lioeters

That's new to me, I didn't know she coined the term. She's the first true "software engineer" then, I suppose. I remember her from that historic photo where she's standing next to a pile of code printed out, a stack talled than her.

Not to be confused with Margaret Hamilton the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the film The Wizard of Oz.

> There is literally not one aspect of the universe that is provably finite.

Or provaly infinite.

> U.S. Oil Industry Earned over $130B in Profit During Iran War (nytimes.com)

> Trump aims to increase US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027

> EU member states' defence expenditure sharply increased between 2021 and 2026. In 2025, member states' defence expenditure reached €418 billion, rising for the 11th consecutive year. In 2026, it is expected to reach an estimated €454 billion. This means that defence expenditure has increased by 75.3% compared with 2021.

While ARM Holdings is based in Cambridge, England, it is majority owned by SoftBank Group which is a Japanese investment conglomerate.

What's important in the context of a European "sovereign computing" initiative is the licensing of the instruction set architecture. Like x86, ARM is still proprietary, while RISC-V is a free and open standard.

This is similar to some of the software being produced these days, where it's impossible to understand or develop the codebase further without AI. The complexity is beyond what even an above average individual human brain can comprehend.

Without making a value judgement of whether that's good or bad for the field in the long term, it is an interesting point to note the similarity with the human-incomprehensible communication among AI agents. When there are no humans in the loop, it's no longer necessary to translate or "lower" the representation for our benefit. Since it's still early days, we can only imagine and extrapolate how far it might go in that direction, what might evolve out of it in the future.

> miss the trees for the forest

I think the common expression is to miss the forest (big picture) for the trees (details). But maybe you're playing on words and saying we shouldn't let the big picture (big O notation/analysis) obscure our attention to the details (an algorithm's actual efficiency and performance).

Like that quote in Le Petit Prince, real intelligence is knowing what not to build, what can be eliminated until only what's necessary is left.

> La perfection est atteinte non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer.

> build a computer from scratch

What would it take to make this possible, if not completely then at least move in the right direction?

Aside from re-thinking computer manufacturing from the ground up.. RISC-V, or something like it, seems like part of the solution.

> U.S. Oil Industry Earned over $130B in Profit During Iran War (nytimes.com)

That's chump change though. There are countless other global-scale rackets, including war crimes, that are generating far more wealth.

Oh cool, you actually owned a Space Pen! I'd only heard about it as a kind of legend, I didn't know it was available for the general public.

> It was refillable, and very elegant, in a featureless polished stainless-steel body with a knurled grip, and the cap could be secured when open.

Why did I have to read this sensual description, I want it now. (:

> Pilot G2 gel rollerball, 0.7mm in black or blue inks

I looked this up - I see what you mean, I'm going to try them. It looks well-made without being expensive.

> anti-AI psychosis

You're doing exactly what you accuse others of doing.

Or that funny anecdote about a pen that works in outer space.

> faced with the fact that ball-point pens would not write in zero-gravity, the Fisher Space Pen was devised as the result of millions of dollars of unnecessary spending on NASA's part when the Soviet Union took the simpler and cheaper route of just using pencils

This has been debunked apparently, but I still think there's a general truth to it.

Glad to see the math corrected, the sloppy calculation was bothering me also.

> he wanted me to have the opportunity to solve it myself. Like, his _present_ to me was to give me an opportunity to solve a hard but rewarding problem.

That's a wonderful anecdote, and it's what I feel is missing from the discussion of this so-called "AI era" of mathematics.

When the AI companies harvest all the low-hanging fruits of unsolved problems, they're robbing the mathematical community of the opportunity to learn and struggle for the solution themselves. That friction is the process of learning and understanding.

> using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy

When I look up "hypocrisy" in the dictionary, this would be an excellent example. "Only we are allowed to infringe intellectual property."

Why would they put out the fire that they themselves started?

The wars have been very profitable for certain people who planned for it.

> Not wanting to work very much, yet feeling entitled to a share of what other people work for,

It's almost like the working class is being exploited by owners of capital and the means of production.

I agree, what they call "egoless" hides a dangerous philosophy of letting the corporations and the "free" market decide the direction of the field of intellectual pursuit.

We need other voices from the mathematical community, dissenting opinions, so-called Luddites and supremacist humanists.

Framing it as the "AI Era" is so 2020's. The term is already obsolete before it even began. We need to look a step or two ahead, and plan for how to prevent the downfall of society and collective cognitive competence.

"Yup, looks good to me!" said the human reviewing thousands of lines of generated code everyday.

This has become common now, and I've seen it ruin some larger projects until nobody understands the codebase full of verbose nonsensical code and comments. It becomes impossible to further develop the project without AI. Contributors not using AI for any reason are all leaving because no one enjoys working with mindless robots (and humans) as colleagues. It's demeaning and devaluing their labor and humanity. They're not getting "left behind", they are leaving the madness of crowds behind.

> ..the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence.

As this technology permeates society, the challenge to maintain control, coherence, and quality will become greater and ever more serious - for example, AI in healthcare, military, management and governance.

> on par with the average developer

More like a genius junior developer who's been home-schooled by the web for better and worse. Hard-working, often impressive, but missing some common sense, occasionally spouts nonsense, and needs guidance to make sure they don't go off the rails.

This theory would make for an interesting study of cultural preferences of programming languages, static/dynamic, functional/object-oriented, post/pre/infix, etc.

From the evidence, one might dare to suggest that public education in the Soviet Union was pretty good, particularly of mathematics and the sciences. For example, the Math Circle as a social activity.

Very helpful information, thanks!

> We view software freedom as not just applications, but also infrastructure and weights.. to ensure the OpenAIs and Anthropics don't become the next extractive monopolies.

Love to see this rebellious spirit of sovereignty and collective action. It's what made the "hacker culture" great.

Seeing the meteoric success of the ArtCraft series of applications, I'm hopeful and looking forward to the positive disruption of the industry, by the makers, for the makers - and screw the takers.

Source: https://github.com/FlashML-org/FreeToken

> FreeToken is an edge-native Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) serving engine designed for running frontier-scale open-weight models on personal and consumer hardware. It treats heterogeneous edge resources—GPUs, CPUs, host memory, and interconnects—as a unified, elastic inference platform.

Love this. The human touch of illustration, and classic stories from computer history. I'm going through the entire series up to now, it's great.

My favorite panel so far: What is a real programmer? https://fosscomics.com/posts/6.%20The%20Origin%20of%20the%20...

Hilariously self-unaware and slop-brained manifesto, doubling-down on the "loser thinking" CEO. I pity the people who have to work under this nonsense leadership.

> This is not about chasing trends — we are being left behind here.. This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience

> Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.. Your job is to identify problems that the LLM cannot solve.. Your job is to push the limits of what the LLM can do

> “Programming” is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. Your old job is gone.

"Thinking" is dead. Machine-generated code is not, nor is hype-chasing C-suite arrogance. All that Harvard and Stanford for nothing.

Brilliant. A reflection of the eternal spirit of Dada and Surrealism, an ocean of weirdness just under the surface of colonized reality, waiting for a chance to break through the cracks and remind us of the marvelous and revolutionary potential of our collective imagination. Thank you more please.