If the monks in the year 1k had CNC machines, they’d have built bigger and more elaborate cathedrals. The act was the message. The gothic cathedral was impossible by medieval standards, and that was part of the act of building it.
And, to your point, yes, if the monks followed the construction with a hundred years of prayer and sacrifice to consecrate the building, indeed the building would carry a more powerful emotional resonance than it does now. The sacrifice is the point, the effort is the point. It’s an act of devotion, not just one of construction.
This is both incredible and I think… “misses the point” is the wrong phrase, but maybe omits something both subtle and crucial in the process.
A gothic cathedral is both an incredible work of art and also the work of hundreds or thousands of hands over decades and centuries - you are looking not just at the final product, but at the love and commitment it took to make that work of art, the long-term dedication and belief that it should exist even if we don’t live to see it exist. You’re looking at an expression of love not just for God and for art and beauty, but for future generations and people we’ll never know. The time and effort isn’t an unfortunate part of the process, it’s intrinsic to what we feel when we witness the cathedral - a connection to others, reaching both ways.
I understand why the monks have developed this technique, and I don’t disagree with them - the act of building a gothic cathedral is outside the capacity of modern society. I’ll never begrudge someone a hack to preserve some beauty in this machine we’ve created. But I can’t help but feel like they’ve created a facsimile of a cathedral - they’ve created the palace at Disneyland, not Notre Dame.
Except when those employees also have command of armies, at which point history has shown that swapping them out before they get too comfortable is key for keeping a republic a republic.
Gibson is a trend spotter. He doesn’t look at technology, he looks at people and culture (he is notably interested in fashion). It’s easier to see what’s happening when you pay attention to who’s doing the thing and what they’re doing, as opposed to what it’s being done to.
Yeah, I think the key here is that you have to know what the limitations are. UUIDv7 does _not_ provide you with sorted and ordered IDs by creation time, it provides you with _kinda sorta_ sorted and ordered IDs by creation time. That's probably fine for a lot of use cases, but if it's not OK for yours (forensic accounting, risk mitigation for banks, whatever), you can't use it for that. You're right it's not a technical problem necessarily, but when the marketing material describes something without an asterisk, people who are unaware that what's being described is impossible at the limits can make bad system design decisions based on that promise.
It’s more than that - it’s that if price is your only signal, it’s always going to be cheaper as a producer to ignore long-term sustainability, which means the companies which do so will “outcompete” the companies which plan for the future, leaving you with a market full of companies utterly incapable of handling an adverse event when it comes around. It’s not just greed, it’s a fundamental problem with how the market compresses signals about companies and products.
It’s currently in your interest to do so, or so you believe. That’s fine. Understand that may change, because, again, you are an individual and not a nation state, and specifically not the nation state you’re pledging allegiance to and putting your safety in the hands of.
The United States government needs to make tradeoffs. They are as you list.
The Chinese government also needs to make tradeoffs. You can imagine what they are.
You as an individual also need to make tradeoffs. In doing so, you ought be sure to remember you’re not a nation state, you’re an individual human being.
(You may decide “I find myself one small being in a world full of nation states, and given that, I trust the US government to keep me safe, and therefore will align myself with its interests,” at which point “ban DeepSeek” is in your interests as well as those of the US government, but you shouldn’t get the two confused, lest you miss the moments those interests diverge.)
This has the delightful and surely unintentional side effect of all but ensuring all federal agencies who want to use LLMs have to direct their budget to one of the domestic frontier labs (OpenAI, xAI), so that’s a nice big fat pipe of taxpayer money that’ll be going to backstop those cats while they deal with the fact that they’re getting their lunch eaten by competitors who didn’t decide the way to build a sustainable future was to incur future debts to the tune of a sizable percent of the GDP of a G20 nation.
I mean, spec sheets and all that, they seem like they'd be good, but they're just insanely predatory as a brand at this point. I learned it the same way you did.
I have a Sony Bravia that was ludicrously pricy but seems to have been made by people who genuinely love what they do. It's got rough edges, but it's a very well-behaved product. Among other things, you can basically disable all the Google Home stuff and have it run as a borderline "dumb" TV.
(I'm aware of Sony's history here. Ain't no saints in this business, I'm afraid.)
“Why would Samsung do this?” Because they are a deeply, deeply consumer hostile brand. Do not buy Samsung consumer products, no matter what the feature set and price tag look like. They are not trying to provide you with a good or service in exchange for money, they are trying to take as much of your money as they can.
I could, or you could open your mind to the idea that the reason opentype wound up being as complex as it is is because the problem space you’re trying to solve is more complicated than you think it is. There is a working reference implementation which does the thing you think can be done more cheaply, you’re just throwing popcorn from the cheap seats here.
And you've now gotten 92% of the way there. Iterate a few dozen more times to get up to 97%, 98%, 99%, etc., and eventually you'll have rewritten OpenType.
Re-reading your comment, realize I’d missed your point. You’re right, I’ll take a look at Incus. I also appreciate the pointer to OKD - until the future arrives, it’s nice to have a more pleasant present, too.
And yet, actually mapping all written human languages and their ligatures, variations, etc, seems to require this level of complexity. So the choice is either you draw the line and decide which languages you consider legitimate or not, or you build a machine of sufficient complexity to capture all languages, and the tradeoff, I suppose, is how much knowledge you want to actually be able to capture in your computerized system.
It's an interesting move to point me to a rigorously written English language definition of a formal language to make the argument that humans don't co-opt our natural languages as formal languages when the need arises.
Which makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too.
That’s incredible. I’m always impressed with the utility of the TrueType/open font spec - the flexibility there is really an underappreciated work of engineering genius.