al_be_back

Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for

A houseplant with tiny turtles for leaves… very informative if under the influence of some substances.

It’s not a Hello World equivalent.

So much around generative ai seems to be around “look how unrealistic you can be for not-cheap! Ai - cocaine for your machine!!”

No wonder there’s very little uptake by businesses (MIT state of ai 2025, etc)

Makes no sense to sell their entire position on a key infrastructure player, if you’re going all in on ai. That’s very odd.

this is not practical or desirable in my view: de-google, de-apple, de-meta, de-aws etc etc etc

What next, become stone masons? nah, that's too corporate, pick berries instead ;)

Come on, what happened to moderation, discipline and planning? How about use what you need, hedge your risks (mix providers, products), be more proactive than reactive to demands for consumption?

> doing, or is it about getting things done

Who says the thing is done? there is a massive danger now, with the sheer amount of complexity & speed brought by ai, in that it's increasingly harder to verify / do proof-of-work.

> AI allows me to realize my ideas

sure for a personal/pet project. however, when working for a customer/client, they've ideas, needs, wants and usually have their own users and shareholders to satisfy - need proof.

> lighting up the gas-powered street lights

ok, no this metaphor may well be loved by ai companies, but doesn't actual work in so many levels. For one, ai (as actually provided) is not electricity or a physical system, a brain, or a mind, it's software (I use it v-selectively). Second, the job being done (lighting, or coding) is ultimately to produce / output the desired outcome for whoever ordered it - a solution to a problem - failing that it's just work and wages for the worker but no effective solution (lighting the dark side of the moon, kinda).

I agree with the OP, as system complexity went up, so does the ability to keep up.

Couldn't agree more, if posting on coding sites/forums, they usually have code highlighting.

However, a screenshot acts like a print-out / pdf, and very handy for sharing in other platforms e.g social media, mobile devices.

Like many others I like the use of ai for OCR in imagery. Won't be long before ai tool can copy the style + content from an image, or video.

the movie 300

In high-tech warfare we're seeing these days your metaphor is reversed. These artisans (potters etc) are tech engineers, mathematicians, chemists. They are quick to mobilize and become effective (operate drones, robots, cyber, complex machines).

I cannot comment on your opinion of Canada, it's too vague in my opinion.

Generally, western Armed Forces (CAF included) reduced their personnel and spending when the Cold War ended (90s). Rightly so. Since then, war is fought very differently and AF are now very quickly adapting.

Recent conflicts in near/along Levant and near/along the Black Sea, show how effective certain types of warfare are in the current climate.

It is relative, depends on the "type of warfare" being fought, and the countries/economies involved.

In a high-tech modern warfare, the countries with a fighting force that has higher academic education, higher tech literacy are relatively quick to mobilize and become effective militarily.

happy anniversary!

Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]

Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.

Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.

[1] https://dillo-browser.github.io/

Removing html and css would also make the browser more secure - but I would argue also very counter productive for users.

Most of read-only content and lite editing can be achieved with raw data + xslt.

The web has become a sledgehammer for clacking a nut.

For example, with xslt you could easily render a read only content without complex and expensive office apps. That is enough for Academia, Gov, and small businesses.

Replaced them with App stores, why one code base when you can have N code bases: web sites, ios, android , tv …

cheaper, privacy-oriented and more secure lol obviously not, doesn’t help the consumer or the developer.

Xslt is brilliant at transforming raw data, a tree or table for example, without having to install Office apps or paying a number of providers to simply view it without massive disruption loops.

Well, by that token, opensource + stackoverflow was vibe coding all along. I can download, pick and choose, mix, modify, run, ship lol

how about developing using WYSIWYG? drag + drop + connect + theme/style + preview.

i think traditional UI should be decoupled from the language - only providing CLI and web UI (w3c web standards).

Apple's ui is very nice, but you're stuck with a whole ecosystem for life. If you want to cross-platform, as you mentioned, well, all hell breaks loose: React & co, Flutter, web assembly.

a unified, all-batteries-included system is excellent for the manufacturer/provider - they can plan, invest, manage and rollout products at a desired rate. but for developers, third-party, and consumers is very costly, intense and risky.

fun-fact from Steve Jobs bio, he was interviewing a tech hopeful for a job, the guy showed him a prototype of what would become the Dock (aqua + animations), created using an Adobe product. Abobe etc had powerful, flexible platforms - unfortunately the market was driven by eager tech geeks - so it was easy to get curried away with fancy UIs. However, that was (20 years ago) an educational issue - not a tech issue.

I don't mean www, that's a different beast. i said distributed nets, as was before www. It's not actually about aws per se, or whether the cloud improves - evolution doesn't necessarily favor improvement just because.

the centralization of computing is distorting the Internet's core strength, the distributed nets (not aws/azure/gcloud zones).

since covid, if anything is telling, is that politics, economy and warfare has shifted into a new era, pretty much globally.

preventing a catastrophe was ARPA's mitigation strategy. the point is where it's heading, not where it is. It's not about AWS per se, or any one company, it's the way it is consolidating. AWS came about by accident - cleverly utilizing spare server capacity from amazon.com.

In it's conception, the internet (not www), was not envisaged as a economical medium - it's success was a lovely side-effect.

Postmortem all you want - the internet is breaking, hard.

The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

Now it has consolidated into ever smaller mono nets. A simple mistake in on one deployment could bring banking, shopping and travel to a halt globally. This can only get much worse when cyber warfare gets involved.

Personally, I think the cloud metaphor has overstretched and has long burst.

For R&D, early stage start-ups and occasional/seasonal computing, cloud works perfectly (similar to how time-sharing systems used to work).

For well established/growth businesses and gov, you better become self-reliant and tech independent: own physical servers + own cloud + own essential services (db, messaging, payment).

There's no shortage of affordable tech, know-how or workforce.

Cyber risks notwithstanding (they concern me greatly), I still think the Gov is better placed than Private sector to guarantee citizens privacy and security (at that level). Why? The Gov is better placed to be the ultimate non-profit org: can fund, can legislate, can draw expertise, is non-profit etc.

Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.

dynamically-typed languages were typically created for scripting tasks - but ended up going viral (in part due to d-typing), the community stretched the language to its limits and pushed it into markets it wasn't designed/thought for (embedded python, server-side js, distributed teams, dev outsourcing etc).

personally i like the dev-sidecar approach to typing that Python and JS (via TS) have taken to mitigate the issue.

Or for third I guess lol Jobs demoed a mac gui to Gates, and apparently Gates ran strait to his Microsoft office, where he too invented gui. Jobs was very upset for years.

You're correct actually, I missed that. With Raspberry Pi they moved production to the UK (Wales) in 2012 - (Factory tour article in 2023 - https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/how-raspberry-pis-are... ).

I wouldn't be surprised if they move production back to the UK assuming Pi 500+ starts doing well.

It was always to obviously to make battery life better

I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.

Huh - just made me wonder, why didn't Musk buy .X tld ? Far better than x.com

Then again, what would've been the domain name, x.x ? oh boy.

So now we are calling booking.com a “monopoly” ,

No, you are. I suggested they're not exactly a small player, considering that DMA is trying to also appeal to local entrepreneurs/startups - and not stand for consumers too.

Personally i use any channel that suits my need and budget, including Booking, Google, etc, but DMA is regulating for 450million people so, I can see their side of argument.

Why not regulate Spotify

what about them? not a Spotify user - so what can they do that say YT Music, Amazon Music, Apple etc aren't allowed?

In my liberal view it sounds awful for users and entrepreneurs alike

curious to read what arguments you have against or in favor?

From what I understand, in European countries (inc EU) both public and private sector rely predominantly on US and Asian imports for Computer Hardware, Software and Digital Services.

With DMA, they're looking to level the playing fields for local entrepreneurs, and likewise for small firms from say, developing economies such as in Africa or Middle East for example (the neighborhood).

Also worth noting, that, Europe has a massive problem with brain-drain and a rapidly aging population. If local entrepreneurs can't compete with Asian or US tech giants, they have to move to Asia or the USA.

Maybe I will take your comment seriously when Booking is a small player.

Finally, a complete modular portable desktop, made in Europe, for about $350 usd (keyboard, mouse, camera, mic, display, power supply).

I'm impressed. Although, a little late in the race to compete with US or Chinese PC makers. However, they've a good chance to influence drone and robotic computing, same goes for Arduino.

Jobs was "inspired" by a visit at Xerox labs, they showed him a GUI built using Smalltalk (which they'd also invented). So naturally, he ran back to his office and invented GUI ;)

makes no sense. how are you comparing yesterday with a "a few years ago" ?

Gets worse for projects outsourced to 1+ Consultancy firms, where staff costs are prohibitively high, now you've got another layer of complexity to factor in (risks, costs).

Consultancy A submit work, Consultancy B reviews/tests. As A increases the use of AI, B will have to match with more staff or more AI. More staff for B, mean higher costs, at slower pace. More AI for B, means higher burden of proof, an A vs B race condition is likely.

Ultimately clients will suffer from AI fatigue and inadvertently incur more costs at later stage (post-delivery).

the IE6 lawsuit was about web browser monopoly, not a complaint for poor tech.