stephc_int13

Mathematicians are approaching the recent developments either from some kind of corporatism or selfishness. I think they should take a step back and consider the societal value of their work, ultimately this is the deciding factor.

This was a proposal, and it was rejected. Not an actual tax or law.

My prediction is that it will take a while for the processes and habits to changes, but programming manually or at least reviewing code will become a niche activity, pretty much like building or maintaining mechanical clocks or old-school woodworking with hand tools.

Building software is hard for humans, managing the complexity of large projects has been at the frontier of our intellectual capabilities for a while, leading to well known issues in cyber security and exploding costs. At some point machines are simply better suited to the task.

TUI are often inferior to GUI from a user perspective, but not necessarily by much.

On the other hand, they are easier to build in a cross platform manner.

Linux is probably the most difficult platform to build GUI for, because of all the fragmentation, X11, Wayland, all the different flavors of GUI toolkits, driver issues, window managers issues, font issues etc.

TUI are a bit like web apps in that regard, using the terminal instead of a browser to abstract the platform.

As with many things, only time will tell.

Zig seems to be most prominent C alternative today, well funded, with some high-profile support, excellent engineering and both a loyal fanbase and haters.

That said, as longtime C user, I've been tempted by Jai and Zig and C3, but I am not ready to make the switch yet. The benefits are simply not big enough.

And there is something new that was not apparent in when this article was written: a lot of code is LLM written now, giving old and mainstream language an undeniable advantage. Also, Rust, with the built-in safeguards, is pretty AI assistance friendly.

François Chollet made an interesting geometric analogy on Twitter. We tend to view Intelligence as something unbounded, like the height of a pole. But it could be something closer to the roundness of a polished sphere. Once close to the limit, incremental improvements are less and less significant.

The intuition we have about the nature of cognition and its whole shape and limits is almost entirely built by looking at ourselves and our peers, comparing that to an ant. I feel this is largely naive and misguided.

I also recoiled a bit when I say that Lutke was on the investors list.

It was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.

I fully agree with that.

Past experience has shown what while Turing complete config is powerful, it is also a double edged sword and I would be wary of using it.

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing.

I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could.

That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.

I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.

Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.

He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.

Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.

It is the same reasoning as with the regular Decimation. It is all about disciplining their employees.

And it works.

We're not saying many ex or current Meta employees talking about their experiences here, even if I am sure that HN is pretty popular among this crowd.

And of course this is not unique to Zuck/Meta. We don't hear much from people working for Musk either.

He is one of the well known netcode guy.

But from the few interactions I had with him I would say he is quite abrasive, stubborn and probably somewhat on the spectrum.

But there is a special kind of unpleasantness in writing/debugging netcode for large projects, I don't think you can be agreeable and still you your job correctly.

The trajectory of id software is interesting.

The company was successful, had one of the most prestigious brand in the game industry, was early enough to capitalize on the rise of PC gaming, incredible talents and tech.

Yet it didn't transform into a Blizzard or Epic.

And it seems that both the early success and stall were the responsibility of one very talented but somewhat obtuse nerd.

I think the rationale is that they are already using typical car factory automation, but they see a huge potential market for general purpose robotics in the coming decades, they don't need the humanoids, they are simply dogfooding a future product.

I think this is smart and not very risky. Tesla is playing a similar game with Optimus, for now Hyundai/Boston Dynamics is at least 5 years ahead.

I am not one of them but quite a few programmers prefer not having to use the mouse at all when working.

The terminal is an old but astonishingly powerful user interface that is still evolving.

Good terminals can be very snappy and configurable in ways that most GUI are not.

There is also arguably an aesthetic/fetishism appeal to it.

I've worked in the terminal at some point of my career, as there was not many other choices, and I understand how someone can get really used to it.

It can be used for many things. But the main use is reverse engineering.

I tried it a few times and was not convinced by the autocomplete.

I found it less effective than free copilot autocomplete on vanilla VSCode.

If you think about it states are not much different than corporations.

Taxes is human labor dedicated to the maintenance of state.

I think it is naive to think that once humans are not needed they will magically be fed by the machines.

If you own a factory, what you see is a big box with input and output, human labor is just an annoying variable, removing it won't turn the entire thing "free".

The owner will still expect to trade the output for something else for his benefit.

You missed the point entirely.

What fuels the economy, for now, is human work. Being a consumer simply means that you are heavily incentivised to take part (by working).

If machines can do the same or better, whoever owns them will end-up seeing unproductive humans as dangerous and wasteful bloat.

It won’t be a life of infinite leisure if you don’t own machines.

Otherwise you could say that humans are working for free as well, as they can cultivate their own food and even build themselves by making babies.

Of course, but none of them is working for free, each consume energy and materials.

It is never really “for free”.

It appears free because machines, like perfect slaves, don’t ask to be paid for work.

They still need to be fed though, energy, iron, etc.

No matter how you turn it, it can’t be free. Meaning you can’t benefit from it without owning it or trading something.

I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen.

And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges.

This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.

No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.

Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.

I have not, but I am curious.

I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me.

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization.

This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look.

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them.

This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.