forgetfulness

Aren’t m68k computers only a few models from the 1990s and 1980s, and some more recent hobby projects? That’s squarely in the retro computing enthusiasts category.

I’m not in the Debian world, but those do seem to me like the types of systems that could use their own specialized distros rather than being a burden to the mass market ones. It’s not as if you could run a stock configuration of any desktop environment on them anyway.

The machine god would still need resources provided by humans on their terms to run; the AI wouldn’t sweat having to run, for instance, 5 years straight of its immortality just to figure out a 10 years plan to eventually run at 5% less power than now, but humans may not be willing to foot the bill for this.

There’s no guarantee that the singularity makes economic sense for humans.

The ripple effect will be felt hard, as American engineers are squeezed between offshoring and more engineers with Big Tech resumes being released into the market, and returnees go push back wages in their home countries in turn

Circular investments were also a compounding factor in the Japanese asset price bubble.

The practice was known as “zaitech”

> zaitech - financial engineering

> In 1984, Japan’s Ministry of Finance permitted companies to operate special accounts for their shareholdings, known as tokkin accounts. These accounts allowed companies to trade securities without paying capital gains tax on their profits.

> At the same time, Japanese companies were allowed to access the Eurobond market in London. Companies issued warrant bonds, a combination of traditional corporate bonds with an option (the “warrant") to purchase shares in the company at a specified price before expiry. Since Japanese shares were rising, the warrants became more valuable, allowing companies to issue bonds with low-interest payments.

> The companies, in turn, placed the money they raised into their tokkin accounts that invested in the stock market. Note the circularity: companies raised money by selling warrants that relied on increasing stock prices, which was used to buy more shares, thus increasing their gains from investing in the stock market.

https://www.capitalmind.in/insights/lost-decades-japan-1980s...

Well it has non-destructive editing finally this year, for all the claims that it was powerful that I had heard through the years, without it the Gimp was a wimp

I may have to give it a go, is drawing a rectangle still a transformation done on a rectangular selection?

Software is a line of work that has astounding amounts of autonomy, if you compare it to working in almost anything else.

My point stands, company loyalty tallies up to very little when you’re looking for your next job; no interviewer will care much to hear of how you stood firm, and ignored the siren song of tech and practices that were more modern than the one you were handed down (the tech and practices they’re hiring for).

The moment that reverses, I will start advising people not to skill up, as it will look bad in their resumes.

We’re all passing through our jobs, the value of the solutions remains in the hands of the shareholders, if you don’t try to squeeze some long-term value for your resume and long-term employability, you’re assuming a significant opportunity cost on their behalf

They’ll be fine if you made something that works, even if it was a bit faddish, make sure you take care of yourself along the way (they won’t)

AGPL and non-compete licenses like SSPL and FSL have been steadily adopted —Redis, ElasticSearch and Liquibase notably switched to them—, pretty much motivated by not wanting to be screwed over by Big Tech one way or another.

More than fine if you ask me, giving away your work for megacorps and oligarchs to steamroll your business or otherwise society at large isn’t much of a public service in the end

Apparently the whole deal with Liquid Water is that it's so people don't give you crap for not drinking alcohol at parties or festivals.

If they see you drinking water or soda off a normal can, people will feel self conscious and get pissy about them drinking but not you, with a flaming skull on the can, nobody bats an eye.

The target audience is actually recovering alcoholics from party crowds, and the product is pure signaling.

Well the "hackers" jacking in to the "Hacker News" discussion board, where we talk about the oppression brought in by the corrupt AI-peddling corporations employed by the even more corrupt government, probably aren't all looking like Zero Cool, Snake Plissken, Officer K, or the like, though a bunch may be.

I’ve got great news for you: there are more girls with colored hair than ever before, and we got the Synthwave revival, just try to find the right crowd and put on Timecop1983 in your headphones

Cyberpunk always sucked for all but the corrupt corporate, political and military elites, so it’s all tracking

I imagine that this makes it much less viable for hobby use, or as a dependency for other open source projects, but setting up a private docker registry and building this image nightly isn’t onerous for any business

13 years old me, back when Maddox offered a very fresh and novel form of content you could grab on your way through the Information Superhighway

That author uses it to mean “model”, as he calls a variety of programming models “spherical cows”.

Well, for sure, a core tenet of computer science is that all models of computing are equally powerful in what inputs they can map to what outputs, if you set aside any other details

Lying is a stupid way of selling something and making money

That was written in a world where “selling software” meant charging people money for Software that ran in their computers, like the famous example of Stallman mailing tapes with Emacs tarballs.

The whole thing was thought up when residential internet couldn’t be used for much more than email, BBS and Usenet, and it wasn’t viable to use it for downloading a text editor.

It’s not a timeless set of principles to live by forever after, proprietary software —that’s not charged for- dominates everyone’s lives more than ever in the public and private sphere, precisely from companies that benefited from the open source ecosystem of software engineering tools.

That reminds me of the “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment about rogue AI fulfilling a particular goal, without being held to any consideration of human welfare

I thought it was a very novel idea at first, until I realized that this describes all manners of human groups, notably corporations and lobbying groups, they will turn the world into a stove, subvert democracy, (try to) disrupt the economic and social fiber of society, anything to eg maximize shareholder value

It was developer experience that precipitated this fallout, a language usually needs to be growing in user base for the developer experience to improve as people complain and tackle problems they encounter.

The old linked thread had some prominent figure saying “but just do <inconvenient thing>” in response to every issue, if the language isn’t growing, only people accustomed to the inconveniences stick around.

So, I’d say it used to be Clojure, but now I doubt there is one.

Well in Sam’s ideal world you’ll be using bots to keep yourself distracted.

You would like to learn to play the guitar? Sorry, that kind of money didn’t pass in the budget bill, but how about you ask the bot to create music for you?

Elites also get something way better than keeping people busy for distraction… they get mass, targeted manipulation and surveillance to make sure you act working the borders of safety.

You know what job will surely survive? Cops. There’ll always be the nightstick to keep people in line.

> Not necessarily. Such forces could be outvoted or out maneuvered

Could.

> So many assumptions. There is no need to just assume any particular distribution of boredom across the future population of the world. Making predictions about social unrest is even more complicated

I’m assuming that previous outcomes predict future failures, because the forces driving these changes are of our societies, and not a hypothetical, assumed new society.

In this world, ownership, actual, legal ownership, is a far stronger and fundamental right than any social right to your well-being.

You would have to change that, which is a utopian project whose success has been assumed in the past, that a dialectical contradiction of the forces of social classes would lead to the replacement of this framework.

It is indeed very complicated, but you know what’s even more complicated? Utopian projects.

Sorry but I see it as far more likely that the plebes will be told to kick rocks and ask the bots to generate art for them, when asking for money for art supplies on top of their cup noodle money.

Because otherwise you'd have to convince AI-owners and select professionals to let go of their wealth to give a comfortable and fulfilling life of leisure to the unemployed.

More likely it will look like the current welfare schemes of many countries, now add mass boredom leading to unrest.

Sam Altman has expressed a preference for paying people in vouchers for using his chatbots to kill time: https://basicincomecanada.org/openais-sam-altman-has-a-new-i...

Tinfoil's chat lets you do that, add a bit of context to every new chat. It's fully private, to boot, it's the service I use, these are Open Source models like DeepSeek, Llama and Mistral that they host.

https://tinfoil.sh/

BigQuery ELT, the org I went to was rather immature in their data practice, and I sold them on getting some proper orchestration (Dataform, their preference over DBT, and Airflow), and keeping the architecture coherent.

I'd have rather stuck with Spark just because I prefer Scala or Python to SQL (and that comes with e.g. being far easier to unit test), but life happened and that ecosystem was getting disrupted anyway.

That does sound, as you allude, like IBM on its long downward spiral of globbing up products to stay relevant and touting them as an integral solution, while in-house development stuck to keeping legacy products alive for their Enterprise contracts. I wonder if they'll be foolish enough to start doing consulting around them, obliterating their economies of scale in the process; so far they are going with the "consulting partners" approach.

Oh well. Databricks notebooks were hella cool back when companies were willing to spend lavishly on having engineers write cloud hosted Scala in the first place, and at premium prices to boot.

What is the lowdown on Databricks? Their bread and butter were hosted Spark and notebooks. As tasks done in Spark over a data lake began to be delegated wholesale to columnar store ELT, they tried to pivot to "lake houses", then I sort of lost track of them after I got out of Spark myself.

Did Delta Lake ever catch on? Where are they going now?

RoR?

If it's still like the RoR I used, it can never be considered "boring", just old.

It was a framework where code you dump in "conventional" locations is autoloaded everywhere.

With DSLs based on interpreting the method name as an expression, reflecting on them in `method_missing` implementations you get from inheriting classes.

Where state is shared between instance objects by way of reflection.

Where source diving is the documentation in many third party packages.

No, these were reasons why "rockstar" became a pejorative in the programming community for a while.

Your impassionate argument in favor of an ethnic cleansing with bombs, starvation and lack of sanitation lies in stark contrast to this outrage about the Uyghurs' culture being erased with development and draconian imprisonment for suspected extremism, while at the same time, the West Bank was reduced to a patchwork of ghettos with draconian checkpoints where life is cheap if you are suspected to be an extremist.

On the one hand, the slaughter of teenagers today in Gaza is justified because of the sins of their forefathers in electing Hamas, on the other, it's a genocidal atrocity that beards can only be so long in Xinjiang.

The US is only more righteous for supporting America's Greatest Ally at the cost of the lives of it citizens, of those of Arab countries and, now with the TikTok ban, to its founding principles, in your world.

LLM companies aren't being funded by the hundreds of billions because investors expect science to be advanced by text and image generators.

I find it very unlikely that the commodification of knowledge work will be for the betterment humanity, I don't know if people are expecting here that just because the value of more people's labor becomes zero that we will do, what, do away with money? No, it will just mean that fewer people will have the chance to earn the right to use space and resources in a meaningful way.

Zuckerberg would rather have them hooked on the "save europa" content in his platform, there's little more than that to this ban.

There's always the basic drives that his mental illness place in his actions. If nothing else, attention, validation and social status are plenty enough for someone of his condition, that of narcissism.