leoc

Surely that was Oppenheimer.

The usual “buy the rumour, sell the news” then?

I seem to recall that Mystic River was ridiculously highly connected in the Oracle of Bacon database at about the time that that film came out in 2003.

The HOPL 2 paper "The evolution of Lisp" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/154766.155373 covers about 1963-1992.

Out, damnéd xit! out, I say!

There seems to be a bit of a symmetry between what WoW did to Blizzard and what WH40K did to Games Workshop.

Good boys! Good boys.

Tantacrul (software project manager, UX guy, muso and YouTuber)’s “Music on Reality TV is Insanely Manipulative” https://youtube.com/watch?v=G77ev9pks4I is pretty good.

Current self-driving systems also require periodic manual intervention from remote operators https://www.reuters.com/technology/waymo-defends-use-remote-... , for that matter.

But an appropriate level of caution about change is necessary. Change isn't always good https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... , and it doesn't always deliver what it promises or arrive on schedule.

That's not obviously so. The adoption of JS wasn't particularly hindered by the fact that users have to match their brackets and generally avoid syntax errors.

I assume it’s in part a consequence of Blow’s newer self-definition as a game-programming iron man: after all the work on the custom engine you probably feel the need to get as much mileage as you can out of it. But as others have said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115215 , presumably they could have applied some razzle-dazzle like staged releases in “seasons” to make the large amount of content feel more like ongoing fun than a huge homework assignment.

There's also Backus' "Programming in America in the 1950s – Some Personal Impressions" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EylBknGtkqA at the 1976 First International Research Conference on the History of Computing. The conference paper is pp. 125-135 https://archive.org/details/historyofcomputi0000inte/page/12... in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980, Metropolis, Howlett and Rota eds., ISBN 0-12-491650-3 ). Naturally it also got a session at the first History of Programming Languages conference in 1978 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/960118.808379 at which Backus spoke again https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025#sec2 . And of course it's one of the stars of Jean Sammet's 1969 Programming languages: history and fundamentals book (ISBN 0137299885) where the FORTRAN section begins on p. 143 https://archive.org/details/programminglangu00unse/page/143/... .

And Fortran doesn’t just predate Lisp, it’s a direct ancestor. McCarthy was talking about LISP as a FORTRAN extension for quite a while during LISP’s development. The original Fortran is effectively LISP 0.

My conclusion from all this is that Douglas Adams joined the writing team some time ago and has been responsible for the whole LLM arc.

Indeed the hardware-inefficiency of local inference is in principle good, not bad, for hardware vendors. But until the manufacturing capacity exists to ship local-inference systems with enough VRAM to enough customers then inference is going to keep taking place at (more-)efficient centralised providers and nVidia will have to keep trying to sell what it makes to them to remain an AI player.

Then they finally shut the thing down just in time to make sure that it couldn't attract any kind of exodus of unhappy users from Twitter or Facebook.

If this were built atop something that let me own my own posts (ATProto?) it would be interesting. You'd think that maybe Bluesky would be talking to people like Orkut Büyükkökten, the Friendster guy Jonathan Abrams and the Birches who founded Bebo, since it's a technically sound(ish?) and interesting platform and a somewhat-established social-media presence which is searching for a broader (and more agreeable) userbase, while a number of those old founders seem to have a continued interest in taking a run at having a social media platform.

We know that by and large the biggest new proposed datacentres aren't intended to aggregate existing capacity but to add to it. Adding 26GW spread across three datacentres no doubt is more efficient than spreading 26GW across 26 or 260 new datacentres. But anything like 100GW or 400GW of total extra datacentre capacity, in the US alone https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/02/insid... , is enough of an increase that the question becomes whether the increase is economically or socially justified at all, and some (I assume) relatively modest efficiency gains from taking datacentre aggregation to the next level surely won't have a decisive impact on that. We're certainly beyond the point where such questions are largely just a problem for the investors (or even for Americans), especially when it turns out that, whoops, the DCs are going to be powered by finite, highly-dispatchable and CO_2-emitting natural gas after all, not baseload nuclear stations.

Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)

And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.

> [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...

For those who haven't clicked through, that article mentions a 9GW datacentre planned for Utah by Kevin O'Leary's company as well as a 10GW datacentre planned for Ohio by Softbank https://apnews.com/article/ai-data-center-ohio-uranium-enric... and Facebook's planned 7GW data centre in Louisiana https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... , all largely to be gas-powered it seems.

Around the time that Triumph of the Nerds came out in 1995 I saw the segment in which Cringely introduces the audience to someone he builds up as "the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP15q-s1yMM . When it was revealed to be Steve Jobs I—a teenage Macintosh fanboy!—thought "what, that has-been? How ridiculous."

It's reasonably clear that Star Wars would have been in some trouble if it had come out with anything like the original John Jympson edit, and in that sense it's fairly safe to say that Star Wars truly was saved in the edit. (Though that's also not very surprising, as by all accounts it's not particularly unusual for a good completed film to have had a shaky first edit.) But it seems that all the evidence suggests that George Lucas was always unhappy with Jympson's editing and understood its problems, and that it was he who selected three professional editors including Marcia Lucas to work on a re-edit which achieved his high-level creative intentions and was closely and actively supervised by him, and in which he did some of the hands-on editing to boot. There doesn't seem to be much to support the idea that the (other) editors took Star Wars out of the hands of a hapless George Lucas and bestowed on him a film which had been reworked beyond his own capabilities or vision, which is the usual "saved in the edit" claim, let alone that Marcia Lucas alone was largely responsible for that supposed feat, which is what was claimed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883758 .

Do you mean the prequel trilogy here?

It doesn't affect the specific point in question here, but it's probably best to treat the RocketJump video with caution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .

Marcia Lucas along with two other editors won the Film Editing Oscar for Star Wars/ANH/Ep. 4 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1dW6bNBzN8&t=52s ): she was no doubt a very good editor. Neither she nor the other two "saved Star Wars in the edit" in the manner often claimed. For example, Marcia Lucas fought to keep the teen-movie version of the opening with Luke meeting Biggs and others at Tosche Station in Tatooine, while George Lucas had always preferred to begin the Tatooine segment with the droids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE&t=1407s .

That version of events has been disputed: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .

There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.

Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .

There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.

Right. It is weird that this has to be explained, but let's make it clear: in the Before Times, probably anytime up to at least the late '00s, probably approximately no-one in or around free or open source software would have endorsed the idea that the legal disclaimers completely free even the most mainstream, self-publicising, broad-userbase open source projects from any moral or ethical obligation to have even the slightest concern to ensure that their software doesn't hurt or betray its non-paying users, even in the most harmful ways. And if one of the many and often vocal FOSS opponents of the time had started claiming that this is what open-source developers really believe they'd have rightly been seen as having veered off into the lunatic fringe. And that's because it's a, frankly, bonkers idea which is radically detached from normal human understanding of the social and moral role and obligations of volunteers, voluntary organisations, charitable givers or gift-givers. And also because it's a wildly counterproductive idea to put out there if you're hoping to increase FOSS adoption.

That does leave the question of why this idea has started to take off more recently. Part of the answer is certainly that Rich Hickey, disgracefully, set the ball rolling in this direction, and that many others have welcomed it as one weird trick and one pat answer for all the worsening problems of developer burnout. Unfortunately it seems hard to dismiss the idea that it's also social breakdown driven by a broader trend, as over time we move further and further from the pre-'60s "neurotic society" of people obsessed with duty and social conformity (often with oppressive or destructive results, to be sure) into the "psychopathic society" in which even people who don't themselves merit a Cluster B diagnosis have internalised narcissistic and psychopathic attitudes.

I think some of it is an unintended consequence of the backlash against bad or puzzling error dialog boxes in '80s and '90s software. A lot of people seem to have concluded that the easy solution to the challenges of error reporting was just to fail silently instead roll_safe.jpg .

Suppose that you build a childrens' slide in your front garden. You put up a big sign saying "Consider using my slide! https://neovim.io/ Here are several wonderful things about it. It's free for everyone!" in your yard. Underneath in smaller letters you add "[No liability]". You also put up noticeboard ads for your free kids' slide in neighbourhood shopping malls https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/neovim https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Neovim . Unfortunately, when you built the slide, you left sharp metal edges and corners sticking far up on the inside, reaching into the path of the user. No reasonably competent and diligent metalworker or slide-maker would have failed to notice these major flaws or failed to understand the serious danger they represented. Several neighbourhood children use the slide and receive serious gashes to the legs, arms or face, and have to go to the hospital. Even assuming that your no-liability small print somehow had you free and clear legally, do you believe that your behaviour would have been ethically and morally above all criticism? Do you think that "should have read the small print!" or "can't I build what I like in my own front yard?!" would have you covered? Do you think that your family and friends would agree?