marmarama

Talking about the new normal is the new normal.

The weaker antipyretic effect of paracetamol/acetaminophen compared with ibuprofen has been known about for decades in adult studies.

It would have been surprising to obtain a different result in children.

No, it's a bad idea.

Coding agents are not omniscient gods. Cognitive complexity of code is still a thing for LLMs. And every line of code that the LLM writes is still a line that needs maintenance, and has bugs.

Software engineering rules still apply. Coding agents move the needle somewhat on "what can be maintained by us vs. what someone else can maintain" but not _that_ far. And the same "Don't maintain it if you don't have to" approach still applies. More code to maintain means bigger context required, which means the agent burns more tokens to do a task. More context also means the agent makes more mistakes and adds more bugs.

Abstractions are still a good idea. Handing off maintenance through abstractions is still a good idea. Good software design is still a good idea.

It's ironic you talk about communism, because fundamentally this is a problem of "owning the means of production", i.e. who controls the AI and the robots.

If it's you and me, then hey, we can all live happily ever after pursuing hobbies and art, provided for by our mechanical friends, within the limits of resource availability.

If it's an AI trillionaire, things aren't so rosy. If they don't need workers, why would they even bother allocating outputs from the robots to keep us alive?

I don't doubt at all that some group or another will enjoy the fruits of artificial labour. The question is how we are going to get there, and whether that group is most people who are live today and their descendants, or just the families and friends of trillionaires.

You're not looney at all. Frontier models do dumb things all the time, especially on mature codebases. Just yesterday Opus 5.5 butchered the OOP model in a codebase I work on - it duplicated a load of classes that should have just been subclasses. A junior checked it in very satisfied that it was perfect. The LLM review passed it, the tests were fine, and it implemented the feature successfully. It's just the code design had poor taste and poor long-term maintainability.

I keep seeing this kind of thing over and over, and honestly it's not got _that_ much better since the big breakthroughs about a year ago.

For sure I happily vibecode stuff without worrying about it when it's a greenfield project, and if the LLM has written it entirely from scratch then usually it's well structured and sane. But making changes in messy, mostly human-written mature codebases is still a minefield.

If it's just a toy, sure. But even frontier models reach a tipping point of complexity fairly early where they start introducing bugs quicker than they fix them.

A (good) framework abstracts away the complexity so you hit that tipping point much later in terms of codebase size, and reduces your token spend to boot.

People still buy into "research" from Gartner and Forrester despite it being an open secret for decades that they are pay-to-play.

These kinds of "research" companies are there to validate people's preconceived ideas and purchasing decisions rather than being genuinely unbiased. And they are very useful for that, both for consumers and for marketers.

LADSPA v1 is ancient and fundamentally quite broken, and that's what they dropped. Audacity 4 ships with LV2 (i.e. LADSPA v2) support.

FWIW I don't think I've used a v1 LADSPA plugin for a decade.

"As effective as placebo" does not mean worthless. As you point out, placebo antidepressants are fairly effective.

It's a terrible bind. Patients want a pill to fix things, but if they know it's just a sugar pill, it doesn't work. It has to have active ingredients that might work. That's why there's little desire to change the status quo on antidepressants much. Anyone who reads the medical literature knows they're statistically underwhelming, but the experienced reality is that they help people a lot.

Talking therapies, CBT, exercise are all good alternatives but they take time and effort that a depressed person might not be able to manage. An antidepressant prescription they can get in 15 minutes.

That's where the fully automated weapons systems come in. Robotics and AI give the megalomaniacs of the world both a reason and the means to kill everyone with impunity.

The rest of the 21st century is going to be really messed up.

Night Sight appeared on the Google Pixel camera app in 2018. I think Nokia was doing it first on phones before Microsoft destroyed the remains of their phone business.

The reborn Nokia/HMD was also doing multi-sensor image stacking back in 2019 on the Nokia 9 Pureview.

In most countries with universal healthcare, the universal healthcare provider plays a major role in preventive medicine, nudging people towards healthier lifestyles and influencing government policy on a wide variety of topics, such as food standards, consumption taxation, traffic laws, or pollution regulation. Because it's in their interests to do so, because a healthier population saves them money.

Is there the same motivation to help people live healthy lifestyles in the American healthcare system? Are there any lobby groups with the kind of influence and reach as a universal healthcare provider?

Bars, restaurants and supermarkets have glass fronted refrigerators and freezers the world over, and yes, most are double glazed.

They're just less efficient and more likely to break. In a commercial environment that's worth it to show off the contents, but the trade off is different in a domestic setting.

Sure, but if you are a business in the US, you might not be able to use it legally.

And, through the US exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction, businesses in Europe doing business with the US might not be able to use it either, for fear of reprisals. Even though the model is Chinese and hosted in Europe.

This sort of thing happens all the time, especially in the finance and defence sectors.

Your "development build" is another person's daily driver.

Case in point: GrapheneOS (or any other custom Android distro) is unlikely to be able to ever pass remote attestation, even a signed, secure boot build with the bootloader relocked, because it's not the original OS for the hardware.

Same goes for any desktop Linux.

I think you've misunderstood. It's not an app problem. The problem is that it makes Free Software OSes unviable. The copy of Android you compile and install yourself - or your copy of desktop Linux where you upgraded the kernel yourself - will never pass remote attestation, and it gives both the attestation provider and software that checks attestation the ability to unilaterally shut out any OS they like with no workaround, even those that do pass attestation.

In a world of deeply untrustworthy Big Tech, and trend of governments, banks and other basic services needed to exist in society relying on apps and in the future, websites that use remote attestation, that is very troubling.

There are better ways of dealing with the bad actors problem, but Big Tech has chosen violence.

That's the standard Piagetian understanding of child development, yes. Humans do not start out with theory of mind, and are thus inherently solipsistic, but in most cases an understanding that there are other conscious beings with their own thoughts, goals and feelings develops between the ages of 2 and 7.

Developing theory of mind is one of the key milestones in child development.

Then the slop merchants will simply move to controlling a DAW with AI and use the same software synths that everyone else does. It's a little more involved and slower, but far from hard.

Ultimately this isn't really solvable without a way of marking audio with a verifiable signature that it was produced by a specific human, with some kind of reputation algorithm.

I think Apple doesn't really have a choice. They've been very strongly encouraged by the current US government to move as much chip manufacturing to the US as possible, and particularly to make Intel Foundry work, or face... problems.

Also the AI boom means NVIDIA et al. can afford to buy TSMC's best processes at scale, which means less available capacity for Apple.

I'm sure given no other forces at work, Apple would prefer to stick with what they were doing previously, buying the lion's share of TSMC's best process.

It's not so much ripping off the designs - nothing of what Apple Silicon is doing is particularly surprising and both x86 and Intel's microarchitectures are sufficiently different to Apple Silicon/ARM that knowledge of specific implementation approaches wouldn't be directly useful in most cases.

The real advantage is knowing exactly what Apple is launching months or years in advance, because that can inform strategic planning.

Sure there's an analogue.

It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong.

Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.

Here's the neat thing: you don't.

I've tried, and I feel like I've got closer with faster models, but ultimately the agentic loop excludes you. Even if you're asking the agent to do simple short tasks, it's still: prompt, wait, wait, wait, check, and you never really feel like you're the one in control.

The problem with faster models is also that they're more stupid, so that additionally breaks your flow when you have to fix something dumb it's done.

LLM-powered autocomplete is a bit more like it, but that tends to be either so dumb as to be a net negative, or slow enough to be useless. And autocomplete is pretty distracting for me.

I feel like I'm missing a mode that works more like a pair programmer. Perhaps a multimodal model that can talk to you about what you're writing, as you write it, and offer suggestions rather than trying to take over and do everything for you.

So why doesn't the mouse pointer work that way on an Apple trackpad?

Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?

Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.

Umm, you can do basically all of this, today, with Home Assistant and a handful of add-on apps.

I use a local LLM with it, but you can use a hosted LLM if you like.

The core home automation stuff can run on a potato. The LLM just writes new automations when I ask it, or acts as a natural language interface.

I use a pretty small 4B parameter local LLM, on a fairly modest mini PC. It doesn't take a frontier model to do that kind of work.

> How did the UK and France solve it?

Remove the fuel elements, reprocess what's useful, and store the reprocessed materials and nuclear waste somewhere "temporarily" that isn't really suitable for long-term storage. Remove intermediate and low level waste from site and also store it "temporarily". Remove any non-contaminated plant and sell for scrap. Punt the main part of the problem (scrapping the main reactors and reactor buildings) down the road for a hundred years or so until radiation levels are acceptable for demolition to proceed. Re-use other parts of the site for projects that can use the existing HV connection, like another reactor, or battery storage.

That's essentially all you can do unless you want to risk a radiological accident.

No need to bother maintainers, just package it up and upload it to the KDE store as a Plasma extension. Then it can appear for download in "Get New Widgets" in Plasma edit mode. Plenty of "lazy" widgets in there.

Window previews when switching are also a nice thing when doing heavy multitasking.

There are a few things MacOS X inherited from classic MacOS that I don't think work that well in the modern world, and application-focused task switching is one of them. It made sense in the classic Mac context where many apps used floating windows for toolboxes and other non-document windows. You wanted to switch the whole application, with all of its windows, as a unit. It was also the right technical decision with classic MacOS's modest multitasking abilities.

But the world has since mostly standardised on SDI app design with tools contained within that window, and multiple windows representing different documents. In that context, the macOS app-then-window approach is more roundabout than pure window switching. You get used to it, but when you've got a lot of windows open, it's a small but ever-present drag on usability.

Alt-Tab is one of the first things I install on a new Mac. Hopefully one day Apple will give us a built-in option, much like they eventually did with window tiling and full-screen window zooming.

Sure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do it.

You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.

The problem with this is that "breaking the Nash equilibrium momentarily" is a spherical cow.

"Momentarily" can mean years or even decades, and millions of people can suffer or die as a result.

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.

Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.

So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.