barnabee

Title of the post should be be I Won’t “Just Hang Out”, or maybe We Won’t Just “Hang Out”, but then it’d be a different post.

Enabling the transfer of information from companies to people through piracy is a moral good

I’ll always support those who are willing to take such risks where I am not.

Makes sense to me…

I tend to "graze" on games by regularly(ish) playing for usually not more than an hour. I often swap between games and don't finish many of them. That's never really seemed like the point[0] any more than the idea of "completing" chess or skiing[1]. A tedious, unskippable tutorial level or spending hours early on grinding or subsisting with basic tools/weapons/mechanics before you get the good stuff is what kills a game for me.

So the question for me is how much boredom before it gets fun rather than whether I will eventually lose interest before I finish it. That's a given (I predictably didn't finish Braid or The Witness, I like both).

[0] And besides, like TV series, it just seems like such a lot of time! A game has to be very short or _really_ good, which means both engaging and fun mechanics and a great story, for me to make it to the end.

[1] Ok that's a lie, I definitely intend to complete skiing

Regulation that said something like “we own 50% of your profit or 20% of your revenue, whichever is the larger” would.

If Apple can charge 30% to gate-keep mobile payments, we can surely charge that for the total information output of humanity.

I hope the fact there's now a more open, Linux based VR headset will encourage more variety of headsets and price points, like we see with PCs, generic Android handhelds, etc.

I'd love someone (maybe even Bigscreen themselves) to make something like a standalone version of the Beyond 2. I'd be happy with some kind of puck or whatever for the compute and/or battery just to have it be that lightweight.

I’m excited. In addition to VR games I’m pretty interested to see how viable it is to do things with the Frame that I’d usually do on a Linux laptop.

I hope the openness of the OS leads to lots of cool 3rd party options. I’d love to see a standalone headset the size of the Bigscreen Beyond 2, and I’d also be much more willing to pay $3000 for a premium VR/AR device that runs Linux than an Apple or Meta device.

Can I buy half of one? The size and aspect ratio of the outer display sounds like it'd be pretty close to my ideal phone.

Maybe that means I want one on a technicality. I suppose the big fold out screen would be useful at time if the device isn't too chunky...

This

Already powerful and wealthy organisations/institutions/people leveraging somewhat powerful AI seem far more dangerous to me than the "AI decides to kill everyone" scenarios.

And therein is my problem: OpenAI and Anthropic are organisations like that, run by people like that, and they operate in collusion with others also fitting that description. The call is coming from inside the house.

The most likely way that AI creates a disaster is due to the ambition, greed, hubris, and naivety of these people who think they understand the risks[0] better than anyone else. I firmly believe they do not.

The first step to managing these risks is for the "frontier labs" to be willing to not just collaborate but meaningfully give up some of their power and control.

[0] by which I mean not just thinking about how AI might develop but also what's physically possible, how the AI might interact with the world, and how people/societies/organisations/governments might react and respond.

Agreed. The X3 just feels kind of magically small, and well proportioned in a way the X4 Pro doesn’t. Both have their merits though and I’ll be keeping both, because in some situations a backlight is near-essential for me.

If I buy a game - i.e. I am on a store page title "Game Name" not "Limited Revokable License for Game Name", and I click "buy", then I expect to own a copy of the game or the right to a copy of the game (in perpetuity), not a limited revokable license to play the game.

What?

I’ve recently re-played games I enjoyed in the 90s.

I listen to my dad’s old vinyl records.

Why the hell should my game purchases evaporate after some arbitrary and unpredictable amount of time?

Many physical stores will accept returns for a refund with literally no reason required, so why not?

For truly critical systems and independently developed redundant or backup system that can perform at least the most important functions is clearly superior. Regardless of how much effort goes into making one implementation reliable, there's always the possibility of an issue that takes it out, or forces it to be taken offline.

I don't know how common this is in retail banking but I'm happy to see Monzo do it.

Not all software is (or should be) engineering…

> When was the last time you bought a hand written book or a hand painted picture

So programming "ended" if it's no longer such a dominant profession, even if plenty of people still do it as an art/craft/hobby and some of them even get paid to do so?

Doesn't sound like the "end of programming" to me, more a reduction in the number of programming jobs. One that if anything is overdue - many developers today get paid to do jobs that shouldn't need to exist even without AI.

.gd works for me

> authors deserve to get paid for their work

I don't really agree

Information itself should be free, authors deserve the right to monetise other ways (merch, physical media, exhibitions/shows, etc.) but society should pay artists and creators to do their thing[0]

Not everything needs to be a business, and I think art is one of those things

[0] I don't know much about it but maybe Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a model. I think some other European countries do similar-ish things, too

Freeing all information is virtuous, though…

I praise all pirates and leakers

Maybe you can own (some) things, you can't own information

Tor Browser is handy, if simply changing your DNS isn't enough

I managed 0/10 - far worse than random chance

Not sure what that says about me or the LLM but I guess I shouldn't worry too much about watermarking ruining the outputs…

Agreed. This is exactly what I want, ideally with components and libraries and panels and data shareable and extendable between applications.

The closest in spirit is Probably something like Dear ImGui[0] and the ecosystem of components and apps built with it, but it's not quite there for me. Something is missing.

[0] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Serde is not even part of the standard library. There’s no HTTP client (let alone server), logging, decent date/time…

That’s not what I call well featured.

Most programs should need close to zero dependencies.

Of course they’re free to do what they want, and there’s the question of maintenance overhead[0], but while https://blessed.rs/ needs to exist, Rust’s standard library is deficient in my eyes.

[0] One idea would be to treat a language more like an Linux distro and have library maintainers like package maintainers but a unified quality, audit, and release process

I wrote this on another thread recently, but my line for exclusion from standard library is a library that’s any one of:

- not obviously/generally useful (i.e. useless or too specific/should be a program not a library)

- obviously trivial (code it yourself when you need it/compose from other primitives)

- already available (open source) elsewhere by a credible team that supports and maintains it

Anything else… put it in the stdlib

IMHO the rise of TUIs is heavily correlated with the near-abandonment of professional quality graphical interfaces.

If there was a powerful, information dense, configurable docking/tiling, multi-application-composing GUI framework (all things a good terminal can do) then yes, build everything in that. I’d love to see it.

Until then, TUIs are vastly better than another Electron app or Mac app using UI frameworks that are trying their hardest to look and act like basic phone apps.

My line for exclusion from standard library is a library that’s any one of:

- not obviously/generally useful (i.e. useless or too specific/should be a program not a library)

- obviously trivial

- already available (open source) elsewhere by a credible team that supporte and maintains it

Anything else… put it in the stdlib

Ideally everything not built specifically for any given project is part of the OS or some other battle tested, supported system package.

For example, I might well choose to reimplement eg a subset of TOML parsing to avoid the dependency risk.

I don’t write JavaScript/TypeScript, but if I did, I’d find Bun’s “batteries included” approach compelling, at least to the extent I decide I can trust Bun, after due diligence

Why do you want huge companies to be allowed so much control?

What is it about letting them restrict what people can do in order to squeeze even more money out of them and other companies that appeals to you so much?

Where do you think this should stop?

Should my wifi router be allowed to only work with some brands of phone or laptop?

Should my mobile service provider be allowed to ask for a percentage of any payment I use over their connection?

Should my car by allowed to refuse to park if the owner of the car park doesn't share ticket revenue with its manufacturer?

If not, why not?

Personally, I choose to believe that just like some things cannot legally be agreed to contractually (even if they're in the contract and you sign it), some business models should also be unacceptable to society. That includes any situation where by owning a platform, media property, or content/service delivery technology or provider, a company wants to force itself as a middleman between any two parties.

It should be against the law to create they kind of business they have, though

Don't provide a way to do so.

Just not using GitHub would probably solve most of the problems.