dcminter

Genuinely bizarre comment. Why do you think the books were written in latin?

Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.

I actually lived there for a few years, I guess I'd forgotten that the millenium bid fell through :)

Edit: By the by I do intend to visit again at some point if only to see the DEC exhibition at the town museum (if that's still on) and perhaps swing by Sweeney's pie shop (if that's still open).

Oh, and now I see from a sibling comment that there was another bid in 2022! It gives me a twinge of national pride that British rules on City-hood are so weird!

It's a city that can be annoyingly hard to Google. If, for example, you search for "Reading Library" you basically get ALL THE LIBRARIES... :)

I think parent is agreeing with you but thinks your price point is actually a bit high.

> You’re confusing “It will go away” as the underlying tech vs “it will go away” as in “this will totally lead to trillions in profit and these IPO’s aren’t a sham.”

It was very unclear that this was your argument. Sure. Maybe. I don't much care either way.

> Those uses probably won’t end up replacing white collar work

Ironically the only way I see you being correct here is if it generates so much economic growth that it indirectly creates more jobs than it destroys (which I don't think is a wildly unlikely scenario).l

Edit: Perhaps you mean all white collar work though, in which case sure, I don't buy that either.

> ML isn’t useless, that’s been obvious for a while, but it’s grossly overhyped

To me and many others who were there this feels a lot like the dot com boom. It was hyped like crazy. Many companies got huge valuations and then disappeared almost overnight when the bubble popped, but overall the hype was not just valid but under stated.

> People here who think their vibe-coding isn’t ultimately worthless are delusional

Depends what you value, I guess, I mean ultimately everything is dust and ashes. But if you think that typical vibe-coding output is more worthless than typical pre-LLM coding then you're just wrong.

What I see in this hype round that's relatively novel is a lot of people trying to persuade themselves that it might all go away if they wish hard enough.

I don't personally know anyone who bought crypto for anything other than investment/gambling purposes. I know a LOT of people who have Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions because they find them useful.

Is your thesis that AI is useless? Because that seems like fantasy to me.

There is maybe a case to make around the economics of AI companies, but even there I'm very skeptical because the open models are quite capable on relatively inexpensive hardware.

> Around a year ago [...] It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process.

Last December/January seems to have been the tipping point from too flawed to be really useful into something pretty good for dev work, so this seems about right.

Hardware is going to get cheaper (as it always does over the long term) and even if the commercial models enshittify¹ to something too contaminated by ads to be bearable the open models won't. We're not going back.

For now it looks like the ability to lead these tools to good solutions is valuable. I guess we'll see if it carries on so. Not much we can do if it isn't except move with the times.

¹ I'm actually fairly optimistic about that at the moment because so far we are the customers.

If you're going to make that kind of stretch then you just tick the Android box and move on with your life.

Open Source designers often ignore "very popular" requests because they are certain that they know better than the end user what is good for them (of course very often they are right). So that would be one possibility.

Perhaps. There are other possibilities. Certainty that we know all the answers is part of bad design.

I have not recently got lost when navigating (mobile maps), had to wait for my bank to open the following day to move money (online banking), or had to phone or visit a travel agent to arrange an international trip (OTA).

I feel the klunkiness of bad design as much as the next grumpy gen-Xer, but you don't really notice all the rough edges that disappeared in the last 30 years.

Now, why the hell can I not conveniently disable autoplay video in Firefox or Chrome here a quarter of the way into the 21st Century!? (Sound of angry muttering fades away...)

Not to mention that one of the things people want a hard limit for is to limit the financial blast radius of misconfiguration. Saying "oh sure, you can cobble that together yourself" is super missing the point.

> the UK and how people think about a Russian invasion.

That is a very Thought Bubble perspective. It's not a mainstream view of any kind in the UK. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus is not in favour of a Russian invasion, nor is he expecting one. Nor is his mate in the pub.

I vaguely remember the RSC doing a Christmas BBC Radio 4 skit years ago the gist of which was repeating "If you're <common phrase>, then you're quoting Shakespeare" for about 20 minutes straight.

Chat GPT and Claude's infuriatingly obsequious ways make GPP seem distressingly prophetic.

The electric monk in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes me a bit twitchy these days too.

I read that recently. Neuromancer I had read before and found excellent again (and in places pithier in the era of AI). It's very quotable too.

The other two were much weaker; of the two Count Zero was least interesting though so at least it wraps up on a fairly high note.

I read the Bridge trilogy a decade or so ago (?) and I must re-read that soon too - I suspect Idoru will hit harder these days.

Ooh, do try "Farthest North" too, about Nansen's North Polar expedition. Quite fascinating and (I found) quite amusing to a modern reader for various reasons.

I generally prefer novels despite having originally got into SF via collections of Asimov stories, but I read the "Stories of your life" collection recently and it was quite stunning. I think "Tower of Babylon" was my favourite but they were all excellent in different ways.

I should get Exhalation.

I liked 1 & 2 a lot (I happened to read 2 before realising that 1 existed and that worked well for me).

3 & 4 I thought were quite poor.

Well in theory I'm reading "Blind Corner" by Dornford Yates, but it's so terrible I may not finish it. I adore Dorothy Sayers and have a sort of forlorn hope that another of the golden age crime writers will have something approaching her flair. In practice this is a third rate John Buchan-ish boys-own bit of tatt. So far. I suppose it might improve.

Instead I'm sneaking off to reread a Pratchett novel (he had very few duds until the Alzheimers really got its teeth into him).

After that/those I'm dithering between SS/GB by Deighton and some other re-read.

For some reason "5", even if constructed as phonemes came out as "frame" - I always wondered why. I've never seen it mentioned in the various short pieces about it online including its contemporary reviews. I wonder now if it was a bug in the particular rom I had and it was fixed early enough to not get much visibility.

In fairness I think a lot of people (me included) genuinely thought that would be an entertaining name for the ship, so the polling result wasn't necessarily wrong per se.

Also using Moto G-series phones for a decade or so now. Seems I have more junk (gambling apps, linked in, etc.) to scrub off them each time though.

I could see myself splashing out on a more expensive phone if it were less locked down - so probably never. However I don't play games and as a Gen-Xer my laptop is where the rest of my digital life lives; it makes sense that those for whom the phone is their primary device would prioritise it more (especially with somewhat predatory financing).

Given the AI-heavy page, I don't think your skepticism was unreasonable.

Dave Plummer's a well known YouTuber. He pops up in a couple of DEC groups that I'm in on Facebook. However I'm not a fan. He seems to take a lot and contribute only self-promotional videos.

The photo on this page looks very AI heavy. I'm not an expert but I really don't think those light panels are real (if they're real they're not contemporary to the machines they're in).

(Edit: I should qualify that I don't mean the panel with the octet switches, that looks roughly right - I mean the one under the 8" disks and the one on the vaguely Vax-pedestal looking thing)

While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008.

So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?

To save those browsing the google: "International Conference on Learning Representation" so an AI conference.

> ... what happened?

Seriously?

I have no special insight, but I think this commenter cut to the core of the problem:

> "I came to the comments because the web page for Enzo explains everything except what the hell it does. Then I couldn't understand the [submission] comment either."

I think you need to practice your "elevator pitch" technique before you submit here again.