wolframhempel

Sure - but if you take especially late Gothic cathedrals like Milan's, there's 3400 Statues and 135 spires, decorated with almost 100.000 Crockets (the decorative elements on the steeple roofs). I feel these things are more mass production than meditative process...

Before anyone complains that this removes the human aspect of art, it's worth stressing that sculptors have always looked for ways to automate work and save time (as the website itself points out).

As far back as ancient Egypt, grids and measuring tools were used to reproduce figures at different scales. Roman workshops churned out copies of Greek statues in marble and bronze, using casts and moulds. From the 18th century onwards, sculptors used outright pointing machines to transfer models into marble. James Watt, the steam engine guy, even built a mechanical sculpture-copying machine that could (somewhat) automatically reproduce reliefs and medallions.

Gothic architectural decoration wasn't about expressing the inner world of its makers in the way we think of art today. Much of it was produced by large masonry workshops using standardized geometry, wooden templates and repeated designs.

So, yeah, using a CNC machine is truly Gothic.

That's fascinating, given that out of 19 posts, 16 where written before 2020 :-)

If you're an employee, that's true - but as a founder of a small SaaS (https://arcentry.com) I genuinely work about 1-2 hours less and get more time walking with my dog through nature. I now have the luxury of concentrating on building the core product and writing articles for the blog and AI handles the things I'm less good at or passionate about, including marketing and content distribution, accounting, building the website (which admittedly looks a bit AI-y, but still much better than my handmade version), answering simple customer requests and escalating complicated ones to me and so on.

Meanwhile, I get to do more of what I enjoy. Of course, it's always tempting to let Codex work on the core product itself - but I resisted that urge so far as I feel a strong sense of ownership and craftsmanship - plus its the thing I actually like doing.

As a general rule, every policy and system should be designed with the worst possible user in mind.

- German address registers with religious affiliation were a good idea until the Nazis came to power.

- Pegasus spyware was developed and sold to governments to fight terrorism and serious crime — until it was used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, including in authoritarian states.

- Rwandan identity cards listed ethnicity for administrative purposes — until militias used them to identify and execute Tutsis at roadblocks during the 1994 genocide.

Bottom line: Even if you trust the current administration (do you?), are you sure you want 5o give that power to all future ones?

Blatant self promotion: But if you'd like your Mermaid diagrams rendered in pretty isometric 3D, we've added Mermaid support to Arcentry lately: https://arcentry.com/blog/isometric-mermaid-diagrams-with-ar...

I’m excited to be bringing Arcentry back. It's thoroughly modernized, with 700+ components for everything from Foundation Models and AI Agents to the latest Cloud Services, improved automatic diagram creation, imports from Terraform, OpenTofu and CloudFormation, AI-assisted diagram creation, and quite a few other improvements.

More details here: https://arcentry.com/blog/arcentry-is-back-and-better-than-e...

I’m excited to be bringing Arcentry back. It's thoroughly modernized, with 700+ components for everything from Foundation Models and AI Agents to the latest Cloud Services, improved automatic diagram creation, imports from Terraform, OpenTofu and CloudFormation, AI-assisted diagram creation, and quite a few other improvements.

More details here: https://arcentry.com/blog/arcentry-is-back-and-better-than-e...

I think the line is at emergence.

Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it.

But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.

I'm perfectly happy to believe that the United States has an awareness of itself in the abstract sense that its a complex system with emerging behaviors that are feedbackloops of itself. I'm also convinced that all mammals and most sea and air creatures have consciousness in this as well as the more general sense.

To me, the fact that an awareness of one self exists isn't particularly stunning - what's stunning to me is that we believe it is something incredibly special and we are the only ones endowed with it.

I think this assumption comes from the same human self confidence that decided it was the only thing "created in gods image" in the universe and so on...

This seems healthy to me. A market where returns are less dependent on seven mega-cap names is probably more stable, not less. If earnings growth broadens out and capital starts flowing back toward quality and free cash flow outside the obvious AI winners, that should reduce concentration risk and make the whole market less fragile.

Maybe that's what I don't get. Ferraris in my mind need to be great at two things: Going 300kph around a racetrack and going 3kph in front of Harrods. If I want a comfy way to get my family around, I'd get a Mercedes.

I've seen a lot of explanations, including one by Marques Brownlee, stating that electric cars need large batteries in the floor, meaning they necessarily have to be taller and more SUV-like—and that, hence, a low, two-seater electric sports car is very hard to pull off with a decent range. But then, the Rimac Nevera is low and fast with 490 km of range—and that was released five years ago. I'm not sure why Ferrari couldn't have built something like that.

I don't think it has any expectation of being an astrophysics simulation. I mean, if the "spaceship" misses, it falls towards the "floor"...

To be fair, I remember being about ten years old and berating my friend who just told me that he had something called "Rebel Assault" on a CD how this was completely impossible as CDs could only store music and how he was a complete idiot for believing otherwise... :-)

There's value in being early - in the right thing.

- If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return

- If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now

- If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush

Of course, you could just as well have

- become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design

- specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms

- made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...)

Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...

As a former soldier and as someone who married into a family from the now russian occupied parts of Ukraine i feel that this is a great mindset, but also somewhat of a luxury believe. I agree that ideally we'd stand up to aggression and weapon production and that all other citizens around the world would do the same, and we'd live in peaceful equilibrium. But they don't- and so our best bet is to be so strong that no one wants to attack us. For that, we can't leave the cutting edge of military technology to others. This mindset used to be anathema to the tech community, but then briefly changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as people briefly understood that there are in fact aggressive actors in the world and war might come to us. But it seems we went back on that.

True, but I'm talking about the autonomous AI weapon question

I assume this is in response to OpenAI working with the Pentagon (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal...).

I'm afraid that AI weapons will follow a similar dynamic to nuclear ones where, as much as we'd like to avoid them, someone will build them. Which means, everyone will need them. I'm worried that we're repeating the pre-Ukraine war mindset of US Tech keeping their distance from defense while other countries have a joined tech/military base.

I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.

Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...

If you have a large screen, make sure you limit your window's size - otherwise the framerate will drop quickly.

I used to work in investment banking in the city of London and later in Canary Wharf. I loved working in the city as it was a beautiful old place, people were very social and having 2-3 hour boozy lunches with someone who you might do business with one day wasn't a rarity (mind you, I moved out before covid, I understand things have changed quite a bit).

Then I switched jobs and ended up in Canary Wharf. For those who don't know it, Canary Wharf is a newly built finance district in the London Docklands. If you've been to Singapore, Dubai, La Defense in Paris or Songdo in Korea, you know the kind of place. Everything is clean, new, modern. Everything has 90 degree angles. Everything has cameras, security guards and cleaning stuff. What it doesn't have is any resemblance of a real city, any organicity or soul.

I hated it. Every morning I saw the streams of suite dressed worker drones pouring from the tube directly into their office towers (Canary Wharf has a huge underground shopping mall/railway station that allows you to go from the subway directly into your office without ever seeing the sun).

I was unhappy. So I did similar things to the OP. I got up earlier and walked there. (I lived in Mile End). It was a nice walk along the canal for a while and then a not so nice walk through smog and traffic, but I didn't mind. I took my lunch outside on the remaining docks. And finally, I got up so early that I arrived an hour before work began.

I spent this hour in a Cafe. Alone. Having breakfast. I loved this hour. I sat there, as the only one not rushing in, getting their "strong capo", beeping their card against the reader and rushing out. I observed the grey and black dressed stream of people. I day dreamed.

It helped - for a while. It was a band aid before I left London all together and moved to Berlin. But most of all, it is a uniquely calm and joyful experience. It decelerates you. The boheme in Paris or Prague has long figured this out. Sit in a cafe. Enjoy a coffee or a glass of wine. Look at people. Daydream. Reflect, be enough - there's a lot to it.

It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.

Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?