Ambolia

Steven Pinker on this article:

https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310

"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."

Energy usage per capita peaked in america in the 1970s[1]. After that, maybe there were efficiency gains, but by using more energy you get crazy progress in the early 20th century, like doing 100x or 1000x more work per person. With efficiency gains I doubt you'll even get 2x the work in most cases.

There's also the Productivity Paradox[2] where progress in IT (computers, internet, ...) didn't translate on higher productivity in society. There's different theories about this, like it being caused by the change from industrial economy to a service economy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/10/176801719/two-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

It costs a lot of money to move, you don't know if the alternative will be any better, and if it affects a lot of companies then it's nobody's fault. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Cloudflare/AWS" as they say.

I will worry when I see Startups competing on products with companies 10x, 100x, or 1000x times their size. Like a small team producing a Photoshop replacement. So far I haven't seen anything like that. Big companies don't seem to be launching new products faster either, or fixing some of their products that have been broken for a long time (MS teams...)

AI obviously makes some easy things much faster, maybe helps with boilerplate, we still have to see this translate into real productivity.

It would be cool if you could somehow form chains of trust with this, maybe even with links to other social media, where you could "follow other people that this guy has vetted". I want my social media censored and curated, but I want to choose my own censors and curators.

It's a publicity stunt to score points while solving nothing. Same issue in Spain with squatters, it allows the goverment to confront tenants with landlords while the goverment does nothing.

What about binary blobs? I hate having to store them outside of the database and that you can't just do a dbdump/import to clone a project.

I like the rule of thumb: "If the result of a social psychology experiment doesn't agree with your grandma, it's probably fake."

For me what killed search was 2016, after that year if some search term is "hot news" it becomes impossible to learn anything about it that wasn't published in the last week and you just get the same headline repeated 20 times in slightly different wording about it.

After that I only use search for technical problems, and mouth to mouth or specific authors for everything else.

It can't be accessed without a google account.

"What this chart shows is that, since 2000, the fossil fuel industry has in its very best year managed to secure $84.69 for every $1 spent on lobbying. This is not a bad return on investment, and clearly the money that the fossil fuel industry is spending on lobbying is well worth it. But when we look at renewables, the picture that emerges is on a different scale entirely. In 2012, during the ARRA stimulus, the industry received $690.95 in tax preferences for every dollar spent. In 2023, we are on track to see that rise to $740.38 thanks to IRA distributions. Although the fossil fuels industry still spends more on lobbying in absolute terms, the returns on green lobbying are significantly higher. "

Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.

If you are only doing web as documents with links. As soon as you use any Forms and error back-and-forth you have to either patch over the web stardards, or annoy your users with sub-par functionality.

It could be done with "select for update" and etags+triggers checking the etag received + triggers generating a new etag on every create/update.

99% of apps are basic CRUD apps

You run into the edges of pure HTML forms on day 1 of the project if you have to listen to any feedback or requests from the users.

I don't have knowledge about Svelte so you may be right about it solving all those issues. My contention is with regards to the general idea of the article and some comments that seem to indicate that everything was good in the web development world before React introduced a bunch of problems. React did introduce some problems, but to sell me on migrating I'll need to see that the new framework solves the issues inherent to web development, not just the issues that React created.

Compiled languages boil down to assembly, but I wouldn't like to write them as assembly files with a few higher-level constructs sprinkled through the files.

You may disagree that html and css are that bad. But I think it was always a mess, specially when you go beyond linked documents and add any kind of interactivity and forms. There's also inherent limitations like "select" dropdowns offering very little functionality and mostly ending up as custom components in all projects I have worked in.

That only works if you think that basic HTML and CSS where at any point good platforms for building complex applications. Many people (me included) wouldn't agree with this. In that case, saying that Svelte doesn't help overcome any of those fundamental limitations of web development would not be a selling point.

Things only get worse when you add vanilla javascript to the mix.

The problem starts in html, css, javascript and the browser as a development platform. React tries to patch over those issues, and creates some new issues.

People claim other frameworks solve the same issues without introducing any significant new problems. I'll remain skeptic until I see a couple of huge full-functionality apps in those frameworks that manage to keep a clean codebase and good performance.

I've seen too many times people "solving" frontend development, most of the time that solution just amounts to documents linked to each other, and avoiding complex forms and interactivity, but if you just do linked documents, frontend development was solved in the 90s, and you don't need javascript at all.

Archive without paywall: https://archive.is/0LyCG

If the identity is based on a cryptographic key, I assume you can move your account to a different server? Even without help from the original server. But not sure how easy to move the contacts in that case.

Just an example of how AI generated garbage seem to be contaminating google top results.

This is the current top result for googling "ubuntu vs kubuntu". The response gets copied into google as the direct answer.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/AVMiceliBarone/status/166215065632766361...

A key interesting point that highlights how increased efficiency creates choking points and fragility:

Shay Assad: We have nowhere else to go. For many of these weapons that are being sent over to Ukraine right now, there's only one supplier. And the companies know it.

It wasn't always like this. The roots of the problem can be traced to 1993, when the Pentagon, looking to cut costs, urged defense companies to merge. Fifty one major contractors consolidated to five giants.

I think sports, or martial arts, or just letting kids run free in a playground are better environments for that. Sitting in a class with a teacher setting the rules will ensure that only the most scheming or socially machiavelian kids have resources to apply or avoid violence.

Public school is one of the few places and times in life where people are forced to be closed in a room with people they don't like at best, or suffer systematic violence at worst, with no chance to just leave.

Would be funny to see workplaces try to implement some of the weird practices schools do, like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days.

Twitter threads summarizing the speech:

- Play-by-play: https://twitter.com/toddntucker/status/1651634719031795721

- Overall summary: https://twitter.com/jennifermharris/status/16516981316820664...

Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole.

Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.

This is used in the programming book Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics [1]. With some of the same authors as the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation...