jshaqaw

Have given up. Not happy about it. But realistically I'm not going to spend half my waking hours locking down my digital existence from a wall of threats and still failing. The bad guys have near unlimited financial resources, incentives, and technology to breach whatever feeble defenses I erect. Nobody has any privacy anymore. Live life assuming anything and everything you say, do, search, browse is going to be in the newspaper tomorrow.

I put that into the "people who want to kill me" silo.

I vacillate on the value of seeing this stuff. Sometimes I think its important my radar be aware that these attitudes are way more prevalent in society than they used to be. Lot's of my not-on-twitter peers I suspect are in a bubble and don't realize how much societal decay there has been around norms and batsh*t conspiracy thinking. As a citizen I think it's important not to be in a total bubble until the frog boiling temperature is reached.

At the same time, I'm pretty sure that low grade daily exposure to "look at all these neighbors of yours who wish you were dead" overstates the prevalence and the fact that the people who feel this way do so in no small part because they are getting a daily algo feed claiming I wish they were dead (spoiler - I don't want them dead). Since I find it really hard to break my Twitter addiction there is something about all of these emotions which keeps some susceptible humans like myself clicking, but like the article says, it's quite rare that I emerge from an hour of Twitter scrolling feeling anything but gross.

All of this is frustrating because I was very late to Twitter. I joined a year or two before the acquisition. I loved how I could connect with all sorts of interesting brilliant people in all sorts of interesting fields. I wish I could get that back but I guess that iteration of Twitter didn't sell enough ads.

Respectfully, the moderate isn't getting their point across because nobody is reading it. The only people the algo shows moderate views to are the extremes to feed their need for fresh meat. Normie moderate people in a point in the Overton window where they may respond to moderate points have as much organic attraction to spend time on Twitter as my teenage children do to chat with their peers via email (i.e., null).

The moderate on twitter is the proverbial old man yelling at clouds but imagining the clouds are actually some relevant audience of non-bots. I do admit we may define moderate differently here in which case there is a chance we are talking past each other.

Dead right on twitter. The normies have all left it. Pre Elon Twitter was the community bulletin board and meeting place for all sorts of interesting subgroups. They’ve all left. Normal younger people consider twitter to be as relevant to their lives as Compuserve.

My feed there used to be cool physics stuff. Now it’s just all the people in the world who want me dead and for every real one of those 99 bots joining in.

Obsidian isn’t hard to code. That was never the barrier. The barrier was that the creators took a risk and made something new with their design choices. LLMs (at least today) can clone and mash-up but they don’t make new choices. Open source as a whole is a lot better at copying than creating. Happy to be corrected but all the major user apps I know of are clones of commercial products.

I love open source. But Obsidian exists. Cloning existing apps to open source is almost push-button in the age of Claude. Obsidian makes a good product and frankly barely charges for it. Yes it's closed source but since all your files are markdown there is no lock-in risk. I guess I'd rather see people in open source make new things than copy existing products especially when those products are made by small scrappy indie companies. If everything gets cloned I don't see who has any incentive to try and innovate the next new thing in commercial markets and honestly I see too little evidence of innovation vs. cloning in the open source world.

The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.

I am a bit over 50. Most new computer tech doesn't hit me like it used to but occasionally I still get hit with wonder. I got that feeling trying the Apple Vision Pro in store demo. 50-something me still can't believe I have AI at my fingertips.

For the most part though it's not that new tech isn't cool but as I get older, parts of life which seemed mundane as a kid or young man aren't quite so mundane anymore. As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background. With years I see those moments with loved ones as precious, finite, and what it's all about. Tech is neat and sometimes very neat ... but it isn't what it's all about.

Pascal will always have my heart. My first bridge outside Basic (I was stuck with a home pc so didn’t go down the assembly rabbit hole like others of my generation). Turbo Pascal’s IDE. Add it possible for a kid to learn and create in a way I never would have done if stuck with a collection of semi independent tools. for those who say just use the command line - this was 1989. DOS was not exactly today’s modern shell environment!

Good points all. Please understand this is more of a general open source friendly criticism I made. There is good value in preserving access to codebases made for Wolfram language which is expensive albeit they do offer decent licenses now to mess around with it.

I’m curious abut benchmarking. Wolfram claims they put a ton of effort into optimizing the speed of at least certain types of mathematical computations.

UX is an area I’d suggest working on. Wolfram was a real pioneer with the notebook style interface but nothing is meant to last forever. That might be an area to innovate without losing access to legacy codebases.

I’m going to get hate here but what the heck I have karma points to burn. What I have to say is not a critique of this particular project which seems nicely done but a general statement on open source.

I’d rather see more open source projects making something new than so much “Open Source reimplementation.” If closed proprietary companies are so worthless then why do so many open source projects copy those implementations. Did Wolfram really discover the one true way in its language syntax and presentation layer? If it did, is the idea of open source really just making it unviable for companies to invest in important things like that? To be clear these are of course rhetorical questions. The open source world could experiment (and in defense sometimes does) with truly new approaches and interfaces. I just want to see more of it.

Mathematica exists. Mathematica for free versus Mathematica for money is of course a nice trade. But even better would be to try new ways to interact with mathematics unburdened from legacy concerns.

I spend my weekends enjoying life and my family but I guess that’s just part of my objectively idiotic take on life.

Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer. But If you find them fun go for it. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to enjoy your environment. If tinkering with Emacs is fun for you go for it. It's prob not replacing mental cycles for "productive" work. It's replacing zoning out with social media or YouTube between productive work times.

I can't justify using Emacs myself on a productivity basis. But working in an environment I think is fun while being productive makes me marginally happier.

Data centers could pay locals a sufficient amount that it overcomes the NIMBY opposition. If you can’t pay locals enough while still generating value for external beneficiaries then the project simply isn’t economical.

I usually throw my 5g scoop on my morning coffee where I don’t notice it exists. Any reason not to take it with coffee or am I doing it right?

Data as an obstacle to legal AI is a human rights violation.

As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.

How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?

One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.

Got Zed for the first time last week. Turned it on and said “the visuals are so perfect I have nothing to change.” The defaults are amazing.

Shaking down schools with kids' data. Losers.

This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.

Maybe ask your LLM to explain it?

I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.

I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.

The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.

For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.

All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.

Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.

Cook was an able steward of Apple. Under his leadership the hardware side continued to iteratively improve nicely. Apple Silicon is good stuff. I am firmly embedded in the entire Apple ecosystem and have no reason to leave.

I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.

I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.

Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!

If you enjoyed coding for the sake of coding it hasn't gone anywhere. People still knit for themselves when they can go buy clothes off the rack. People still enjoy chess and Go even though none of them can beat a machine.

If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.

It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.

A problem with mythologizing past defeat is it can lead to sacrificing the present and future. Some people have the need to live in a grand mythic narrative. Others just want decent lives for themselves and their children with security and a future.

Lotus 1-2-3 on PC Jr cartridge in the era before widespread availability of hard drives was the only good thing about that awful platform

Apple hasn't been able to ship software in decades.

They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.

This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.

Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.

Since I sadly must return to the real world (but thank you everyone for the well spirited debate) -- string theory is funny to me because its a bit of a Rorschach test as such a tiny number of people who follow the subject can actually evaluate string theory vs. alternative models. It's just an abstract blob people can project their worldview onto. To the extent someone reading this is in the group who does understand the topic, this isn't about you--

As a society we can't place excess faith in the orthodox positions of institutions. We all know they can be rigid, wrong, and lock out dissenting views. But society today seems to embrace heterodoxy for its own sake the way perhaps in the past orthodoxy was just accepted on pure faith and there is a vast media ecosystem happy to promote (ie monetize) this worldview. Just because something is heterodox doesn't make it right.

Have a wonderful weekend all.