You miss the point entirely little bro. Modern water-moving infrastructure is qualitatively different than two thousand years ago. Why would modern education be exempt from a similar transformation?
89 karma · joined May 4, 2026
Einstein once said physics is like looking at the outer movement of a watch and attempting to understand its internal mechanisms.
LLMs watch the outer movement of our keyboards in an attempt to comprehend our varieties of intelligence (intuitive, rational, symbolic, logical, ...)
In other words, it made more sense to 'frontload' hardthought and pondering so one was prepared [for whatever may come].
People also thought aqueducts were the best way to move water for thousands of years.
Uh in what universe? Obviously physical books are helpful but are not most of the new ones being written with the assistance of an LLM?
You can let the LLM decide how to name things, and spend days or weeks refactoring things. Or you can get your sketchpad out and invent/derive Correct names for methods, api methods, database schema, and so forth, and save yourself a lot of trouble.
The LLM is great at elaboration, but bad at inception, that is, bad at starting off from a blank canvas accurately for a long-lived project. That's where human creativity and genius come in. Not in the elaboration, but in the seedling.
In the orchestration metaphor, it's as if you give the LLM a blurry blob of reality and it starts playing music on it. You clarify, that's a saxaphone, or that's a cello, and suddenly it holds it correctly and plays it with sophistication. If you neglect fair naming or good-naming of your methods and needs, the LLM does its best guess on what this blurry blob of reality is, and it is often a blurry result to accompany.
For example, when I am reading a book, I often take notes of my favorite quotes/sentences/things that stick out or perk up my ears. Usually if I own the book or it's a used copy of mine I make a note of the page number on the very last blank page(s) and write out the full sentence/quote. Then when I go back months or years later I just open to the last page and can find all my favorite/important quotes. Most 200 page books typically have ~20 useful sentences for me to reference [going forward] - it's basically like making your own index or table of contents.
That long aside, just to say, if I'm not "very aware" or "consciously mindful" of what I'm copying down or writing, I'm able to do it very well on autopilot without etching anything into my memory -- as if no recallable moment gets etched into the wet cement of the brain unless I'm actively "hip to it." I wonder if others have this "autopilot" problem.
Github owns and controls NPM, npm is no longer a community-controlled project. Therefore, Github should [happily] take on the duties, responsibilities, and obligations of a software publisher to provide either: trust ratings on packages and code, or literally and not figuratively scan every single package-and-version on npm for appropriateness.
But obviously you already got that point and just wanted to exert some modicum of bossiness and control by having me regurgitate my well-formulated thoughts for a third time while painting inside the lines you insist are relevant.
So when you cover yourself with a blanket your parents bought you when you were a child, you are covering yourself with cotton that grew in a specific climate, in a specific place, with soil and sunshine and water and temperature that baked that cotton plant and made it exactly what it is/was. Growing the same seed elsewhere will not have identical outcomes. If you grow it in a cold place, you will get a different fabric texture than if you grow it in a hot place, or a moist place, or a dry place. And beyond the suitable range for growing, it simply will not bear fruit. We label different crops and resources by the same label and call them "varieties" of one another, but in reality we are simply being lazy with our specificity and our categorization. A plant grown in a hot climate has a tendency to transmit the heat it was gestated/incubated in, and a plant grown in a cold climate has a tendency to transmit and transfer the coolness it was gestated in. These are subtle truths not noticed by the masses - the system of conditions is imbued, is etched, into the summary product.
Consider how certain varieties of wine or lemons or drink are famous specifically because of the origin climate/temperature/soil. Sicilian lemons cannot be grown anywhere, just in Sicily. Champagne is named after the region from which it bears its eponymous name. And it is no secret that two "identical" dishes prepared in two completely different countries will taste very different and have different effects on the body, because the ingredients are sourced locally, and in the sourcing is the makeup, not on the exacting-chemical/chemistry level, but on layers that are subtle -- in the folds between the atom and aspect-of-the-naked-eye, true layers and strata that are largely invisible and untracked, knowable only by the environment which bore/gave-birth-to them.
In certain mystical traditions there is the concept of the "mandala" which is not only the presence in the center, it is the surroundings. Every fruit comes not only from its own inherent properties as encoded in the seed, but also in the soil , the water, the metaphorical sunshine it receives, the steady state temperature of the spot. All these factors constitute what we call the "material."
Anyway, thinking of these ~fringe examples helps clarify my thinking on the matter: it sounds like we're basically targeting three different things:
1) The thing(s) you want. What is the finished product you're gunning after.
2) The raw materials that go into the thing(s) you want. What is the entire process ,, with , from an engineering perspective ,, all its "inputs" at different moments of the flow.
3) The actionable thing: Making a universal index of products that once were, so we can track what they are made of, and what their creation-cycle is from raw materials to assembly/assemblage. Additionally, here we can also track where you can still buy/procure/obtain them if versions/copies/prints exist today.
But realistically my friend, you are better off just buying ten or twenty pairs of your favorite shoes when they exist, because the rotating crushing automaton of production-reality that underpins all of consumerism is constantly consuming itself. How many times have I purchased a one-time-print of a hoodie or piece of merchandise that is no longer available, nor will it ever be available again? I won't go so far as to wax poetical and say that rarity is what makes things valuable, because it's not, however tightly coupled those traits might be; but cool things being one-offs and highly scenario-bound for obtaining them is actually useful information about how the universe works. Reproducibility and the urge for regularity is a logos-construct [logical, rational, reasoning intelligence] while dwelling in the felt-sense of the realm and leaning into intuition is an eros-abiding [intuition, connection, relation, significance].
So while I understand the urge for the clothing you like to never end or be discontinued, I think a more useful approach is not how do we keep the cool versions existing forever, but how do we keep more fresh, new cool versions coming unabatedly. Sources get exhausted in multiple senses of the term, I think we need to think more metaphysically about how to replenish sources on every level of the meaning of the word source.
One reasonable approach is to increase the scrutiny for new releases based on how many active downloads of the package there are. So for new packages, maybe there will be not a ton of scrutiny, but for things that are downloaded by millions of users, like Axios, there would be significantly more scrutiny per release.
The epidemic of "not my job" and "[we] don't get paid to do that" is a large contributor to why the world is so messed up. I don't know what to call this phenomenon. In the Hawaiian language there is a word Kuleana which means "sacred responsibility" or "sacred task." If more people took on their Kuleana joyfully we would be inviting the ideal [realm] more rapidly.
However, I do find promise in one aspect of your idea: an infinite archival catalogue of items-that-once-were. Then, you can link to things like, as others have mentioned, eBay listings where you can still find the "originals.'
Stylistically, I find Bukowski's "I know it / will" linebreak to be offensive to my aesthetic sensibilities as an excellent writer.
Obviously border agents need to be able to check your bags for contraband but checking all your gmails just because they want to? That's antithetical to the spirit of the law. That is overreach that does not stand up to scrutiny.
smuggling endangered species? bad. okay search a suitcase.
having unrestricted access to all my gmails because i need to catch a plane? absolutely unacceptable.
having your phone autowipe when pressed by authority? quit whatever nefarious shit you're doing, thanks