saulpw

There are many polls vs one election. It's a lot harder to manipulate all the polls.

Also, yes, we can and should be volunteering locally. AND ALSO we can have independent statistical review.

How do you confirm the election results itself though, when the election purveyors can't be trusted? Statistical polling has been a third-party check on elections for a century.

How would that look any different than literally right now?

I see no evidence that you're committed to it getting better over time. Tell me again in a year or two when something you've made has actually gotten usable. Until then, build your credibility by making something good, not just making a sloppy copy.

Don't sloppy that copy!

I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.

Well we've been doing exactly this for 200 years! IMO the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing novelty products that go straight-to-landfill, and daily suburban commuting to bullshit jobs, and diverting water to inhabit cities in inhospitable deserts, is a greater cause of our 'slow genocide' than AI will be. So why would we stop now, when we couldn't be bothered to even slow down before? (Annual carbon emissions aren't even trending downward, much less getting to net negative!)

So while I also foresee and lament humanity's self-genocide, it seems a bit hypocritical to get salty about AI "automation" while broadly accepting our industrial civilization's trajectory.

Yeah this was my impression too, I thought it was structurally impossible to have a private key like "4"?

Original comment you responded to said "> [Meta] have arguably contributed nothing to society for over a decade" and you responded with a list of tech that is supposed to indicate their contribution. I'm not impressed. I'm also not impressed by fast fashion and child labor phones. Big Tech has been a scourge and 20% less web traffic because of zstd does not absolve them.

I also "use" Facebook tracking and ads and I'm not psyched about that either!

Yawn, I've used none of these except Linux and I would expect that their Linux contributions have been self-serving and not made it better for regular users like me.

I mean, Hack? Who cares?

We were lucky for decades to get paid to do what we enjoy. Virtually no other field gets this. Maybe artists but note that very few artists make even a living from their work. So yes it sucks but as they say, "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened".

"Gathering mental capacity to simply know what next I need to do" is not a waste. That is work. In fact it is the most important work with LLMs. If you spend all day in a hammock dreaming up what next needs to be done (and it's the right stuff), and then type a few sentences into the LLM to generate it overnight, that is better time spent working than spending all day cranking out 20 PRs that are of mid-low value.

> AI can make it very easy to do more and more busywork that doesn't move the needle.

I'm struck by the fact that the origin of the word "business" is "busy-ness".

Also Cory does not have Qualified Immunity, and if Cory is caught doing this, Cory can be punished.

Typescript was Microsoft and Swift was Apple, so those follow the same pattern of Go and Rust.

10 years is enough time. The industry was absolutely using Perl (1987) in 1997 and I was using Python (1991) professionally by 2003.

I mentioned Zig already; Julia also feels like it fizzled in a similar way, by getting attention without commensurate adoption.

But I will concede that you're right about Lean. It feels important that it's solving tomorrow's problem (i.e. today's) rather than yesterday's problem.

AFAICT there have only been two programming languages that people rely on today that were created after the year 2000: Go and Rust. Both were sponsored by large organizations which had clear goals that drove the design and development. All other modern languages are not going anywhere. The days of Python and Ruby and Perl and PHP being personal projects that people created, that grew into widespread languages that other people use seriously, are over. (Zig feels like it's a potential counterexample, but it's already been 10 years; for every other language mentioned above, after 10 years they were clearly well along their adoption curve.)

Depends. I say, let your needs drive your personal infrastructure. For example, I wanted to run Claude Code in YOLO mode 6 months ago, but I have lots of projects that I wanted to keep separate from one another (or at least be intentional about how they interact), and especially I wanted give some a set of permissions that they needed, but not this other set, and vice versa, and I could see them doing "grep -r" and "find $HOME" to just search over everything (with constant "I'm sorry, I exfiltrated these API tokens, so you need to rotate them"), so I built a little container setup to isolate them, and it's been working decently well for me and given me peace of mind when I let a project cook for a few hours.

Now I find that sometimes I do have tasks that I just want completed, and they're small or obvious or scoped enough that I know my role would be basically opening up a session and telling it to implement it and then asking another LLM for review and then fix the problems it found and then rubberstamp it--this is all for my personal setup so "QA" just involves me trying out the feature in my normal workflow anyway. So now I have a little miniature "software factory" that does the above, but without me needing to be in the loop. I press Alt+N and type e.g. "make TTS streaming" and continue about my other business, and in 5 minutes my text-to-speech setup has gone from nothing showing up until I toggle my push-to-talk switch, to words showing up at every pause.

I know it's not a bigco "software factory" but it serves my needs. And isn't that what this new era is about? We have a magic genie that grants wishes as long as they're well-enough defined and it's connected to the right other pieces to make it happen. So create an internal process that allows that genie to grant your wishes reliably and in bulk. What else is a "software factory" anyway?

Keep your identity small[0].

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

> What is needed is a human at the beginning, to decide what needs to be done - and a human at the end, to decide whether it’s finished.

I've been thinking the same, this is very well put.

diskprices.com, I was going to say $500 but looked it up before posting.

I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?

Yup, I learned all too late in life that it's not really about buying and selling, but about allocation. Sounds like they dramatically increased their allocation of (US) cash? I don't think that sounds like a better place to park your money right now..

Children prefer to have a stable home, food on the table, and a camper van to travel in with their family. They just don't know it until those things aren't available.

Not saying their Dad was right, often client work feels more urgent than it is. But Dad probably internalized "need to make sure business is taken care of so I can support my family" and that is what it looked like.

Same here. I'm making more software than ever, for myself, and I'm finding it incredibly useful. But even though I've been a proud open-source software developer, I'm not releasing this new code because I don't see the value in it: I won't get the credit (because I "only" designed it, and didn't write the code), nor will anyone else use it, and if they did use it, I wouldn't want another maintenance burden for myself. So it stays private.

I'm also amazed at the abilities of AI when I can verify them. But, how do you know that Claude is right about your dishwasher? I mean you're not that much worse off if it's wrong (compared with a similar medical query), but isn't this a case of trusting the AI without verification, just because it looks correct and was stated confidently?

You're crazy, I'm...not even arguing. You'll see that even in the course of this one thread that I've been quite ambivalent. And I've already talked with Claude about it plenty, and few ideas that feel workable in our present climate. I don't feel like I'm "ignorant" but then we never do, right? Would love some pointers to ideas. What you got? Communism? Georgism? UBI?

Throwing shoes into the mechanism doesn't seem to have done anything but coin a new word. But I'm all ears! What other options do you see that could work at a larger-than-village scale?

The only people who even somewhat successfully resisted industrialization are the Amish. Is that what we should be doing, forming religious communities that are increasingly isolated from the rest of humanity? Unable to contribute meaningfully to the discourse, but still subject to the externalities of the dominant paradigm?

You mean like all the benefits of industrialization? The real externalized human/environmental costs of our fast/cheap fashion, of our iPhones, of cars, of electricity, of agriculture?

I saw a video today, talking about how this is really the end goal of what we've been working towards for 200 years. Automation and scale and convenience uber alles. As structured it's not a good idea and it seems that Dr. Kaczynski wasn't wrong in diagnosis, only in the treatment. But here we are and we're pretty pot-committed, so I guess we have to see for ourselves what's on the other side.

It's like the old 'Boss' screen in 80s videogames. It's a thin veneer so that anything just cruising to see if you're available will be deterred.