beders

Oh we know. That's why static types are a la carte in Clojure. You can have them if you really really want them.

It'll take a while but now other programming languages look alien to me. Once you've adopted s-expressions it is hard to go back.

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.

There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.

And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?

Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?

Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?

You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common? They thought their plants were safe.

So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.

Good thing you have a variety of those nowadays. Clojure runs in the browser, Node.js, cross-compiles to Dart, works stand-alone via babashka and has a brand new C++ interfacing implementation in Jank.

The ergonomics of using a proper REPL and interactive programming is hard to beat.

Nobody should take the Pope seriously or the Vatican.

An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.

I think you highlight one of the problems with users of LLMs: You can't tell anymore if it is BS or not.

I caught Claude the other day hallucinating code that was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, leading to tasks being failed and never recover. But it certainly wasn't obvious.

Thank you for putting it so succinctly.

I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.

My employer is trying to convince us to embrace spec-kit. But we are a Clojure shop: we iterate fast and produce results. We don't sit around and write specs and then hope working code plops out.

Define the contract before writing a single line of implementation. Specs are the source of truth.

There is only one source of truth and that is the source code. To define and change contracts written in an ambiguous language and then hope the right code will magically appear, is completely delusional.

Iteration is the only game in town that is fast and produces results.

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.

The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.

The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.

As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.

In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

The reason they are on Bluesky is that it just works, its client just works and the barrier of entry is low. Oh, and others they want to follow are on there. That's it.

No regular user cares about - oh my data, it is stored centrally, how evil! That is just not a problem most people have. Like at all.

It's sad how many people are falling for the narrative that there's more at play here than predict-next-token and some kind of emergent intelligence is happening.

No, that is just your interpretation of what you see as something that can't possibly be just token prediction.

And yet it is. It's the same algorithm noodling over incredible amounts of tokens.

And that's exactly the explanation: People regularly underestimate how much training data is being used for LLMs. They contain everything about writing a compiler, toy examples, full examples, recommended structure yadda yadda yadda.

I love working with Claude and it regularly surprises me but that doesn't mean I think it is intelligent.

This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that you can use for free is nauseating.

This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate.

If you don't like that, go elsewhere.

If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get.

In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.

How can light "bounce off" something if it doesn't have mass?

Has anyone confirmed the solution is not in the training data? Otherwise it is just a bit information retrieval LLM style. No intelligence necessary.

It is enabled by default so you can enjoy the snowflakes.

While the author mentions that he just doesn't have the time to look at all the databases, none of the reviews of the last few years mention immutable and/or bi-temporal databases.

Which looks more like a blind spot to me honestly. This category of databases is just fantastic for industries like fintech.

Two candidates are sticking out. https://xtdb.com/blog/launching-xtdb-v2 (2025) https://blog.datomic.com/2023/04/datomic-is-free.html (2023)

Most of the musings on enforcing invalid states with ADTs are impractical when working with real data that needs runtime validation when it enters the system.

Using a schema/spec/type library at runtime that is even more powerful than ADTs is a better investment - or to be less controversial - is an additional investment on top of types.

Yes, it means the compiler can't help you as much, but who has time waiting for a compiler anyways ;)

I find the "make illegal state unrepresentable via types" idea great for software that needs to fly a plane, but for enterprise software not so much. The cost/benefit is not justifiable.

Can someone who's adapted HTMX for a larger app report about front-end-server costs?

HTMX serves fully baked HTML that needs to be created on the back-end (or front-end-facing servers)

That is more processing than sending the raw data to the front-end and baking the HTML there.

It is also more bandwidth (unless the JSON is more verbose than the HTML generated).

Lastly, I can generate different HTML fragments on the front-end from the same client-side state with the data only being transported once. How is that working out?

AI - as a discipline - has been around forever (1956), essentially since the birth of Lisp - both with staggering successes as well as spectacular failures that ushered in 2(3?) so-called AI winters.

The author probably just means LLMs. And that's really all you need to know about the quality of this article.

One could get the impression that the only really really important non-functional requirement for such a thing is to absolutely ensure that you can only call the "good" functions with the "good" payload.

Know the consumer of your API.

If that is just your team, use whatever tech gets you there quick.

However, if you need to provide some guarantees to a second or third party with your API, embrace standards like JSON, even better, use content negotiation.

This is the first wave of a new generation of Apps which has the potential to replace/enhance the majority of e-commerce websites.

I wouldn't underestimate it - it's the hammer can break up the information silos we've built up around websites/apps.

Why prompt Gertrude(tm) on Ramazon for a specific thing you need, if you can ask ChatGPT to find you said thing along with UIs to purchase it across all e-commerce platforms that agree to play in this market?

when PayPal tells you that they already know you and don't require you to log in: that's fingerprint.com behind the scenes.

There are pros/cons.

It should be obvious by now that using any free service of scale is being paid for by your interactions which are made more valuable through fingerprinting.

Trying to circumvent that just makes it more expensive for the rest of us.

The Clojure (or any Lisp) journey is very different, not because of the language per se, but because of the developer experience.

In Clojure, there's no appreciable compilation time. During my work week I barely, if ever, restart the application I'm working on: I'm working inside of it via a REPL connection.

It's an entirely different ball game and if you just compare language features you are missing out on an incredible interactive coding experience.

60.7%

Why would anyone trust the output of an LLM, if it is barely better than guessing and much much worse than humans?

GPT-5 shows more impressive numbers, but for that particular task, the precision should be 100% - always. No matter how large the data set is or in which format. Why are we doing this?

TLDR; Use regex if you can treat XML/HTML as a string and get away with it.

Can I finally redo the Star Wars sequels with this? :)

If you opt for non-human-readable wire-formats it better be because of very important reasons. Something about measuring performance and operational costs.

If you need to exchange data with other systems that you don't control, a simple format like JSON is vastly superior. You are restricted to handing over tree-like structures. That is a good thing as your consumers will have no problems reading tree-like structures.

It also makes it very simple for each consumer/producer to coerce this data into structs or objects as they please and that make sense to their usage of the data.

You have to validate the data anyhow (you do validate data received by the outside world, do you?), so throwing in coercing is honestly the smallest of your problems.

You only need to touch your data coercion if someone decides to send you data in a different shape. For tree-like structures it is simple to add new things and stay backwards compatible.

Adding a spec on top of your data shapes that can potentially help consumers generate client code is a cherry on top of it and an orthogonal concern.

Making as little assumptions as possible how your consumers deal with your data is a Good Thing(tm) that enabled such useful(still?) things as the WWW.

You can get basically all variations of async coding with Clojure a la carte.