BjoernKW

Intelligent UI for everyone is Bret Victor's vision for computing UX finally coming to fruition.

I've always found his work impressive, but for the most part it was all prototypes and proofs of concept.

Having such interactivity available to everyone now is nothing short of groundbreaking and another indication AI works as the great equalizer by democratising capabilities previously available only to a select few.

Quite a few years ago, Erik Dietrich proposed "efficiencer": https://daedtech.com/starting-tech-firm-efficiencer/

I've always liked that term and it's more fitting than ever.

Mathematically speaking, because compilation is a surjective function. Context, organizational, as well as personal knowledge - that information simply is lost in the process of compilation.

It can be restored to some extent by making educated guesses, but it'll never be exactly as readable as the original, which in some cases probably isn't that bad, because the original source code might not have been particularly readable to begin with.

I have used Simon Martinelli's AI Unified Process quite extensively and successfully: https://unifiedprocess.ai

The accompanying tooling allows you to generate requirements for existing projects (brownfield, legacy) as a foundation to either build upon or reimplement existing behaviour.

Anyone who has watched Interstellar should know this.

Well, there are very few things you truly _need_ an app for, but quite a few where an app comes in handy.

> “I have to now use an app to operate my washing machine. Why?!”

Frankly, that's asinine. However, I'd very much like my washing machine or tumble dryer to notify me when they're done (with those appliances sitting in the basement of my house).

I even remember a dorm at uni (TU Dortmund, back in the late 90s) having a website for their washers that'd retrieve and display a status via TCP/IP. IIRC, some guys at the local computer science department jerry-rigged some custom board into standard washing machines available at that time.

> The end of interest-based 3rd places

Whatever happened to pubs and the shared interest of drinking beer (and getting drunk in the process ...)? ;-)

> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)

This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.

As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.

> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.

> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.

Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?

> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.

Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.

> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).

I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.

> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

Engineers are prone to overcomplicating matters.

Pieter Levels famously runs Nomad List as vanilla PHP application on a single Linux server, while people keeps insisting you need a fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud setup and the modern stack-du-jour to provide such an application.

Still, EU member countries even fail at cooperating where it'd absolutely make sense to do so (see FCAS, for instance).

Yet they keep yapping on about the EU being about tighter integration between its member states. If not in the area of defence, where else? So far, this has been an abject failure (recently, see: FCAS).

Care to elaborate?

While advancements in drone technology in Ukraine certainly have been accelerated by the war, the country was by no means unprepared. They have been preparing for a large-scale war ever since the Russian occupation of Crimea (and the dismal international reaction to that).

The EU isn't even capable of ramping up its own defence capabilities when being faced with the very real threat of a Russian incursion in the next few years, which has me wonder what would be required for them to finally wake up.

> Stop honoring US copyright.

I suppose some people just want to see the world burn.

I'm by no means a supporter of copyright and copyright laws, but unilaterally terminating such agreements is a recipe for disaster. How do you think the US would react to such a move?

Linux is no EU project, but very much global. It just happens that its originator (who, quite tellingly, has been living and working in the US since the mid-90s) is Finnish.

It's way to late for baby steps. The EU is bound to become either a US or a Chinese protectorate in all but name in just a few years time now.

How isolationism and open source are supposed to stem that tide, is beyond me.

> and develop domestic alternatives.

Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.

It never ceases to amaze me how people scramble to defend the EU's failed policies over the last three decades. The EU managed to regulate itself out of all relevant markets and it only has itself to blame.

> I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).

How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).

Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.

I can't tell anymore if this satire or not, because there are more than few people who actually believe isolationism and red tape such as the AI Act or GDPR is beneficial to the EU's economic welfare.

Yeah, "disliking" is one way to put it. More often than not, it's rather a case of blatant antisemitism.

Exactly this.

A few years ago, I saw a talk that made a point about how prosthetics that mimic original human body parts are often designed from an able-bodied point of view. They look inoffensive and are designed for the wearer to blend into what's considered normal.

However, these prosthetics frequently are not all that useful. Once one starts to rethink from first principles in terms of function and efficiency rather than aesthetics this opens up an entirely new space of solutions that might be much more efficient than the original "solutions" they replace - the most famous example probably being Oscar Pistorius' running blades.

The same applies to digital transformation - and by extension AI and robotics. We don't need faster horses. We need to rethink and replace existing processes entirely.

Data is proving otherwise. While locally shortages do happen, in general there more resources available than ever: http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/04/50-ways-the-world-is...

> Frankly, I'm not sure anymore what the name of the interactive terminal software was

Might've been either NComm or Term. Another piece the puzzle I just remembered was compression utilities such as LHA (and later LZW).