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> AI tools are already automating large parts of the software engineering role

Are they? I hear a lot of breathless claims about this but no-one I know is automating anything with AI. It's a useful suggestion engine/menial task helper, but anyone who's used it for more than a day knows its severe limitations.

Hell, i wish it was a lot more powerful. I have a bunch of bulma CSS to convert to tailwind. Both ChatGPT and Gemini Ultra fail miserably at what you'd think is a simple, by-the-numbers task, but nope, their results are so problematic it ends up taking more time to fix than just doing it yourself in the first place. They're useful "sparring partners", but that's about it...

It would be awesome to write/read the selected cities into/from the URL so selections could be shared easily.

> I see the consumption of alcohol as weak, immature, and reckless

I don't drink, at all, ever. I came to the conclusion quite some time ago that it's been the cause of far more problems than it's ever solved, and it's just better for everyone if I never pick up a glass again.

That said, I know plenty of people who somehow do have that chip installed that allows responsible drinking, in moderation, in appropriate settings - and I would never be so judgemental as your quote. There do exist plenty of people who can drink in moderation and without any real negative consequences. Who am I to begrudge or look down on that, and indeed who are you to?

There's certainly a lot of people for whom alcohol consumption, knowing all the facts, would indeed be "weak, immature, and reckless". Knowing myself and my history, that list includes me! But there's plenty of people not on that list, and so I just don't think you can make blanket judgements like that.

> I see Elixir developers comfortable with Erlang and vice-versa

I agree with this. I was an "in theory" fan of erlang for a long time, but was always put off by its syntax, which I don't find too pleasing. But after a lot of elixir, and kind of rubbing up against erlang anyway, you sort of can't help but learn it, or at least learn to read it. Once you start using things like ETS, for example, you're going to be reading erlang docs. By the time you even know about ETS, though, you've probably seen enough erlang that it's not scary anymore.

I do prefer elixir - but I admit it's purely a subjective, aesthetic preference. They're both good and I can imagine jumping back and forth as needed.

One thing I will say though is that once you've worked with the BEAM enough you ain't going back. You will rip my genservers out of my cold, dead hands.

I don't disagree. I agree it's worth the extra effort up front if you're expecting the code base to last. And the exponential complexity you mentioned, well, that's basically why I left Rails. It can be designed well.. but you're going against the grain, and unless the rest of your team is totally on board, it's a struggle.

That wasn't the question though. The question was, which is easier? And let me tell you, you can't beat User.first. Even typing this comment I'm proving my point as I can't remember how to do that in ecto. User |> first() |> Repo.one()? after importing and aliasing a bunch of mysterious (to the beginner) things?

Right tool for the job. If i was building a temporary app, i'd use rails and make very very sure everyone was on board with the idea that it was temporary. I might even sabotage it so it couldn't be used long term (us evil old rails devs have.. tricks). Proper long term infra? elixir.

Adding to the list of feature suggestions, it would be nice for a manufacturer tier filter. I'm not interested in "A-Tech" RAM, which, rumour has it, is sourced from Kingston's chip binning rejects. So of course it's going to be cheaper, that doesn't mean you want it.

It would be nice to be able to filter by only the proper trusted brands and first-party manufacturers.

Unfortunately, it wasn't my hundred million dollar company.

Come on. I am a huge phoenix/elixir fan - I am procrastinating from elixir dev writing this very comment - but this is not even close to true. It is a big learning curve. It's absolutely worth it, IMO, but there is no way it is as easy to get started with as rails. Not even close.

It's my framework of choice and a secret weapon indeed but let's not pretend it's rails-easy. It's just not.

> It's fairly common to use git repositories as a vehicle for serving websites. The webdev pushes their changes to some branch of a publicly available git repository

This doesn't require the git repo to be public. My go-to "day one" static website deploy strategy is to set up a git remote on some VPS, point nginx at its public html folder, then "deploy" to that with a git push, authed by ssh key.

You'd be surprised how far you can get with simple tricks like this. I served about the first 6 months of what would become a multi-hundred-million company with this hilariously simple setup running on a $20/m DO VPS.

OK, i have to admit that one was a little odd, I was beginning to give up and trying new angles. I can't really share my other sessions. But I was trying to get a handle on the language and thought it would be an easily-understood situation (multiple-token auth). I would have at least expected the response to be slightly valid.

The language in question was only open sourced after GPT4's training date, so i couldn't compare. That's actually why I tried it in the first place. And yes, I do expect it to be better - GPT4 isn't perfect but I don't really it ever hallucinating quite that hard. In fact, its answer was basically that it didn't know.

And when I asked it questions with other, much less esoteric code like "how would you refactor this to be more idiomatic?" I'd get either "I couldn't complete your request. Rephrase your prompt and try again." or "Sorry, I can't help with that because there's too much data. Try again with less data." GPT-4 was helpful in both cases.

here was one of them https://gemini.google.com/share/fde31202b221?hl=en

edit: as pointed out, this was indeed a pretty esoteric example. But the rest of my attempts were hardly better, if they had a response at all.

> GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more

Idk, I just tried Gemini Ultra and it's so much worse than GPT4 that I am actually quite shocked. Trying to ask it any kind of coding question ends up being this frustrating and honestly bizarre waste of time as it hallucinates a whole new language syntax every time and then asks if you want to continue with non-working, in fact non-existing, option A or the equally non-existent option B until you realise that you've spent an hour trying to make it at least output something that is even in the requested language and finally that it is completely useless.

I'm actually pretty astonished at how far Google is behind and that they released such a bunch of worthless junk at all. And have the chutzpah to ask people to pay for it!

Of course I'm looking forward to gpt-5 but even if it's only a minor step up, they're still way ahead.

I'd agree, for 95% of projects. If you are serving web pages, or implementing something that doesn't have a lot of server side work in between requests, then sure, pick Rails.

But if you do have something active running on the server - ingesting something, holding connections open, talking independently to other systems, anything soft real time - you will very quickly run into the limits of pure web frameworks and will be forced to re-invent all manner of wheels and end up building much more than you need to. That's where elixir shines and is, IMO, the optimum choice.

Phoenix is basically "rails for when you actually need something more than build the world/destroy the world web requests". It's great for that, and those kind of projects are more interesting IMO, too. But for anything else, use Rails (or, yes, Django).

OK, I admit my experience on french trains is pretty dated. But I was thinking more of the TGVs, etc, and the ICE in DE. It's not just the metros. If it were, Singapore or a Chinese city would probably top the list.

> It doesn’t hurt that Japan’s rail network is often touted as one of the world’s best

Ha! One of? I'm going to tout it right now as the world's best, hands down, full stop, not even close. Second and third place - maybe Germany and France? Western Europe fills out most of the top 10. One can argue about exactly who goes where.

But you can't argue with number one, it's Japan, by a mile, in fact by 19,029 miles.

> syntax is overrated

Speak for yourself there good buddy. It's pretty important to me!

But I do agree with your broader point. From one perspective, Kotlin has been a great success if we define its mission as a test-bed and laboratory for improving Java proper. Unfortunately, while it has arguably succeeded in that mission, in doing so it might unavoidably fail in another mission, which is to thrive as an independent language.

I'd liken it to yarn and npm. Yarn was a huge success.. at forcing npm to massively improve and thus basically rendering itself irrelevant. A bittersweet success, but a success nonetheless..

I wonder if there's a term for this kind of self-sacrificial project which makes the world better for having existed but doesn't survive the process..

They're not pushing anywhere near hard enough. I don't even really want to play new games, I'd settle for just being able to play old games. It's funny the article mentioned Halo - I can't play that on my M1 Max at all, even though I own the mac version. It could probably emulate it fast enough. Hell, it could probably emulate the windows version fast enough. But nope, it doesn't work and I'm not willing to jump through hoops to somehow maybe hack it into working, I want to play a game sometimes, not configure UNIXy stuff, that's what I'm playing a game to take a break from.

And I like the screenshot of Steam. Almost none of my Steam games work, even first-party stuff like Portal or Half-life. FFS, the steam client itself has not even been updated for arm64. That right there tells you how seriously Valve takes the mac gaming market.

If Apple were serious, they would do as MS has repeatedly done and back up to Valve's (and other's) offices with a dump truck full of money and just do whatever it takes to make it work. Until they start to take proactive steps, not this "build it and they will come" mentality which has never worked in the past, I think mac gaming will remain the backwater it is. I'd love to see that change, but I don't think it will.

Legally? Old VHS or laserdisk, so not really an option unless you're a fanatic.

Somewhat less clear cut legally? "Despecialized edition" is the keyword you're looking for on the torrent sites. Theres's even a wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...

That's weird. Which ones are you trying? I get great elixir help out of CGPT4. Sure, it needs close supervision - you can't just trust it and you need to actually understand everything it suggests, and it loves to "forget" things you told it just a moment ago about how you can't use a guard clause there, or whatever - but in terms of just getting a decent starting point, man, it's been a game-changer. The $20 I send OpenAI each month is the most no-brainer money I spend.

It was definitely pretty bad with liveview for a while, while that was under heavy development and API changes, but it's had a data update that mostly fixes that, and if you specify the version it's helpful there too.

> I think maybe you are misrepresenting the thesis of the book

I certainly could be! It has been a while. But are you saying your understand was that sentience was achieved in the scrambler's evolution, and then later discarded in favour of "more teraflops", if you'll excuse my analogy? That wasn't my understanding - but I might well be wrong.

Even if so, the idea remains unconvincing, in fact more so. After a species achieves a certain domination in its environment - something you would very much expect from a civilisation capable of building spacecraft - evolution simply doesn't apply any more, not in any darwinian sense. Even with humans, evolution has basically stopped, or if it continues, does so under circumstances entirely under our control. I find it impossible to imagine any naturally-ocurring scenario in which such any sentient species is forced by evolutionary pressure to optimise away consciousness in favour of other mental tasks. They would instead, as you mention, simply augment their powers with technology - or deliberate genetic intervention.

It's still an interesting premise and definitely got me thinking. I also highly recommend the book. It's actually quite exciting, all this philosophy does not take up that much space in the text ;)

The problem with the chinese room is that someone had to build it... and someone had to invent chinese.

> I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment.

Very much agree, on both counts. Even "just" on earth, it's not like the more mechanistic approaches didn't have plenty of chances to compete. The near-instant and very complete domination by the first species to reach a certain level - and its subsequent orders-of-magnitude raising as it then starts to compete mainly with itself - was totally driven by evolution and there's no reason to think it wouldn't happen anywhere else. The only variable I can really see is in where it (evolution-driven intelligence increase) stops.

It's extremely hard to imagine even the basics such as group coordination and complex communication without some sense of self, and even the animals we see on earth with some level of these abilities demonstrate at least a proto-consciousness, which might well have won out in the end had we not been first past the post. There's no reason to think this phenomenon would be an earth-only anomaly.

It reminds of the "million monkeys with a million keyboards" thought experiment. Yes, they will, given infinite time, produce the entire works of shakespeare. But in the real universe they don't have infinite time, the actual shakespeare evolved, wrote it all first, then took over the monkey planet and enslaved or at least repurposed them before they even got the first paragraph out.

I don't mean to suggest that homo sapiens is some kind of universal peak of capability - we are almost certainly not - but I find it pretty much impossible to imagine sentient creatures being outcompeted by non-sentient ones under any circumstances.

It's expensive, sure, but consciousness appears to be a - the - superweapon, and whoeever grasps it first, wins.

> Both Boeing and the crews share responsibility for the crashes.

And I never said they didn't. I just choose to assign Boeing the lion's share of the blame, as they should never have let that rush-job, cost-cutting death trap of a machine take to the skies in the first place.

Anyway, I see you have your mind made up, so there's not much point in arguing further. If you feel like continuing, why don't you take it up with - let's see - every single global aviation regulator, who also somehow came to the conclusion that there was maybe something a little bit wrong with the type.

> I think at that point it's just better to switch to something truly functional like Elixir.

Well, yes, and I did ;) but since we were talking about ruby...

Everything you said might well be true, and indeed as far as I know it is, but aircraft should not have fail-deadly systems which require lightning reflexes and up-to-the-second training to diagnose and disable fast enough before they crash the freaking plane in the first place. Yes, the pilots of the affected flights might have been able to save the aircraft if their training had been just that little bit better. We'll never know. But the real blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Boeing for shipping such a ticking time bomb in the first place.

Which is why the entire worldwide MAX fleet was grounded for more than a year, and the regulators didn't just mandate a bit of extra training.

Coming up with this narrative about how it's the crew's fault because they failed to disable Boeing's quietly introduced little self-destruct system fast enough to save their own lives was a particularly despicable move from their PR department and I lost a lot of respect for them over that.

Check out hanami next time you're starting something new. It's a little more complex than sinatra, but really gels with how I like to architect things. It's basically "what if dry-rb had a web framework"?

I think you need to re-evaluate your sources of information, because what you wrote in this comment comes across as a bunch of unfounded, conspiracy-addled fantasy world nonsense.

Not only is "NATO vs BRICS" not escalating, there is no "NATO vs BRICS". What are you even on about.

Anyone can come up with a list of mistakes made by any major actor in any sphere you care to name. OK, sure, people and even countries make big, dumb mistakes sometimes.

That doesn't prove anything other than humans remain human. I'm no blind supporter of Uncle Sam but things are just a little bit more complicated than your comment seems to suggest.

I think this is a worthwhile post just as a kind of memento mori to the rest of us.

I found this surprising as well. Here's the actual report, which the Guardian did not think to link:

https://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/publications-and-resourc...

OK, I have to admit I'm surprised it's that high. As you'd expect, it's heavily biased towards the elderly. It's good that a light is being shone on it.

But the article is written as if Australia is some kind of global prime suspect in driving resistance trends, and I continue to doubt whether that is actually the case.

As an Australian originally, this article is pretty hard to take seriously. I have a great many problems with Australia's medical system, especially the GPs-then-hospitals-with-nothing-in-between idea, but overprescribing drugs has not been one of them. If anything it's been the opposite, it's ridiculously hard to get anything out of a doctor there, especially antibiotics and double especially anything that could conceivably be abused in some way.

The experience overseas is so much more loose that I wonder what the author is on, no pun intended. In Indonesia the health care system was so broken that I actually became kind of a low level expert in antibiotics myself, and would regularly self-diagnose and "prescribe" myself whatever, which I could just walk into any pharmacy, demand, and get. In Thailand it's a little stricter but not much.

So with two much larger countries right nearby with much laxer rules it's hard for me to take seriously the notion that tiny, isolated Australia's moderately bad GP habits, if that is even true, is having much of an effect on anything.