a4isms

And the extremely regressive consumption taxes.

"As the father of a daughter, I understand the need for feminism that I ignored as a son, brother, playmate, classmate, friend, neighbour, landlord, tenant, lover, teammate, colleague, report, supervisor, and fellow citizen."

That's a particularly icky formulation of personal connection, because it has overtones of paternity as property rights.

Alternate explanation that can co-exist with or replace the above:

American parties always seem to maintain party discipline over their members, forcing those with other views to either remain silent, or leave.

I am a former D-list tech blogger, and the thought of posting slop under my name horrifies me. But then again, I consider myself an author who has enjoyed the pleasant side-effect of minor notability. I never considered myself an influencer who happened to use writing to acquire more influence.

Anybody shipping slop around—whether written by interns and published under their name or written by machines—is not an author. They are an influencer, and reposting slop is what they do.

TL;DR: Build and manage team APIs, not team implementations.

That is a true and useful component of analyzing risk, but the point is that human behaviour isn't a simple risk calculation. We tend to over-guard against things that subjectively seem dangerous, and under-guard against things that subjectively feel safe.

This isn't about whether AI is statistically safer, it's actually about the user experience of AI: If we can provide the same guidance without lulling a human backup into complacency, we will have an excellent augmented capability.

If you show me a tool that does a thing perfectly 99% of the time, I will stop checking it eventually. Now let me ask you: How do you feel about the people who manage the security for your bank using that tool? And eventually overlooking a security exploit?

I agree that there are domains for which 90% good is very, very useful. But 99% isn't always better. In some limited domains, it's actually worse.

It is not illegal for them to trade on their inside information. It is illegal for you to trade on their inside information. So they can send you their stock picks list and gloat about their ROI, but if you invest on the basis of the newsletter, you go to jail.

Wilhoit was right about everything: America is in-groups who are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Alongside out-groups who are bound by the law, but not protected by it.

You and I? An out-group. And it although we make a lot of jokes about leopards ripping faces off, MAGA know they're an out-group too, it's just that as long as somebody else is getting it worse, they're fine with that.

The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:

The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.

He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.

What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?

Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.

Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?

Back when Java was the NextBigLanguage, we built Java development tools at KL Group/Sitraka (now a part of Quest). For version 2 of the suite of tools, we were getting rid of the nerdy configuration text file and planned on shipping a configuration wizard (yes, we called them wizards while fondling the onions we tied to our belts).

I was the Program Manager, and as usual we were very tightly constrained for time, and in the era of golden master DVDs that had to be ready to distribute at JavaOne in the Moscone Centre... Hard decisions had to be made. The team decided to work on more important features, and drop the configuration wizard from 2.0. Then I did what everyone knows is a no good, very bad, terrible thing. And although I got away with it that time, it's still a no good very bad, terrible thing:

I took my work computer home for the weekend and fired up a HyperCard "compiler" called Runtime Revolution that could make executables for Windows and Unix. Come Monday morning, we had a shippable configuration wizard. Leadership blew its top, because one of their values was, "We're a Java shop, which means we use Java to write Java tools." And after I left the company, they rewrote the configuration wizard in Java Swing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)

To this day I consider firing up Electron and a complete React framework for simple tools to be a "Turing Tarpit," a place where absolutely anything you imagine is possible, but nothing of interest (in the domain of simple tools) is easy.

This is where Tesla has a key advantage. Optimus can walk you to the kitchen to look for a Coke Zero. Google and OpenAI cannot compete with this.

Also, what shipman05 said about version control and composition of text-based artefacts! It is nice to be able to interoperate with many text-based tools and scripts, although I rarely have needed the latter.

I used DeckSet for years. I love this concept.

https://www.deckset.com

To answer your question directly, I am already all-in on Markdown and lightweight markup languages in general. Adopting such a thing is an exercise in a certain form of minimalism. In Markdown I can theoretically do anything by dropping into HTML, but the entire point (to me) is to focus on what I'm trying to write and not on every presentation and every slide being unique objects.

It's the same thing with my blog. I could use any number of tools that give me arbitrary control over text and images appearing wherever I want. But I choose not to want that in exchange for the simplicity and constraints guiding me to focus on what I'm trying to say rather than how I'm trying to say it.

I have found a local maximum for me, and tools like this are a good fit for that. You may be elsewhere enjoying a different kind of local maximum.

Here I am!

I still enjoy writing code like the code in TFA, but these days people seem a lot less interested in code than organizing their agentic LLMs, so I don't have the same incentive to share whatI find interesting. And it would be terrible marketing, like showing up to audition for a job driving F1... In a Jaguar E-Type.

Elegant and beautiful, but that isn't the game any more.

Please use the word "Dup" for a resubmission of the same link and "See also" for a different submission.

My gawd. You don't need to be a "nerd" to know that almost every modern device these days will happily take a screen shot, read the text in the screen shot, and let you copy or even translate that text.

In the early days of Hacker News, and maybe even before Hacker News when Reddit didn't have subreddits... OG blogger Joel Spolsky posited the "Joel Test," twelve simple yes/no questions that defined a certain reasonable-by-today's-standards local optimum for shipping software:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

Some seem ridiculously obvious today, but weren't standard 25 years ago. Seriously! At the turn of the century, not everyone used a bug database or ticket tracker. Lots of places had complicated builds to production, with error-prone manual steps.

But question five is still relevant today: Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

Wild cards and crazy rules versus no regulation is a false dichotomy.

To continue a conversation from another thread on another post, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and out-of-band context required are all costs that just happen to act as moats for entrenched incumbents. And no surprise, such incumbents often have so much influence over politics that they literally write the laws that regulate them.

The folksy aphorism goes, The more wild cards and crazy rules, the greater the expert's advantage.

For people with social or performance anxiety, it could be just the opposite. In fact, I'll wager that some people diving into an extensive study of leetcode problems are doing it to procrastinate attending actual technical interviews. ("I'm not quite ready yet, gotta make sure I don't blow any interviews.")

I was obsessed with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums weren't better in an absolute musical sense, his production values were so obviously in a class of their own I still put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record album engineering and production.

Reminds me of an old argument that if I'm running a restaurant, and if customers don't want to be served by coloured people or homosexuals, I shouldn't have to hire them. It's bad for business, what other reason do I need?

At some point, we have to face the fact that there are two kinds of freedom: The freedom TO something-or-other, and the freedom FROM something-or-other. And the two are often in tension, requiring actual judgment calls and weighing of values, because there is no one perfectly crafted set of objective rules to sort that mess out.

Some people care about the freedom from algorithms not showing them ads for jobs they are qualified to do and pay better, but the companies would prefer the freedom TO primarily hire whomever they please and advertise to whomever they please. Those two freedoms are in tension.

If the freedom from gender discrimination in the marketplace freedom doesn't matter to you, or matters les than the freedom for someone else TO advertise only to men, well, I can see that you are consistent in your beliefs of things I deeply disagree with.

If we look at this as a system with work flowing through it, the "theory of constraints" quickly tells us that code review is the bottleneck, and that speeding up code generation actually lowers system throughput.

This is not new stuff, Goldratt warned us about this twenty+ years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints

This is the answer, and it has been the answer going back to the before times when we didn't have pull requests but we did in-person team code reviews before merging branches (yes, really). A massive, complicated merge without documentation and extensive support from other interested/impacted people and teams justifying things like a parser DSL? That is always going to be a problem whether AI generated it or the developer locked their office door and went on a three-day manic coding binge.

AI doesn't directly make this stuff worse, it accelerates a team's journey towards embracing engineering practices around the code being written by humans or LLMs.

The beauty of `const` in JS is that it's almost completely irrelevant. Not only does it have nothing to do with immutability, it's also local. Which means, if I were to write `let` instead of `const`, I could still see whether my code reassigned that variable at a glance. The keyword provides very little in the way of a guarantee I could not otherwise observe for myself.

Immutability is completely different. Determining whether a data structure is mutated without an actual immutable type to enforce is impractical, error-prone, and in any event impossible to prove for the general case.

There is no exception for ANY data structure that includes references to other data structures or primitives. Not only can you add or remove elements from an array, you can change them in place.

A const variable that refers to an array is a const variable. The array is still mutable. That's not an exception, its also how a plain-old JavaScript object works: You can add and remove properties at will. You can change its prototype to point to something else and completely change its inheritance chain. And it could be a const variable to an unfrozen POJO all along.

That is not an exception to how things work, its how every reference works.

OG HN mainstay Joel Spolsky put it incredibly presciently back when Napster was a thing in 2001. The music studios were all raving about theft, but he pointed out that people weren't filesharing mp3s to save a buck, they were filesharing mp3s because, his words: You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

TV still doesn't get this for TV shows. Yes, I can type the name of a show. There are two options, one is some streaming service, the other is Prime. So I select Prime. Psych! It offers me the option to go to that streaming service. And subscribe. Which means thinking about the long term, not this show I want to watch.

Or I open the lid of my Mac, type the name of a show, and almost right away I can watch it on my Apple TV.

In languages like JavaScript, immutable and constant may be theoretically the same thing, but in practice "const" means a variable cannot be reassigned, while "immutable" means a value cannot be mutated in place.

They are very, very different semantically, because const is always local. Declaring something const has no effect on what happens with the value bound to a const variable anywhere else in the program. Whereas, immutability is a global property: An immutable array, for example, can be passed around and it will always be immutable.

JS has always hade 'freeze' as a kind of runtime immutability, and tooling like TS can provide for readonly types that provide immutability guarantees at compile time.

I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."

I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.