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Your best argument is the 2nd sentence.

The first sentence is actually a much better jumping off point for the other side of the argument than yours, because the mistakes involved in the statement should set off alarm bells for people who've walked with mathematics.

What do you mean by "place"? What do you mean by "more"?

Are there more places as marked by real numbers between 0 and 1, or places as marked by integers? Could a machine that can count integers 1000000 times faster than people "visit" all those real places between 0 and 1? What would it mean to visit all the places between 0 and 1? Once the machine visited all of them how would it help people explore that territory?

What do the general ratios and rules between paths and areas mean about how much path it takes to cover an area?

The real world is quantized in way that math isn't, of course, but that's one way the analogy can lead you astray.

And even just keeping to the real world rather than math, it's not all about the sheer velocity with which you can cover an arbitrary distance metric. The primary bottleneck is less that velocity than the amount of time you have to direct to place scaled to your capacities. The car's velocity can let you trade some of that time for fast travel between farther places, and with a road network can arguably even increase a certain variety of places, but that's a very different statement than more places. And it's also a wall against attention to everything in between.

This style is often how I want to write my view layer. In fact, when I get my model layer, app logic layer, and view layer done well, it's usually how my view templates will look more or less, whether the remaining data anchors, transformation functions, and control flow are out-of-band script or in-band tags.

And then there's stuff like XSLT...

The most desirable outcome with iPhones is to be able to run an up to date fully-patched iOS on them with up to date apps for as long as the device will function.

The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.

"Better than them" is just barely in the realm where it's not incredible to discuss, and still quite debatable.

Cheaper than them? That's dramatically unproven and unlikely just on power efficiency alone, even if we accept the suspect assumption the only efficiency anyone should care about is currency marked per line of code or theorem proved.

We're not just going to have to become better existential philosophers, we're going to have to become better examiners of assumptions and claims.

As a lifelong student of religious cultures like Utah's (and often in particular Utah's), this isn't bad at a first approximation but could be elaborated better.

There is absolutely a class of Utah politicians that has little sincere personal investment in purity culture and associated culture war issues, but knows that they can be used for ingroup/virtue signaling. They also know that the dominant religious culture in Utah prepares the most significant statewide voting block to respond to such culture issues far more powerfully than any kind of attempt to engage on policy or detailed dialogue. This isn't that different from a common general strategy of running on symbolic issues and then devoting your time in office to favor trading/personal gain plus occasional personal pet policy issues, but the particular flavor is regional with a strong religious emphasis.

But there's also significant portion of regional religious leadership and membership with sincerely held purity culture beliefs. Some of this is rooted in psychological traits amplified via theology where adherents achieve a perceived state of purity/redemption by cleansing rituals and avoiding contaminants. Some of this is rooted in credences: the tradition makes moral claims about sexual contaminants and you have to sign on to be part of the ingroup (and also the tradition's leaders speak for God and are therefore wrong and if you challenge them you're not just outgroup, you're actually challenging the authority of the tradition which makes you opposed to God himself, so from this perspective there's little legitimate discourse about sexuality topics leaders have spoken about, there's mostly authority of religious leaders and individuals declaring of which side of the spiritual war they're on).

So, some people shaped under this culture over time do believe they are fighting crucial battles for the children, to the point where they have no problem with the erosion or even destruction of any secular treaties like those the 1st amendment supports (the fact that Latter-day Saints are quite vulnerable should secular treaties fall in a nation of much larger religious organizations that see LDS as blasphemous heretics is largely lost on most of the porn crusaders, there are some peculiar delusions that come with being a local majority with some national clout yet a national minority nonetheless).

And others know this sincere belief is a convenient lever for other power plays, and all you have to do is flatter the prejudices and signals of the ingroup in order to get broad permission for corruption and other antisocial advances.

The real divide isn’t separation of concerns or implicit vs explicit structure. It’s whether you have staff that wants to think about markup as a data format expressing domain entities and/or generalization of presentation concerns.

Most developers and organizations don’t want to and they don’t want to think why or what doing so would buy them. They will probably find the tailwind local maxima enabling that reasonably comfortable and may even repeat the familiar mantra as has been done here. It especially pairs well with unreflective product management, which is the most popular kind of product management.

This is why there are moral panics about things people feel in their guts: most people are reasonably easily unsettled and distracted by queer people, people who look different, people their people don’t trust being in charge.

It works. Most people are happier focusing and holding forth on that and repeating familiar statements than they are talking to congressional staff about policy.

Your car that you paid a lot for and you like and have positive useful experiences with every day? That’s going to be way farther down the list of things to worry about.

Which mostly seem to stem from the fundamental misalignment of OpenAI and Anthropic leaders/owners, aka the evil of the companies.

Arguably, though, their evil is well within the normal distribution of the usual evil of humanity magnified via the social technology of capitalism. The further tech is mostly raising that exponentiation to its own exponent. The unchecked singularity was embraced centuries ago.

Worth noting this dynamic when people overgeneralize “local government good, federal government bad”, a tendency that has been present and growing for at least 50 years.

The theory that local government is more accountable and responsive seems to be pretty deeply broken, what actually seems to happen is that localities lack a critical mass of attention and focus for real responsiveness and accountability.

Or the American character in general does.

For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.

There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.

I thought the recommended honeymoon reading was Knuth’s _Surreal Numbers_

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system.

And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.

with the advantage that you can discover this by reading citations.

A fascinating everyday arms race I had no idea was playing out around me.

The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work.

Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal.

Models trained on that work will reflect that approach.

How does the PWA work offline with HTMX? The “hit the server for fresh markup fragments” approach seems like it has to be abandoned here, however simplifying it is for online apps.

Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also:

> paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers

Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large. There’s so many other fields that are likely to reward participants with more wealth that it’s absurd — even with all the passion for the work in tech it’s probably relatively less pure.

And whatever the excesses of copyright have been, the whole bargain has always been on more pro-social foundations and stronger intellectual foundations than “extortion” sneers. It recognizes that incentives matter and work that’s valuable should be rewarded and incentivized.

A culture that takes a Robin Hood approach to low marginal cost billing points but fawns over the hypercapitalized distribution King Johns isn’t creating a freer or richer society or fighting the real cartel center, it’s indulging resentment and caricature.

> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.

This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.

> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma

Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).

If the “protocols not platforms” philosophy is the right track, usenet/nntp.

Speaking as someone who has run courses designed to take late teens / early 20somethings with a variety of backgrounds and tried to teach them 1st semester programming concepts in two weeks, I think anyone who thinks tcp/ip an easy four week dunk for most doesn’t remember how much they’ve already learned and take for granted.

Sure, if you’ve already learned enough groundwork, tcp/ip is accessible in weeks. The same is true of most of the algebraic concepts in play here. And both have rabbit holes you can also spend a much longer time going down (though here I am willing to give the edge to math which offers much greater opportunities for hypergeneralization and new vistas of abstraction along which not only specific rabbit holes but entire new generalizations of both rabbits and holes may be found).

If you’re not redistributing ebooks you bought, it’s hard to imagine what legal claim someone could make against you, and even harder to establish the ethics of that claim.

To say nothing of Amazon’s ethics.

Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.

The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.

My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.

I’m having trouble imagining the privacy concern. If someone’s vehicle is topping 90db then it’s hard to argue what they really want is privacy, and even the most invasive monitoring method I can think of (widespread mics) could be nerfed by requiring hardware that only responds at db threshholds well above conversation.

I’m at the point where I don’t just want ticketing and other enforcement on this front, I want yanked licenses for this after a warning, and I might even want it legal to shoot vehicles guilty of noise violations and their drivers with paintballs to mark them for further enforcement and shame.

Smoking is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool; noise pollution is something between that and opting everyone into your dumb M80 party. It’s antisocial, it causes health problems on top of discomfort, and it should stop.

I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven.

Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3.

And frontier models are already a study in unusual levels of resources dedicated to step 1.

It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone). Combine that with recency bias and the marketing serving incentives of platforms and vendors to push towards “native” and the point seems pretty strong.

There’s some minority of apps where work is offline resource bound or mostly offline regardless, those certainly have always made sense on device, other than that habit and mindset probably is the main driver of preference.

See also Bill Thurston’s classic Math Overflow answer to a student wondering where they fit compared to a Gauss or Euler:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...

“The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. [Their importance is not just in their specific statements], but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to mathematical developments that increased our understanding.

The world does not suffer from an oversupply of clarity and understanding (to put it mildly)… In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining --- they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians.”

I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.

The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.

That makes sense — decisions that are about personal benefits beyond technical/product choices and their merits.