al_be_back

Makes sense to me... leaving to start their company with Google being an investor.

Clayton Christensen [1] says (paraphrasing) it's a good idea to spin-off (or invest) in a startup that you've a say on, before the ecosystem sprouts a seemingly-non-entity and gently disrupts your market.

Interestingly (diff strategies i guess) Apple tends to acquire (Q.ai) rather than invest/venture (as google in OP).

[1] The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

of course they are. his original quote says 'political' but often translations or quotes may say 'social' (informally).

>> Ordering, consensus, and mutability policy are application concerns outside this series. [1]

Of course, immutable means as-is, but since you're not dealing with ordering etc (that's pretty big), I might as well use existing tech (JSON with a schema) and a policy (simple/naive: hash and compare lowercased data).

[1] From their spec: 2.2.1 Identity and Content Addressing - https://tson.io/2026/32/tson-part1-data/#

> 2. "Happiness depends upon ourselves."

he's quiet possibly referring to happiness as a relationship (with family, friends, colleagues, citizens etc) rather than just by oneself / isolation / individual. he famously said "man by nature is a political animal" (or social if you prefer)

> Myth 3: Lines of Code Written by AI...

how come lines of code (or expressions) by an engineer aren't a good way to measure progress (Gates point etc) but GenAI tokens must count and be paid for?

yes. the point in this post was not to replicate their title and/or content, but to point to the the issue.

For some reason, this made me think of privacy & security issues: user fingerprinting, user-type detector (devtools open = dev/engineer) etc.

Detecting the difference between window.innerWidth (viewport) and window.outterWidth (window with bar etc) in JS, can be powerful to the browser user via an Extension. However, not so if the site/page uses (e.g a JS Lib).

Personally, i like the viewport vs window separation that the browser provides. I don't want an Element to not budge or care about my sidebar/window dressings, thank you very much.

NOTE: BBC is public-funded broadcaster in the UK, so it cannot show commercial ads in the UK.

Ads rely on cleaver imagery to hook the viewer. So when a media org (bbc) reports the image without a mask (and even enlarged it, high-res), they're in effect pushing the ad to millions of viewers.

PR companies very cleverly use traditional media (often outdated) to do their work — for free/close to nothing! Great hack.

Smoking ads are banned by the govs in many countries, including the UK (article) therefore, it's highly unlikely that the PR firm didn't expect it would be banned... yet, the bbc took their bait, in my opinion.

BBC could've have blurred the cigarette, or pixelated the image and then provide a 'Click to see the Original' feature for viewers that want more proof.

Very interesting. The media tracks may've been em dashed during prod. Spotify seems to use this format "Artist — Album".

Em dashes are indeed amazing! Go U+2014 !

has anyone used/seen em dashes in file/dir names? just wondered — I have't.

It's certainly easier to read than a hyphen/minus...but i guess it may become problematic cross-platform (on windows/linux it isn't as straight forward as on macos).

I agree with Codeberg, I think they're arguing for some sort of AI Code-Gen Fair Use policy.

My take: If ai generated the code, let ai pay for it, unless it has been proved worth it's upkeep. Basically, show me some sort of: AI code-gen proof of work (or proof of worth, some mechanism), then you're in.

Automation at ai-scale are very expensive, just look at the trillions of USD being spent by ai companies. And let's not forget, that the rest of us don't have those levels of funding. And neither do non-profits like Codeberg i'm guessing.

And some more, i'm not even considering security issues, where for instance ai code-gen turns on hosting/platform providers (similar to chapgpt incident on hugginfaces). even if the sandbox proves resilient, the code is parasitic in nature or behaves like a virus.

Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for

A houseplant with tiny turtles for leaves… very informative if under the influence of some substances.

It’s not a Hello World equivalent.

So much around generative ai seems to be around “look how unrealistic you can be for not-cheap! Ai - cocaine for your machine!!”

No wonder there’s very little uptake by businesses (MIT state of ai 2025, etc)

Makes no sense to sell their entire position on a key infrastructure player, if you’re going all in on ai. That’s very odd.

this is not practical or desirable in my view: de-google, de-apple, de-meta, de-aws etc etc etc

What next, become stone masons? nah, that's too corporate, pick berries instead ;)

Come on, what happened to moderation, discipline and planning? How about use what you need, hedge your risks (mix providers, products), be more proactive than reactive to demands for consumption?

>> doing, or is it about getting things done

Who says the thing is done? there is a massive danger now, with the sheer amount of complexity & speed brought by ai, in that it's increasingly harder to verify / do proof-of-work.

>> AI allows me to realize my ideas

sure for a personal/pet project. however, when working for a customer/client, they've ideas, needs, wants and usually have their own users and shareholders to satisfy - need proof.

>> lighting up the gas-powered street lights

ok, no this metaphor may well be loved by ai companies, but doesn't actual work in so many levels. For one, ai (as actually provided) is not electricity or a physical system, a brain, or a mind, it's software (I use it v-selectively). Second, the job being done (lighting, or coding) is ultimately to produce / output the desired outcome for whoever ordered it - a solution to a problem - failing that it's just work and wages for the worker but no effective solution (lighting the dark side of the moon, kinda).

I agree with the OP, as system complexity went up, so does the ability to keep up.

Couldn't agree more, if posting on coding sites/forums, they usually have code highlighting.

However, a screenshot acts like a print-out / pdf, and very handy for sharing in other platforms e.g social media, mobile devices.

Like many others I like the use of ai for OCR in imagery. Won't be long before ai tool can copy the style + content from an image, or video.

> the movie 300

In high-tech warfare we're seeing these days your metaphor is reversed. These artisans (potters etc) are tech engineers, mathematicians, chemists. They are quick to mobilize and become effective (operate drones, robots, cyber, complex machines).

I cannot comment on your opinion of Canada, it's too vague in my opinion.

Generally, western Armed Forces (CAF included) reduced their personnel and spending when the Cold War ended (90s). Rightly so. Since then, war is fought very differently and AF are now very quickly adapting.

Recent conflicts in near/along Levant and near/along the Black Sea, show how effective certain types of warfare are in the current climate.

It is relative, depends on the "type of warfare" being fought, and the countries/economies involved.

In a high-tech modern warfare, the countries with a fighting force that has higher academic education, higher tech literacy are relatively quick to mobilize and become effective militarily.

happy anniversary!

> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]

Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.

Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.

[1] https://dillo-browser.github.io/

Removing html and css would also make the browser more secure - but I would argue also very counter productive for users.

Most of read-only content and lite editing can be achieved with raw data + xslt.

The web has become a sledgehammer for clacking a nut.

For example, with xslt you could easily render a read only content without complex and expensive office apps. That is enough for Academia, Gov, and small businesses.

Replaced them with App stores, why one code base when you can have N code bases: web sites, ios, android , tv …

cheaper, privacy-oriented and more secure lol obviously not, doesn’t help the consumer or the developer.

Xslt is brilliant at transforming raw data, a tree or table for example, without having to install Office apps or paying a number of providers to simply view it without massive disruption loops.

Well, by that token, opensource + stackoverflow was vibe coding all along. I can download, pick and choose, mix, modify, run, ship lol

how about developing using WYSIWYG? drag + drop + connect + theme/style + preview.

i think traditional UI should be decoupled from the language - only providing CLI and web UI (w3c web standards).

Apple's ui is very nice, but you're stuck with a whole ecosystem for life. If you want to cross-platform, as you mentioned, well, all hell breaks loose: React & co, Flutter, web assembly.

a unified, all-batteries-included system is excellent for the manufacturer/provider - they can plan, invest, manage and rollout products at a desired rate. but for developers, third-party, and consumers is very costly, intense and risky.

fun-fact from Steve Jobs bio, he was interviewing a tech hopeful for a job, the guy showed him a prototype of what would become the Dock (aqua + animations), created using an Adobe product. Abobe etc had powerful, flexible platforms - unfortunately the market was driven by eager tech geeks - so it was easy to get curried away with fancy UIs. However, that was (20 years ago) an educational issue - not a tech issue.

I don't mean www, that's a different beast. i said distributed nets, as was before www. It's not actually about aws per se, or whether the cloud improves - evolution doesn't necessarily favor improvement just because.

the centralization of computing is distorting the Internet's core strength, the distributed nets (not aws/azure/gcloud zones).

since covid, if anything is telling, is that politics, economy and warfare has shifted into a new era, pretty much globally.

preventing a catastrophe was ARPA's mitigation strategy. the point is where it's heading, not where it is. It's not about AWS per se, or any one company, it's the way it is consolidating. AWS came about by accident - cleverly utilizing spare server capacity from amazon.com.

In it's conception, the internet (not www), was not envisaged as a economical medium - it's success was a lovely side-effect.

Postmortem all you want - the internet is breaking, hard.

The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

Now it has consolidated into ever smaller mono nets. A simple mistake in on one deployment could bring banking, shopping and travel to a halt globally. This can only get much worse when cyber warfare gets involved.

Personally, I think the cloud metaphor has overstretched and has long burst.

For R&D, early stage start-ups and occasional/seasonal computing, cloud works perfectly (similar to how time-sharing systems used to work).

For well established/growth businesses and gov, you better become self-reliant and tech independent: own physical servers + own cloud + own essential services (db, messaging, payment).

There's no shortage of affordable tech, know-how or workforce.

Cyber risks notwithstanding (they concern me greatly), I still think the Gov is better placed than Private sector to guarantee citizens privacy and security (at that level). Why? The Gov is better placed to be the ultimate non-profit org: can fund, can legislate, can draw expertise, is non-profit etc.

Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.

dynamically-typed languages were typically created for scripting tasks - but ended up going viral (in part due to d-typing), the community stretched the language to its limits and pushed it into markets it wasn't designed/thought for (embedded python, server-side js, distributed teams, dev outsourcing etc).

personally i like the dev-sidecar approach to typing that Python and JS (via TS) have taken to mitigate the issue.