tomjen3

Lisp missed its timing. When it was above and beyond everything else and a totally different world, it was way too expensive and way too inefficient.

Today, when mainstream languages have stolen much from Lisp, the benefit of using a language where you can generally just add a gem, egg, or crate is much higher than the benefit of the one thing that is still unique to Lisp: macros. Reflection is inelegant as hell when you compare, but it will get you almost all the way macros do.

At the same time, typed languages have become much more like dynamic languages. The types have disappeared into var and let statements; they are now inferred rather than repeated. Pattern matching has been added, and more—without compromising the benefits for larger teams and larger code bases.

Purists will disagree, but I haven't seen a real world problem solved in Lisp that I couldn't also solve in other languages.

And yes, I am interested in being proven wrong. I want to know what kind of problems still exist that are that hardcore. But I suspect a big part of it is that those who code in this still think the "hello world" for Java looks something like this:

    public class HelloWorld {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
      }
    }

when in reality it now looks like this:

    void main() {
      println("Hello World");
    }

and in C# it looks like this:

    Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");

And comes with full first class support for Linux and Mac.

Lisp is an intellectual tower and has given an incredible amount to the programming community in terms of ideas and a playground for people to try things. I'm not denying any of that — it should be celebrated. But my thesis is this: most of that has been moved, copied, stolen, and adapted to mainstream programming languages.

Look up price versus intelligence for your favorite open model on artificial analysis and compare it with Luna, Sol, Opus, and Sonnet. Mind you, all of those are API prices, and you're still better off paying API prices than using an unsubsidized open model. Subscriptions from any of the major labs are an even better deal.

The major issue is going to be you ran your stuff dry with agents and now you are cut off from the chats. If instead, like 1% had been reserved, then you'd automatically be able to use the website and it would cut off people who set up skills to hack around it, which I suspect is why they're doing this.

All types of architecture have advantages and disadvantages. Clean code might not be very cache-friendly, but it does a pretty good job of making sure you don't have to hunt in too many places to update things and It also makes it pretty simple to split things up so that you can write unit test for most everything.

This is not the right choice for everything, just as using Python is not the right choice for everything. The question to ask is: what are we trying to do in the first place? Then take it from there.

You did that by making sure the speed-up was business relevant. I'm mostly putting this out to force people to think about whether that also applies to their specific thing.

It was built by nerds but optimized on the data of everyone, so it ended up appealing mostly to the average person.

Maybe that's also the solution to a question I've had for years. The ads I see on diverse social platforms are terrible, but if they are matched with algorithms that try to fit me in as an average person, then it makes sense that, as a huge nerd, they miss the mark.

I'm sure there are places that would sue you for that, and it's not worth the bother. Bug bounties really compete mostly with people like me who would say, "Haha, I found an issue with Meta; they're gigantic idiots." And then make an X post or anything about it.

I don't necessarily feel bad about it, but I do feel sad about it.

I would not want all my bread to have come from wheat being milled on an old watermill, but I love visiting those as museums, and I think it would be bad if they were torn down.

I probably feel about the same for JetBrains. Plus, I have fond memories of using them.

For a while I agreed with you, but then I realized I want my agent to have access to the same find references, index, and rename tools, and the rest of the refactor tools that JetBrains have always provided me. And I wanted to be able to use those, even if it means I'll have to pay for Jetbrains.

Just like it was inefficient for me to manually rename variables and classes, it's token inefficient for my agent to do that.

In theory you’re right it’s an often repeated talking point but I just don’t understand why am I worth advertising to but not worth creating products for? The products I see advertised are either stupid or so overpriced that it means buying them is stupid.

I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.

I happen to believe AI will be the biggest change in my career in tech. I therefore think it's pretty natural that there is lots of news about it.

But I would welcome other tech news on the site. A quick count says that less than half the submission are AI related and that is split between four types of ai news (how to handle security, a new model, a non-model release from a major lab and politics). Would you complain about there being too many news about programming languages if the frontpage had C++, Ruby, Lisp and a great guide to ARM assembly?

How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.

I don't believe dropping to 100‑man teams will be enough.

A big problem is that we now have such big budgets that they need approval higher up, and worse, you end up looking like a fool when your project fails. That is still the case with 100-man teams.

This is not necessarily a terrible situation to be in if it were a startup situation where you could count on having 90% failures and the winner making the whole bucket worth it and people knew and accepted that.

But outside Sand Hill Road nobody gets that, so the strategy is to play it safe, safe, and safe, and then you end up with boring games.

It also doesn't help that it used to be that gamers would reliably update every couple of years, so graphics cards and processes would get faster, and you could make a generic shoot‑'em‑up game that was significantly better than the previous shoot‑'em‑up just because you now had more to work with.

Computers have actually increased in price, so much so that no one buys to update their computers. And at the same time, you need permission from an extremely high level to make games, so you can only make games that are very safe.

Meanwhile, the golden age of indie games is out there. It's never been easier to make your creative game and it's never been easier to find an audience for it.

As a result, there are more games than ever on Steam, and those fun games can last a lot longer because they don't have the marketing budget, so there's no big, immediate launch-month splat window. People will find them on social media, watch their favourite streamers play them etc.

Until we get to a point where games are created by studios who accept that 90% of them will fail, we are going to have interesting games from non‑studios.

That leaves a hole in the options for game development, though. Where are we with games that can be developed by 50 people but not by four? Those games do not have a home right no; They are too risky and uninteresting for the big guys, and they are out of scope for the independent.

The entire game-development business is being torn apart and remodeled by AI development right now. It is very likely that the big companies may never be able to make a game with 500 people.

Many games that were previously too large and required too many people to be feasible for indie developers are now very feasible for them. It's also quite possible that exclusives, such as for PlayStation, will very quickly disappear due to widespread piracy aided by AI powered decompiling. The future is extremely hard to predict at present, even more so than for non-gaming segments of the industry.

In Wal mode you can have multiple readers. Writers block, but because there is no network traffic, the writers finish very quickly, so in practice you don't usually wait that long.

Audiobooks replaced reading for a lot of people once those audiobooks became available on their smartphones, for others it was podcasts. For many, they walk only to and from their car.

I've saved no end of hours of transport thanks to Zoom and Teams meetings, and hybrid is now a thing (just not for me).

Bricks and mortar stores around here have been empty for years in some cases, and I'm the last person in the office who carries cash.

That is a good point. However, from time to time we do spend very large sums on certain buildings and what we get for it isn't proportionally more beautiful; in fact it often looks worse.

Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.

What does it mean for art to have a soul?

I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.

That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.

That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.

Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.

I’m going to be honest, I feel that these ideas do not come from a place of science but from a political bent that meat is bad and therefore we should eat less of it. This is inconvenient because it does not fit actual facts of reality (humans work best with an a meat based diet but can in a pinch eat just about anything) and therefore reality must be denied. Those who point out that what they say is wrong will get the usual treatment for that.

I admit this is conspiratorical.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Other way around.

I'm clearly part of the target market for this thing. But they think they can appeal to me by making the laptop look like a MacBook Pro. MacBook Pro isn't bad, but there is plenty of room to innovate in looks and port selection.

What isn't nearly good enough is Windows 11. I'm not buying a car just because it looks like some other car if all the seats have been replaced with liquid poo. The problem isn't that the mirror has a different curvature. It's that the internals are filled with liquid poo.

And Microsoft needs to fix Windows 11.

Wow, that machine is such a Mac Pro ripoff. Yet Microsoft still does not get it. We don't buy Apple machines for what they look like. We buy Apple machines because they have all day battery and because they don't run Windows. This thing, at gazillions of dollars willl still run Windows 11. Certainly the Pro Edition, but that's still a turd wrapped in a box of gold.

Microsoft seriously needs to develop the Windows 11 Deluxe Edition if they are to sell machines at this cost.

That's an old tactic for an old world. You only need, what, half an hour with your agent of choice to write you out of that?

It has the combined soul of humanity that supplied its training data.

You are correct; however, you're also putting a lot of faith in people's ability to make decisions.

Another thing (that does not really apply at AWS anymore), is that todays's enthusiasts are going to be the future CTOs, and the easiest time to recruit them to your service is when they are still an enthusiast who gets to make decisions on their own because there's exactly one decision maker you have to appeal to and that person really likes to try new stuff.

That's why you can get a free fly.io and why we all use Tailscale. And it works too — if I was in charge and needed it, I would immediately go with Tailscale for a business; I know it and I use it.

It's more complicated than that.

You might be perfectly okay with having certain systems shut down, but you probably still want to pay for the archival storage of your important files.

That archival storage might be in several places, including one S3 bucket, whereas there might be another one that, contains copies of scraped Craigslist for X where you'd actually be happy that it just shut down.

This makes it far more complicated to do correctly, and as others pointed out, mostly relevant for hobbyist — this is not something you are going to make a lot of money from.

Better to spend engineering hours making an MCP for the dashboard or improving your Databricks setup.

This was hidden in the FAQ, but it is important:

>You can rename your ChatGPT-hosted URL or connect a custom domain you own. If you rename the hosted URL, the old address redirects to the new one.

This means that, even though it an early access, you are not locked in. Good on them.

That's half of it. The other half is make people think they have a chance of pairing up but try to avoid them actually pairing up because, as Plenty of Fish once wrote in a blog post, it's not just that your users leave you, it's that they leave your service in pairs

Tinder side-stepped this issue when they changed to be a hookup site. The downside, of course, is you end up with a bunch of one-night stands instead of stable families producing babies.

Not really. 1TB is 90 USD, so if you are doing anything with video that is gone pretty quickly. Same with software distribution - your 200mb download hits that with 5000 downloads. Convert a 10 usd trial at 1 percent and almost 20% is eaten in bandwidth charges.

At those prices, it only makes sense to use it for data that never leaves that providers cloud (which I assume, but cannot prove, is their intention).

That is so effing cool — my only fear with it is whether you could turn it into a sustainable business, because I want that project to be around for a long time.

I don't see that. I would want a special tool for something that does not display well as text, like a 3D scene.

I imagine I also want a specialized tool for, say, reviewing 3D models before printing them. And they would definitely like addresses to be shown in a navigable map.

But that type of interface already exist (and has been #killedbygoogle) - its Google Wave.

That sounds really cool — I tend to agree with you that S3 and similar are underutilized, but I remember that essentially all of the providers charge for bandwidth measured in gigabytes and I'm like no. My consumer line is measured in megabits per second and if I have to pay for my data usage the way it's paid for in data centers it would be far more expensive. Somehow consumer ISPs, who have to pay for the lines, are cheaper than than the cloud providers.

This is a prerelease and the title should have reflected that.