zwischenzug

Didn't the card have a limit?

It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.

TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...

Except the "merge mess" footgun.

I got into training people in Git (I now do it for O'Reilly) because I worked with 12 teams that merged _everything_ into sub-branches. The result was that the `git log --oneline` command resulted in screensful of just pipes.

My initial training goal in training was getting my students to understand a rebase to avoid that mess.

If Farage wins he is still subject to an investigation that could eject him from Parliament, over a 5m crypto gift/loan he received from an ex-pat donor that he did not declare.

Farage is looking to get a popular mandate to try and both draw attention away from that investigation, and justify keeping his position because "the people have spoken". The other parties don't want to undermine the investigation by taking part in an election which would be moot if he were found guilty anyway.

Farage is therefore punching on air, and has been reduced to arguing that a joke candidate with a bin on his head who claims to be from outer space is an "establishment" (aka "deep state") plant.

It's actually a smart move from the other parties. Without a serious "enemy" to fight, populists look foolish as their usual rhetorical moves have no bite.

In Parliament, members are referred to by the place they represent, eg "The Right Honourable Member for Harry Pottershire" rather than their names. It's a way to make things less personal.

In fact, "naming" an MP is mark of having broken the rules:

https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/naming-o...

"placelessness" was coined the year after I was born! So if it's not 'just age', then it's been going on a long time.

On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences. Simply going there guaranteed new experiences. I spent a lot of time in Vienna growing up and everything was different. I literally couldn't have a familiar experience even if I'd wanted to. In fact, I remember having to spend lots of money and travelling a long way to find a specialised shop to get a familiar food item (baked beans) to relieve the homesickness.

I don't think people under a certain age can really appreciate how different it was.

This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs.

To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, or maybe felt like 3-5 different games all packaged differently.

Another example: going abroad on holiday in Europe (I'm from London) used to be a relatively wild, vibrant experience, filled with unexpected differences and challenges (not all positive). There were no McDonalds or Starbucks and the shops were filled with unfamiliar products and foods. Now everywhere in Europe feels the same when I visit, especially with smartphone in hand.

And films went from wildly different to one another to what now feels like 'arty' and 'CGI' being the two choices.

This article continues that into the realm of ideas, or idea production. Everywhere you go looks and feels familiar.

Or am I just getting old?

I don't know TBH. It's just that if you're going to have a 'pure' designation for a tech, it's going to be pretty strict (as per bash and adding modules). I've never heard of 'pure' linux, but 'pure' bash has a recognised meaning. If someone said 'pure Linux' and it meant the core without loaded modules I wouldn't be shocked. Not sure how useful it would be, though.

Pure Linux doesn't.

I see some similarity to how I felt when library management/wrangling became a huge part of software development.

In the last century I enjoyed crafting my own 'libraries' of functions that I could then use on the projects I worked on. As time went on, there was less and less of a point doing that as the odds rose near to 100% that there was 'a library for that' thing I was working on, so I was encouraged/forced to download it and use it.

It solved problems and was quicker than writing bespoke code (and libraries were hardly a new idea), so the logic was hard to deny, but I enjoyed my job less over time. Now I've risen up the ranks and now code mostly for fun (yes, I use AI to write functions for me) I look at what it must be like to enter the industry and think it all looks very different to how it did when I started.

You could argue that AI has done this much faster than it did in my early career, so people have less of the 'boiling frog' experience I had, and more of a 'sudden shock' to the system.

It's sad, but I've been doing this to other industries all my career, so I can hardly complain.

This should be an essay.

When it wrote better sql than me. I spent 15 years writing and optimising sql. That was about 2 years ago.

I'm old enough to get this reference! Spent years writing WAP... it was really great at the time.

Certainly tracks with the number of outsourced teams begging for work on LinkedIn.

People used to knock out children as a social security/insurance policy for old age, or to work the farm as they aged. The rise of the welfare state(s) in urban societies removed that need.

I don't believe people keep their kids 'safer' because they think the world has become more dangerous.

It's slightly taboo, but I think people protect their kids more now because they are more precious to the parents. The average number of children per mother has plunged in the last 200 years, and investment required in them per child to get them to child-bearing capability is much higher also. Child mortality has dropped like a stone, so any harm coming to children is much less tolerable.

Parents have so much invested in their children - and so few of them to "spare" - that they get far more protection than before.

How do we know that that isn't essentially how our minds work?

Evidence for that? I remember there was a guy who worked for google that quit because he thought an LLM was conscious and we needed to talk about its rights, but that's the only example I am aware of.

It's a great story, and a nicely written piece.

But civilisations have always forgotten things and then had to re-engineer them. We only recently recreated Roman-equivalent concrete; knowledge required to create the Saturn V rockets had to be re-engineered; we can't recreate medieval stained glass exactly, or Viking Ulfberht Swords; we would struggle to create Betamax tape today.

Many of the examples I found (as expected) relate to military or commercially sensitive technology that did not get written down (for obvious reasons).

It also reminded me when I read Thomas Thwaites' "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch", where to make a smelter from scratch he relied on a 450 year old book ("De re metallica" by Georgius Agricola), as well as a friendly Metallurgist.

We already lost the widespread ability to write assembler in an artisinal way. Now we have AI we will also be lazy about how we write individual bits of artisinal code. So what? Yes it will cost more (in time and money) when we need to re-engineer, but how much would it cost to keep alive all the knowledge and skills we might possibly need in the future?

We had better make sure we write down and preserve the recorded data though :)

Similarly, I did group therapy for a few years, and found it highly and profoundly rewarding.

It's much more structured, with a facilitator to help reduce the possibility of dangerous behaviours. It forced me to confront aspects of myself I otherwise might never have. It also (I think) gave me greater insight into what might be behind people's public faces.

Everything I've known anything about first hand has been utterly garbled - or was completely made up - when written up in Private Eye.

The first sentence makes no sense.

You cannot live by thinking alone.

Don't know if this is definitive, but:

https://www.johndcook.com/powershell.html#:~:text=The%20core...

POSIX Korn shell, specifically, according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell#Grammar

so maybe it inherited 2>&1 from Korn shell, which in turn was POSIX.

But yeah, Powershell was not built purely to be a POSIX shell, but I thought it tried to be compatible where it made sense (hence the seeming clash of cultures).

Isn't that because of posix?

If you place a sports bet online, odds (!) are that it will run through tcl in its business logic. I may even have written some of it.

Engineers can definitely contribute to the problem too, in my experience.

Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).

The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.