travisgriggs

This.

And I wish I had thought to grab that nick years ago…

When tweetles battle beetles… AND…

I think this was once the case. Smalltalk was very "so last year" once Java Marketing overtook the world (I worked for Cincom, final resting place of VisualWorks Smalltalk, may it rest in peace).

At this point, I think it's flipped. The people that might be attracted to it would probably enjoy the retro hat tip. The various language wars have all been pointlessly adjudicated, and lost in time, first to the dominance/explosion of JavaScript only programmers, and now due to LLM generated code.

Learning Smalltalk, and practicing it heavily for 20 years was probably the single best thing I learned in programming during 35+ years. It helped me get very good at modelling things. I work in Swift/Kotlin/Elixir/C now days, and I've learned some great things from those systems as well. But how to build representations of real world data as well as structure concepts/relationships more virtual, hands down to Smalltalk (for me).

My media diet has dropped steadily for 15 years now. I don’t know how much of it is just aging, and how much truly is tired/fatigue for the products offered. And the burden/complexity of streaming has basically just led me to throw my hands in the air and find other things to do. I already spend too much time tapping on my phone, much less watch yet another screen.

How was this assembled? From a meta point of view, how much AI was used to curate and highlite the goals; how much was used to assemble the site itself? Or deploy it?

Just finished Trade of Blood (most recent #3 of the Din and Ana books). Phenomenal. Been a while since I’ve enjoyed a series this much. Good/fun writing. Great underlying messages.

> The company's philosophy on the issue seems to be rooted in the hacker ethos of not giving repetitive work to humans if a machine could do it. When a machine can't do it, Google's thinking is to improve the machine. If the systems are good enough, nobody will need support.

I have not worked at Google, but rather at 4 different companies that built automation machinery (ie multi discipline execution between mechanical, electrical, and software engineers). In none of those cases was it ever “the hacker ethos”. It was mid to upper level management whose incentive loops tended to be associated more with either shareholder perception or HR head counts. All of the engineers were usually begging the company to do a better job (allocate resources) to last mile customer support. Engineers build things, and are usually more satisfied if the products they build are well received because of the “last mile” bit where someone helps a customer appreciate their creation.

> and nobody would elect one

Hmmm… this is giving me thought actually. Given the choice between that and the current administration where the goals of self destruction are strongly in evidence, it’s actually worth thinking about. At least. Let me get back to you :)

On a tangential note, I’m curious if researchers have started running virtual simulations, where sandboxed AIs are used as decision makers of key political and business positions?

Even kind of fits the model. All of the creativity man has raised is herded to the slaughterhouse and ground up so we end up with a big homogenized mash of ground up creativity, devoid of the life that gave it, rotten if not eaten soon enough.

We also associate laboratories with evil scientists and Frankenstein and the like. I can just hear Boris Karloff (er Bobby Picket) uttering “I was working in the lab late one night. When my eyes beheld an eerie sight… … … …the monster mash”. If anything, I associate _uncertainty_ with labs. The result is never known up front, they’re a place of discovery.

But I get your meaning. What should they be called instead? AI Sausage Factories maybe (cue Upton Sinclair?)?

I am an American. Born here 56 years ago. I think we are alarmingly "far gone".

Everyone gets to name their projects for their own reasons. If the pitch is basically an “alternate apple” macOS, I would have chosen one of the other other (alternate) apple varieties as the root of my OS. Missed opportunity I guess.

Or Jose Valim

No Alan Kay or Dan Ingalls. Surprised

As long as message broadcasting remains cheap (in any form; phone, email, text, etc) it will go on. All modern media has evolved technically (and financially) to benefit the producer (the talker). All at the expense of the consumer (listener). Make outgoing bandwidth cost per instance and you’ll see a reduction/optimization of the production. When signal is free to produce, you end up with a lot of noise.

I would love to see what this looks like in practice. Especially in generated code. I assume this is more than insertion of non visible special unicode whitespace characters, but more in the pattern of the text content itself?

I wonder what the web would be like if we priced bandwidth at the requester point and as you go.

Honest ask because I’ve not generally paid attention…

Is it the case that the numbers always appear more optimistic, and then are revised to be more pessimistic values? Or is it just that the original numbers are off and are revised? Does that make sense?

I totally see this. I just did 3 hours of bot sitting to put together some thrash loops that thrash our provisioning working flow for a BLE gadget we make. It was pretty straightforward and productive. But then, I have a lot of experience with BLE, and a quite a bit of experience with python and shell scripting. So I was able to guide the process through stages, do some intermediate testing, make some adjustments, and proceed. Domain experience made this really easy and straightforward. Me two junior engineers who have only superficial/high level knowledge of BLE and some of the other pieces, couldn't have done this as effectively.

Where my angst comes, is worrying that no one will ever get that experience anymore. They might have had some eventual success, who knows what monstrosity a much less guided LLM would have done, but experential learning may be mostly a thing of the past. And it creates a real tension between the person with experience and the person without.

Why is it “just a matter of time”? Why do we assume and say this?

The amount of times humanity has said this and time itself was not enough of an ingredient to achieve some anticipated outcome are legion. But we filter those out and go back to making more predictions based on the current linear derivative we’re observing.

To me, what makes this so obvious with the web platform is the bureacratic nature of developing for it. To do anything meaningful, you have to bring three departments together (html, css, and javascript). Each is a very different language designed for a different guild of practitioners. You even have the interdepartment turf wars, even if one single person is manning all 3 departments, of which department should accomplish any given task. And each department/platform/language has exteded their capabilities over time to give them more reach to participate in problem solving formerly left to others.

Thanks for your paper btw. I did 20 years of Smalltalk. I came to view Smalltalk programming more like biological culture manipulation (you had a dish of live objects that you morphed into the result you wanted), whereas the conventional file->syntax->executable employed by most development systems is more akin to the industrial factory pipeline of assembling products from raw goods.

During those younger years, money mattered. Tools were sold on the premise that they reduced or mitigated the various costs inherint with employing programmers. And then... around the late 90s, that just kind of dropped from the discussion. As quantitave easing made money available to speculate with and hitting it big with the software that was "eating the world", things like web programming burgeoned with very little thought about "does this make it cheaper".

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Please support my efforts through my Patreon account!

/s

I’m overwhelmed by LLM/Agent signal on HN lately. I actually liked this question. It’s trite and whimsical, but frankly nice break.

Can you elaborate why adding guards makes things faster?

Tax social media and other forms of attention products. Time users spend on these products is time taken away from earning revenue that can be taxed. Balance must be restored. If viewers’ available time/ability is harvested so that they have less taxable income, transfer the tax to where the wealth generation is being transferred to.

Same for AI.

In family and friend relationships, this all resonates completely.

Where I struggle and find my ego self defensively screaming “But…!” is in work relationships. Product managers, where their wrongness makes my downstream life more miserable. Basically any relationship where I have a (self perceived) need for the outcome to be a certain way to protect/enhance my well being. Asymmetric relationships.

Q: what kind of collection is this real world example illustrating?

A: Copying Garbage Collector (semi space). Chapter 4!

Great book. I was always fascinated by bakers treadmill. Always wanted a real world case where I could implement one with Fibonacci sized mills.

SpaGrox

> Paying $60B for this is idiotic.

Isn't that kind of Elon's thing?

It’s ok. In the future, no one will do math. Mathematicians will be directors, with a team of math bots that they administer and direct. Instead of being managed, they will become the managers of mathematic autonomons. Universities need to get with the program.

/s

This is awesome. Bag “vibe coding”. Today I will start coding in what I’m going to call “Roy Kent mode”.