical studies, to steer medical advice, and to distinguish moderate from heavy drinking, which is unquestionably harmful. The new guidance advises Americans who are pregnant, struggle with alcohol use disorder or take medications that interact with alcohol to avoid drinking altogether. The guidelines also warn people with alcoholism in the family to "be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors." They do not, however, distinguish between men and women, who metabolize alcohol differently, nor do they caution against underage drinking. The guidelines also no longer include a warning that was in the last set issued in 2020: that even moderate drinking may increase the risk of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease, as well as the overall risk of dying.

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Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service has drawn renewed criticism for a particularly frustrating behavior pattern that can leave users without access to their local files after the service automatically activates during Windows updates. Author Jason Pargin recently outlined the problem: Windows updates can enable OneDrive backup without any plain-language warning or opt-out option, and the service then quietly begins uploading the contents of a user's computer to Microsoft's servers. The trouble begins when users attempt to disable OneDrive Backup. According to Pargin, turning off the feature can result in local files being deleted, leaving behind only a desktop icon labeled "Where are my files?" Users can redownload their files from Microsoft's servers, but attempting to then delete Microsoft's copies triggers another deletion of the local files. The only workaround requires users to hunt down YouTube tutorials that walk through the steps, as the relevant options are buried in menus and none clearly describe their function in plain English. Pargin compared the experience to a ransomware attack.

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Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. "I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal," Cherny wrote. "I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input." He also runs "5-10 Claudes on claude.ai" in his browser, using a "teleport" command to hand off work between the web and his local machine. This validates the "do more with less" strategy Anthropic's President Daniela Amodei recently pitched during an interview with CNBC. VentureBeat reports: For the past week, the engineering community has been dissecting a thread on X from Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic. What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development, with industry insiders calling it a watershed moment for the startup. "If you're not reading the Claude Code best practices straight from its creator, you're behind as a programmer," wrote Jeff Tang, a prominent voice in the developer community. Kyle McNease, another industry observer, went further, declaring that with Cherny's "game-changing updates," Anthropic is "on fire," potentially facing "their ChatGPT moment." The excitement stems from a paradox: Cherny's workflow is surprisingly simple, yet it allows a single human to operate with the output capacity of a small engineering department. As one user noted on X after implementing Cherny's setup, the experience "feels more like Starcraft" than traditional coding -- a shift from typing syntax to commanding autonomous units.

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A customer was looking for a way to find the location of the caret (the blinking line that indicates where the next character will be inserted). They tried Get­Caret­Pos, but it always failed.

Most window manager state functions that were global in 16-bit Windows became per-thread in 32-bit Windows, as part of the conversion to the asynchronous input model. The Get­Caret­Pos function returns the caret position for your thread. (Specifically, the caret that belongs to the current thread and shared with all the other threads that the current thread has been Attach­Thread­Input‘d to, either explicitly or implicitly.)¹

To get the global state, you can call Get­GUI­Thread­Info with a thread ID of zero to say that you want the information of whatever thread owns the foreground window.

GUITHREADINFO info = { sizeof(info) };
if (GetGUIThreadInfo(0, &info)) {
    if (info.flags & GUI_CARETBLINKING) {
        ⟦ info.rcCaret contains the location of the caret ⟧
        ⟦ relative to info.hwndCaret                      ⟧
    }
}

The customer explained that they were writing an accessibility tool that moves the mouse to wherever keyboard focus is. So they filled in the code like this:

GUITHREADINFO info = { sizeof(info) };
if (GetGUIThreadInfo(0, &info)) {
    if (info.flags & GUI_CARETBLINKING) {
        // Convert rcCaret to screen coordinates                           
        MapWindowPoints(info.hwndCaret, nullptr, (POINT*)&info.rcCaret, 2);
                                                                           
        // Move the cursor to the bottom right corner                      
        SetCursorPos(info.rcCaret.right - 1, info.rcCaret.bottom - 1);     
    }
}

But there are times when the GUI_CARET­BLINKING flag is not set, even though you can see a blinking caret with your own eyes. These are cases where the program with keyboard focus is not using Create­Caret but are instead drawing a custom caret that blinks on a custom timer.

We’ll look at that next time.

¹ Things that are local to the current thread (and any other threads it is attached to) include

• The capture, focus, and active windows,
• The input queue and message queue,
• The mouse cursor shape and show count,
• The keyboard state,
• The caret.

In Windows 95, these things were kept in a structure called the “virtual window information” because it was taking what used to be global state in Windows 3.1 and making it local state, virtualizing each thread into thinking that it was controlling the show. The abbreviation for the virtual information was “vwi”, which was pronounced “vee-wee”. So you might overhear people on the window manager team saying something like “You can’t capture to a window that belongs to somebody else’s vee-wee.”

The post How can I find out where the Windows caret is? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Stratechery's Ben Thompson has published a lengthy rebuttal to Dwarkesh Patel and Philip Trammell's widely discussed winter break essay "Capital in the 22nd Century," arguing that even in a world where AI can perform all human jobs, people will still prefer human-created content and human connection. Patel and Trammell's thesis draws on Thomas Piketty's work to argue that once AI renders capital a true substitute for labor, wealth will concentrate among those richest at the moment of transition, making a global progressive capital tax the only solution to prevent extreme inequality. The logic is sound, writes Thompson, but he remains skeptical on several fronts. His first objection: if AI can truly do everything, then everyone can have everything they need, making the question of who owns the robots somewhat moot. His second: a world where AI is capable enough to replace all human labor yet still obeys human property law seems implausible. He finds the AI doomsday scenario -- where such powerful AI becomes uncontrollable -- more realistic than a stable capital-hoarding dystopia. Thompson points to agricultural employment in the U.S., which dropped from 81% in 1810 to 1% today, as evidence that humans consistently create new valuable work after technological displacement. He argues that human preferences for human connection -- from podcasting audiences to romantic partners -- will sustain an economy for human labor simply because it is human. Sora currently ranks 59th in the App Store behind double-digit human-focused social apps, for instance.

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Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college "very important" dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is "not worth the cost," up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story. Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bachelor's degrees in 2023, up from 1.6 million in 2010, and the fraction of 25-year-olds holding a bachelor's degree has steadily increased for the past 15 years. The economic case remains strong. The average bachelor's degree holder earns about 70% more than a high-school graduate of similar work experience, and after factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20% since 2015. Even after accounting for student-debt payments, college graduates net about $8,000 more annually than those without degrees. Part of the disconnect may stem from misunderstanding how college pricing works. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe everyone pays the same tuition, though fewer than 20% of families actually pay the published sticker price.

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