cfiggers

AutoHotkey adds a malleable computing layer to Windows.

In my opinion, it's best to hold your views along a gradient of strength/importance.

It's easy (aka close to thoughtless) to just collapse everything you believe into either extreme of "Matters not at all" or "Matters infinitely much."

It's hard (aka requires lots of thought, especially to maintain) to say, "This view of mine is foundational and I can't let go of it; but this other one is one of a range of acceptable views that I could be persuaded between; and this third one is totally arbitrary, and I hold to it purely because of subjective preference."

Especially over time, there's pressure to reduce everything toward the extremes. But the effortful and right thing to do is to maintain the gradient.

Strong agree. I was especially disappointed because it felt like he was dropping breadcrumbs all through the book and then... Nah, none of that foreshadowing mattered. The central tension of the book is handled by an off-screen deus ex machina, actually, everybody go home.

Incredible ideas. Really, really lousy ending.

it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting

Zig isn't finished yet (they still have not released a v1.0). They're still iterating on the language itself and want the flexibility to make backwards-incompatible changes while they do so.

So in a sense, they have not yet asked anybody in mainstream industry to "bite." After v1.0, when there's an understanding of stability and ongoing language support, industry adoption or lack thereof might become a relevant metric for measuring the project's health. But right now that's not relevant at all.

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

Consensus may give a hint to what is or isn't reality. But consensus—even expert consensus—does not determine reality. Experts can be wrong. Most of the experts, even, can be wrong simultaneously.

Philosophy is the exercise of testing ideas for oneself in the laboratory of one's own mind.

When I test the idea that math is discovered in my own mind, from my own perspective, with my own experience and education brought to bear, I find it unconvincing.

When you test the same idea in the laboratory of your mind, with your experience and your education applied, and get a different result, that is interesting. Your result is relevant information to me. If nothing else, it's a good prompt/trigger for me to revisit my earlier conclusion and see if it still holds.

But your disagreement—or indeed, the disagreement of a majority of trained mathematicians—does not constitute an automatic reason for me to conclusively determine that you/they are right and I am wrong.

I still have my own examination of the concept, with my own supporting and detracting arguments. And the result of my examination continues to be that math being invented is the significantly more persuasive view.

It's definitely not a system default (unless it's a system I've had access to for more than ten minutes!), but:

I use Janet[0] for this.

[0] https://janet-lang.org

Right, yes, of course... the, um... domain reflections and... line settling levels. It's like you read my mind, thanks for addressing those.

I mean... Yes, but there's nuance here.

Using 400 MB of RAM vs 100 MB of RAM is close to unnoticeable in a world of a GB+ for a single Chrome tab... And if "easier for our developers" means the end user is getting more regular updates with fewer critical issues, then it's not an uncomplicated tradeoff at all, parts of it are actually synergistic.

Hey, that's clever, actually. I didn't do that because I didn't think of it!

I have a crystal clear memory of the day I stopped trying to make voice assistants work for me.

I use a timer every day to brew my coffee. With a voice assistant I can set a timer, but with the lack of a screen I can't see how much time is left. One day I thought, "I'm going to finally get around to digging into this voice interface and see what the options are," hoping for something like, "Hey Dingus, set a five minute timer and notify me when there's 10 seconds left."

Or better yet, "Hey Dingus, five minute timer, with notify at 10 seconds."

Notice that this almost maps 1:1 onto a shell command with option flags, just verbally interfaced: "$ timer 5m --with-notify 10s"

Notice also a complete willingness on my part to learn how the thing works and change how I'm using it accordingly. This is the opposite of end user laziness. I'm willing to invest effort in becoming a "Power User" of my voice assistant.

So I looked for documentation, ready to read and use my brain to understand it and do what it tells me in order to start and stop my timers with greater proficiency.

...I found none.

Literally, there isn't any. They don't have documentation. Nowhere is there, even for someone motivated and willing to learn, the ability to do so.

Ok, well that is understandable if these things are changing rapidly. Maybe there's the equivalent to a "$ timer --help" baked into the assistant itself. Maybe it can tell me what options exist so I can use them. I ask the assistant to explain itself. "What are my options when setting a timer?"

It can't parse my question. Literally, it doesn't know what I'm asking for. Because nobody ever considered that a user might ask that question or even want to know that information.

At that point, on the spot, I gave up. Clearly this thing is not designed or intended to be a thing that one could gain skill with. It's an utterly unserious product.

I would very happily learn an entire verbal DSL, a whole pidgin dialect of English, purely for interacting with my voice assistant. "Hey Dingus, five minute staged timer: thirty seconds, two minutes, one minute, one minute, remainder, with countdown from five seconds" is not "natural language" anymore. But you can bet you'd hear me saying it, if that's all it took to make the voice assistant run my coffee brewing recipe with nothing but my voice. And then, hey bonus, let me bind that to a personal shortcut so all I need to say is "Hey Dingus, coffee timer" and I don't even need to reach for my phone.

But you can't do that. It literally does not support being taken seriously. Or, if it can, the design is utterly hostile to me discovering how. So I've never even tried to do anything, since that very day, other than turning smart lights on and off.

My point is: I didn't fail the technology. I came to the table with willingness to tinker and experiment, willingness to change my expectations to suit the design as I discovered it, willingness to work to make it a part of my routine. The technology failed me.

How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious?

The terms "value" and "judgement" have a broad semantic range. I mean to use them here in a sense that presupposes an exercise of subjective preference.

Machines, amoebas, programs, etc. can make choices, yes, and they can weigh alternatives, sometimes by assigning scores (aka "values") to differing outcomes. When I say that "Making value judgements is something that, by definition, conscious beings do and that non-conscious beings do not do," I'm trying to establish a narrower, more restricted definition than the broadest possible meaning of "value" or "judge."

So it's not that I "know" that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious; I'm using these terms in such a way that by definition they do, because that's the set of things I want to talk about. The question then is not whether I'm right or wrong yet, but rather once we restrict the set of all things that could be called a "value" or a "judgement" to only the ones that I'm trying to make qualified assertions about, whether that set is empty (in which case everything I'm saying still evaluates to True, but vacuously and therefore uselessly so!).

I'm arguing this way because I think that narrower set a) exists and b) is relevant to the argument I'm making.

Is the dog conscious?

I think dogs are unquestionably sentient (i.e. they are able to detect and respond to outside stimuli), and seem to display, in some minimal degree, at least an approximation of sapience (i.e. they are able to understand themselves and the world around them; hold and express preferences; form relationships and make decisions based on them).

I don't have a way to test whether a dog is conscious or not, and the dog has no means of trying to persuade me one way or the other; so I have to remain frustratingly agnostic on that point (frustrating to myself as much as I'm sure to you).

I agree with you on that point. It seems to me that people who read Blindsight and get all existential are not thinking things through all the way.

Blindsight poses the question, in essence, "What if consciousness is a competitive disadvantage, in which case non-consciousness would be Better™?"

I can't make a conclusive case one way or the other w/r/t the premise—it may perhaps be the case that consciousness is a competitive disadvantage. I don't know how we could test that without something to compare ourselves against (which is why the book resorts to introducing vampires and aliens—this question is untestable otherwise). But the conclusion, that non-consciousness is somehow "Better™," falls absolutely flat for me. "Better™" is a value judgement. Values and Judgements are both features of consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no such thing as "better" or "worse", there is only "is" and "is not."

So: speaking as a conscious being (you'll have to take my word for that), I'm quite comfortable saying that I like being conscious. And with unconscious living organisms—like, I don't know, coral reefs or whatever?—it's not so much that they like being unconscious as that they don't "like" anything at all.

So I think I'm quite comfortable continuing on being a "competitively disadvantaged" thing (supposing that's even the case, which it just as plausibly is not), that is at least able to conceive of questions like this one and make value assessments of its own, rather than despair over the alleged competitive disadvantage inherent in the fact that I experience myself and the world.

A computer can beat me at chess, sure, but it cannot care that it has done so.

Agreed on all points. I was presenting a deliberately bad argument in order to make the meta-point that arguments like it are unhelpful.

(Just for anyone who struggles with reading comprehension: I'm being incredibly sarcastic here. I think it sucks enormously that we broadly ignore the plight of the few just because most people skate by fine. My top level post is also intended satirically. I do care about this stuff and hate that on balance big companies do not. I'm shouting my protest into the void in the form of irony-laced nihilism, aka, the song of my people, aka, burned-out and disenfranchised millenials tired of hoping for the better world we came up believing would some day exist.)

If we conceive of civilization as being like a biological system, then perhaps there are certain maladies that just are not worth dedicating resources to. Cells die all the time, of a trillion different causes. Few are worth rewriting an immune system for.

If the most severe consequences of this pattern are sufficiently uncommon—uncommon enough that even by your own admission the system as a whole fails to notice them, much less feel any pain over it—then maybe it's a waste of the organism's resources to attempt a systemic resolution. Maybe the "losing battle" as you call it is not with individual organizations or even with broader data security culture per se. It might not even be with the legal system to finally inflict some, any consequence on anyone for letting this repeatedly happen. Perhaps the battle we're losing is, at some deeper level, with the very physics of civilizational energy distribution and consumption, aka, with societal entropy. In which case... Yeah, that battle seems pretty heckin' losing to me. Good thing identity theft only seems to happen to "other people."

I know this argument is going to ring pretty hollow and the irony will bite me pretty hard if I get my SSN highjacked literally tomorrow. Which, thanks to Equifax in 2017, could theoretically happen any minute now! Just like it could've happened any minute now for the last 9 years!

But then again, even if and just because I suddenly personally care a lot more about this issue because I'm suddenly affected by it, that doesn't obligate you or anyone else to feel the same way.

A certain kind of indifference toward the suffering of others might be civilizationally efficient. In which case it might be absurd and maybe even ethically problematic to care in aggregate any more than we happen to do.

Literally, who's to say?

I see your reductio ad absurdum and counter you with its exact inverse:

Because something bad has happened at some point to someone somewhere, you personally must take precautions against it happening to you?

Do you intend to modify your behavior, spending habits, or thought patterns to reduce the risk of catching mad cow disease? Oh, no? So you're saying mad cow disease doesn't exist?

But mad cow disease has a documented casualty count and data breaches do not. So actually, you're being irrational if you care about and take measures to mitigate the one but not the other.

Now that we've established that you are rationally obligated to mitigate the risk of mad cow disease, I have some guaranteed Definitely Not Placebo[^TM]-brand pills to sell you.

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If you find this counterargument spurious, absurd, or unfair, then I have a proposal for you: let's both agree that reduction to absurdity benefits no one, and try to talk reasonably in the middle ground between extremes.

So at the risk of sounding incredibly apathetic toward something that I'm sure is probably a massive headache for some people somewhere...

I'm a millennial and I've been told probably hundreds of times by this point in my life that my data has been breached. Not a single one of those times was there a) anything truly actionable for me to do about it[0] or b) a single negative impact to my actual life. In anyway. At all.

People were talking about the Equifax breach a decade ago like identity theft was going to become an absolutely routine part of daily life for +90% of people. That didn't happen, at least not for me.

My point is: I understand that this is a topic that nerd communities like HN are well-aligned on—data collection bad, data breach bad, I get it. But does it actually matter?

Every single one of us have had our data harvested by tech giants every second of every day for absolutely decades and neither I nor a single person I know in real life have ever had any negative consequences, either because of the collection itself or from the inevitable and seemingly continuous breaching of that data. Every single website, from the random indie shoe website I purchased from one time to multiple health insurance companies, have breached my data, over the span of decades, and from all appearances it has had absolutely zero effect that I can actually point to in real actual life.

So I'm becoming a bit of a skeptic on this item of quasi-religious dogma that y'all all seem to recite the same position on. Does the emperor perhaps have no clothes? Do we all just fear "data breaches" because we've been told to fear them by people who sounded smarter than us?

I need y'all to hit me with some scary anecdata about what happened to your hairdresser's cousin's ex-husband's dog—anecdata with no citation that I obviously can't even verify isn't hallucinated by a GPT, but should clearly accept as valid because "ooooh data breach bad"—because without that the propaganda patina on my brain is wearing a little thin.

[0] (I use a password manager to guarantee that I'm not sharing passwords between logins, so really the only thing I could do in response to a data breach disclosure is rotate the password on the breached account. But that only matters if they were storing my password in plaintext right? I certainly can't do anything about my data being out there, and it's too late for closing that account out to prevent anything.)

I think you're missing the feature of equal-weight index that your parent comment is attracted to—which is a sense that the market generally is out of balance toward AI investment at the moment and that there's a correction coming, which the equal-weight index will have less exposure to.

Your concerns sound valid provided things continue on as they have (I'm not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice) but the commenters above you are specifically worried that it's not going to do that. In which case, the disadvantages you point out of the equal-weight index will be handily outweighed. If an AI bubble popping causes the market-weighted funds to suffer, it doesn't matter that we've avoided trading fees along the way.

There's a few that don't work, but one works phenomenally well— CosmicToast/jurl is incredible (unless you're on Windows—the library as a whole does work on Windows but the build script doesn't have Windows instructions in it, you have to hack that yourself).

I use both. They're similar for simple use, but above a certain level of complexity Hy has a lot of Python-isms that bleed through. It really doesn't ever let you forget that underneath all the parentheses you're really writing Python. Janet feels like its own stand-alone language in that respect, where Hy is more like a syntax swap.

I have the impression that Hy's user base is larger, though (not that either one is huge).

I didn't get the same impression. I'm curious to know what created that feeling for you. Perhaps I'm turning a blind eye to something or other?

This almost couldn't be less "Ferrari." Really baffling.

The mummy that is the subject of The Friendly Article (the post that we're all commenting under right now).

Wrong mindset—a seven-day, 10-minute per day course is the lower limit on what procurement officers will consider acceptable and grant a contract to, which hopeful contractors submit to RFPs as a way of out-competing their competition by submitting the lowest bid.

No actual feedback from or impact studies involving actual users or outcomes are ever registered.

It's like mixing sawdust into the cookies to cut costs, except that when a depivered CBT is worth less than the electricity consumed powering the monitors it is (sometimes) displayed on, nobody with enough influence to matter ever gets upset enough about it to mean anything.

Now that's funny.

"They're too easy to get sentimentally attached to, and then it makes me sad if I blow them up!"

Honestly this probably enhances the sandbox nature of the game by making the stakes more palpable.

What people realy want: as little OS as possible

I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.

I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.

Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.

What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.

Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.

Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.

On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).

This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.

Without having run the whole company twice in parallel, once using Haskell and again in some other language, and without having measured both runs exactly the same way, I don't think metrics like you're interested in could possibly have sufficient context to mean anything reliable.

Obviously Mercury is successful, and obviously Haskell is how they did it. So it's essential to their success. Would it be instrumental to anyone else's anywhere else doing anything else? Can't possibly know, I don't think.

I wasn't aware of the Gloat project before this. It's a compiler that turns Clojure into native binaries by first transpiling to Glojure (which I'd also never heard of before this), which in turn targets Go. This is rather than using a GraalVM native image, which as I understand it is at this point the better-explored mechanism of doing that for JVM-based stuff (but has its own trade-offs).

Very cool!