jrm4

This feels like a deeply important observation. Now also, would be interesting to include e.g. a short video or photograph for the AI to use as well.

Big picture, it's all kind of funny. Over a decade ago, I ended up having to be an undergraduate instructor in Project Management (despite zero experience in it) and kind of speedrunning all of that philosophy. And then, learning the "new" things like Agile, Waterfall, Scrum, whatever.

It was immediately apparent to me why these existed, it was because "software development" somehow collectively decided to abandon core principles of PM.

Like the most basic stuff, e.g. Projects have a beginning and an end.

I chose to not take any of it too seriously in terms of what I taught undergrads, and post-mortems like this make me feel quite justified in that.

Nothing inherently special or even superior about TUIs, I think this very simply just speaks to "what happened" which is the fragmentation of the GUI space over the course of Microsoft v Apple v Linux v "The Web."

Seems like it could have gone differently. Feels like the time could be ripe for something like a "declarative gui spec."

Again, I'm more talking about "atheism in effect" than I am "textbook definition."

I'd say, sure, it's reasonable to discuss, but it's often overblown. The older I get, the less significance "atheism" feels like it has just about anywhere.

No shade to anyone, but I have very little interest in "internal beliefs that seem not to affect people much," which atheism seems to fall square into.

Not to me. The wise position starts from "Humans are mysterious, but I am one and I see that others are like me, so I think we have souls." along with "I get what a machine is from first principles and based on all I know, they don't feel."

I get that this isn't as rigorous as one might like, but I think in the real world it's wise.

Yeah, I'll grant you that one. I don't think he necessarily voted for Trump, and for me he did a good job of explaining Trump's appeal.

But also, there is some sadly common brand of stupid that Taleb fell victim to when it came to thinking about Harris v. Trump on matters in the Middle East.

I am. I'm also aware that *they don't always meet that goal".

That's why I said "something related to it."

As mullvad and others correctly note, however -- they can't leak something they never had in the first place.

Third parties make for juicy targets.

All of you keep missing the "something related to it."

They have something that could end up being a juicy point-of-failure that does not need to exist.

I absolutely understand how it works, which is why I said something like it.

You still have an extra party involved; and you can't fully guarantee that Apple et al is doing things perfectly, and again, in this scenario you've created a 3rd very juicy target.

Probably my biggest tech hill-i'll-die-on is:

Password management involving a 3rd party is dumb and should never ever have been a thing. Before two parties had the secret (or something related to it) and now three parties have it and that's objectively worse -- even taking into account "the lazy user" or whatever.

I know we're past that in a lot of places for a lot of people, but nope, my dad and his printed out sheet of password next to his desk is still beating every company out there.

I don't think it's "spite," I just don't think he's that smart -- or wise -- to be precise. He just has "zealotry in the other direction."

I think so, personally. I wouldn't bank a lot on "the soul" per se, but Dawkins is absolutely one of those "smart but not wise" people.

I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it.

Someone in this space who handles this very well, unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Op said "accepting," not proving.

And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.

Entirely unsurprising. At the risk of whatever, your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them.

Even people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson don't go on and on about "atheism" for a reason; there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."

Not even industrial, I remember someone asking, what's the heaviest thing you can buy per dollar. And someone ran the math, somewhere it's like $20 for a full swimming pool on the expensive side.

Interesting people talking about whether they should be "defended," here or whatnot, and all of that strikes me as wildly naive.

They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going.

But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up.

Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.

But, you know,

Yet.

Maybe you're not the target, then.

I haven't heard too many people say these extreme-sounding, yet at least arguably true points out loud.

Someone should be saying them, and the fact that it's not your particular cup of tea may not be the biggest issue here.

This strikes me as a good "meta" article, though. As in, yes, people here probably don't need this. But perhaps a lot of other people do.

Looking at Zed (and Brave in another thread) I'm really firming up this idea that the "big funded private company model" for essential tech software is just most often idea. They don't know how to add features without also adding bloat and BS.

This is why I say Docker is the only real "success" story here. And note, I mean a success story for the users; Docker tries real hard to enshittify and fails, and that's good.

Their whole thing looks sketchy, frankly. I'm not saying they're evil or have some deep secret ulterior motive. But their "vision" appears to be bunch of absolutely half-baked ideas for privacy, for which Firefox has a much more boring, and consequently better, track record.

I don't understand this either. The GPL doesn't address end users and their use of software at all, to be technical. It only addresses what terms of copyright redistributors of GPLed software are allowed to apply in-turn to subsequent end users.

As people have noted, the "local" part makes it hard.

Here's my question, y'all. What is the deal with the magic Syncthing uses and why can't we use it for stuff like this? And well, for everything?

(I've been doing this stuff for years and I still can't wrap my head around this question)

Right, as I said elsewhere, maybe let's just let "open-source" have it.

"Open-source" can be "anything you can go out and grab a copy of and use" but doesn't give you much legal certainty about any of it, and reserve "free software" for the other, better thing.

I'm genuinely torn on this one; I get technically why not, but why I think I have no problem with it is the wishy-washiness of "open source" generally.

As I teach this stuff to people newer to this tech, it's probably just easier and more helpful to refer to the wide array of "stuff you can just download and use yourself" as "open-source" and then after that, go deeper and talk about why Stallman was right, how "Free Software" was first. etc.

I lucked into starting very early what I planned on doing in retirement, which is teaching college; as a result I did that for a while with no real life experience. Later, I ended up at the same time starting a company for family-related (but kind of big time) web project.

And while I don't have a problem with career instructors/academics generally, they can be so dramatic. :)

I have no doom and gloom at all for my IT students. Opportunities and crises really are the same thing in the real world; I just tell them, just learn and enjoy learning the tech and keep an eye out for how you can be a problem solver.

You'll be fine.

I teach online and Zoom + screen sharing on Wayland is just not there yet.

Slightly offtopic and it's odd because I'm asking for something that feels like should exist though, like, I get that I have no right to it.

This, for X, but not under Gnome or KDE? Even better, perhaps as just a script or something under Openbox?

(might be time to get into the vibecoding...)

Weird. The project is obviously holding itself out to be some amazing awesome new thing. Extraordinary claims at least invite questions like this.

Or are you all suggesting we should be comfortable with, and never question, flowery unchallenged advertising copy?

Still though -- once you got a workflow, no matter how terrible, it strongly tended to continue to work that way, and it was still much easier to diagnose, fix, and just generally not have unexpected behavior.

This is the issue; agents introduce more unexpected behavior, at least for now.

My gut is that always on "agents who can do things unexpectedly" are a dead-end, but what AI can do is get you to a nice AND predictable "workflow" easier.

e.g. for now I don't like AI for dealing with my info, but I love AI helping me make more and better bash scripts, that deal with my info.