Phiwise_

Allow me to suggest to you that this is the inverse of my actual opinion.

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Yes, how dare I give my opinion about tech on a thread about that tech on a forum collecting opinions on tech while children in Africa are dying of unpotable water diseases etc. etc.

In kind, imagine my reaction when I see you spending your time complaining about the inhumanity of my opinion about a product from your air conditioned first world ivory tower when you could fly to the third world, pick up a rifle, jump in a foxhole, and protect the poor children you claim to hold in perspective more than anyone else.

The original Steam Deck came out Feburary 2022 and the OLED model came out November 2023, nearly two years later, and I got my original Steam Deck nearly one year after giving Valve my money.

This is a mystifyingly bad comparison. Did Valve invent OLED? Did the Steam Deck release before that invention?

Somewhat off-topic, but I've been feeling really burned by my steam deck purchase lately. When it came out, I gave Valve the benefit of the doubt there was some good reason why they weren't providing an OLED option, and bought the highest tier even though money is tight. I figured their commitment to opening the PC platform and quality hardware earned them my trust on that. Now what am I supposed to do? Sell my model and take a bath on the used item depreciation to get a worthwhile screen? Buy a second device with pretty much identical performance otherwise? Pay for the screen I should have been able to choose separately and go through the headache of replacing it myself? This is tripping at the finish line, especially since I waited a massive fraction of the time it took them to release this for the inferior version anyway. I get Valve prides themselves on being different than most other technology companies, but innovating on what delivering the best product you can for the money to your customer means is the wrong place to break the mold, especially for a company of Valve's profitability compared to overhead. On so many things, they could do much better at comparatively little dollar cost if they just thought wanting to was important. It's really disappointing how much this has correlated with their success.

[Citation Needed]

Giangreco's book explains why what you said isn't correct.

I don't agree with this in the context of the full video. I'd encourage you to watch it; it's quite good. It's clear Armstrong and Kay have a great deal of respect for each other.

The right way to build AI. You know, the topic of this thread. I've been wondering what you're talking about, though.

Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0

>and of course dropping two atom bombs and killing a couple hundred civilians in one of the worst atrocities of the worst war in history just to show who's boss.

It'd be helpful if you read about historical events before adopting an opinion on them:

https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-Invasion/...

Call me crazy, but I don't think the goal of AI should be to give the rock with electricity in it "a valuable experience".

If only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.

Does a full free operating system, all the way down to the metal, and hypermedia publishing suite in 936kB count as "a system of any complexity" that "will do what it is supposed to do" to you? If not, what specifically is your standard? https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k

A road trip by random walk is also a kind of empiricism that can be tested. This does not imply it is worth the energy to actually do.

>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work.

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly?

https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY

In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.

Of course not. We have so many more regulations and social programs today than we did in 1890. The federal budget per person absolutely dwarfs it today!

If you had read my graph before commenting, you would have noticed that the bottom 50% had 1.289 million millions in Q3 2022, and have 1.189 million millions in Q3 2023, which is indeed a smaller number.

You should also be aware that consumer sentiment surveys that drill down into concrete sentiments usually find consumers are very negative about the current price of durables, which are indeed quite high compared to historically [1]. They also tend to come down slowly without a inciting crash.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUS0000SAD

If only:

>Between 1870 and 1900 [1], America’s inflation-adjusted gross national product expanded by an unprecedented 233%. Though the population nearly doubled, real per capita GNP surged by 90%. Real wages of nonfarm employees grew by 53%, and life’s staples, such as food, clothing and shelter, became more plentiful and much cheaper. Food prices plummeted by 63% and the cost of textiles, fuel and home furnishings fell by 70%, 65% and 70%, respectively. The illiteracy rate fell by 46% and life expectancy rose 12.5%. Infant mortality declined by 17%. ... Had the Gilded Age suffered from monopolistic exploitation, as critics claim, output would have fallen and prices would have risen in the monopolized industries. In a 1985 study, economist Thomas DiLorenzo tested that hypothesis for steel, petroleum, railroads and other industries accused of being monopolistic during the debate on the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. He found that output in those industries actually increased by an average of 175% from 1880-90—seven times the growth rate of real GNP. On average, prices in the ostensibly monopolized industries fell three times as fast as the consumer price index.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1975/compendia/h...

I don't know where you got this impression from, but that's not what the official data says. In relative terms, the bottom 50% hold a larger share of the total net worth than they have since 2003 (ignoring the obviously temporary Cantillon spike), which is over 5 times as much as they did in 2011, and finally comfortably above 50% of their record in 1993 (since 1990) [1]. In absolute terms, they hold twice as many real dollars as they did in 1990 [2], which they got to through the largest relative spike and smallest relative fall of all the tracked tranches. Meanwhile the relative wealth of the two rich segments of 99-100 and 90-99 have been flat for a decade and hardest-landed slightly above the all time low in 1996 [3].

It's truly remarkable to me that people don't remember just how bad things used to be. It's not even been eighteen years; what's the excuse for such short institutional memory? I even doubled the standard graph height and it still pretty much disappears both absolutely and relatively. Or perhaps the talking points are just a little under eighteen years out of date? In that case, there's some good news on the horizon: The yield curve has risen dangerously close to un-inverted [0], which has precipitated or tracked with every recession since the mid 50s, and will probably rise more soon as the market prices back out Powell's flinch in the face of thirty-five months of inflation over 3%; the poor usually take it on the chin the hardest during malinvestment blowups as they scramble to underbid each other for the remaining jobs that didn't fold under the weight of unprofitable compassion, so we can expect the reality of poverty to give wealth inequality rhetoric a comeback. Give it two good years and we can all join Alan Kay in complaining about "That [second] time the bankers stole all our money" once again when the data refresh our memories on just how bad they can get.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1317951

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1317969

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=1317984

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y

HN has regularly featured startup news since the beginning, and Ycombinator is probably the most newsworthy player in the space on a significance-to-spammyness scale. I don't love this article but something about the news should be here.

Vouchers when?

I've spent way too much time spoonfeeding accessible reality in this thread already. It's very tiring to fail to run into anyone with the intetest to learn things themselves. You have as much ability to read the public record as I do, yes?

My point is that what you wrote isn't true.

Sorry, but I use a different criteria for judging the meat on the bones of an argument than if it offends your sensibilities or not.

It doesn't? That's great! Why didn't you say so? And, of course, you have proof of that?

I assume that french word must translate to "federal government" in english, right? What you've written makes no sense otherwise.

Your argument is all true, but still doesn't go far enough. Today, plentiful nuclear energy will almost certainly make it conceivable, and maybe even profitable, to extract that century of coal burning back out of the air! Litany is exactly the right way to describe it. All over on the other side of this debate we see the pessimistic habit of mob chant suppressing reasoned imagination of a future made better by technology and determination.