HN user
The temperature is 98. The humidity is 77. That's a web bulb temperature of 92. People my age die in those conditions. Few things would be too ugly, too noisy, and bothersome as a hospital death bed due to organ failure.
I don't know who the uneducated individual was that posted this.
I developed open source software for 25 years even during the stretch when I was living in my car. I never made money from open source.
I bought full self-driving in September 2025 for my Model Y. I have not touched the wheel on any public road since then. It drives everywhere better than I would. It drove from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Jacksonville and back without intervention. My wife is returning from Michigan at this moment without intervention.
So tell me why you think this doesn't work.
The best way to cut through this noise is to visit a Tesla dealer and ask for a test drive.
Implement the protocol by using drones rather than pigeons
I have 53 years of experience in programming. I taught CS at 4 Universities. I have led an open source project for 25 years. I know 60 languages.
My professional advice is "Don't learn to program".
Your question is like asking... should I learn to shoe horses?
Oh cool. Thanks for the pointer!
The creative part is that the AI needs to create compelling stories that resonate with people. Joel's story shows something that could happen to a couple living on being popular.
There are 12 stories requested in musical form. The form isn't the issue. The content of the "mattress" section requires telling stories that people can accept as "real".
Prolog. Because rule-based programs used to matter.
Common Lisp. THE most important language to learn. It is all here.
Math. Especially Linear Algebra
APL. Learn the true power of array-like thinking and strong use of symbols.
Assembler. Learn the language machines speak.
Forth. Learn how to program with self-created, minimal tools to create great things.
Bash. Learn how to use the full power of the machine in a terminal.
Emacs Lisp. It's not a language, it is everything you'll ever need.
C. Because it is everywhere, usually as a glue language between systems.
Python. So you can see how badly a language can be designed.
Verilog. Learn to fashion hardware in a language.
LEAN. Write provably-correct software.
HTML. Because you wouldn't be reading this otherwise.
Javascript. Because you occasionally have to make useful web pages.
Java. Because you can do network programming.
X11/Wayland. Because you can reach out and show things.
Regex. Because you can't parse without it.
Erlang. Because things break and you need to survive.
CUDA. Because you need to know how to write kernels.
SNOBOL. Patterns are programs. Programs are patterns. Plus 3 way branching.
Latex. Because you need to communicate to other meat-things.
SQL. Because databases underlie it all
OCAML. Because Type-correctness matters
Lambda Calculus. Because you need to know how it all works in theory.
Haskell. Because you need to learn a real higher level language.
C++. Because you need to see cancer in its raw form
Swift. Because you can make the stone in your hand do things.
Qiskit. Quantum computers are coming
Of course LLMs are going to make all of these languages so rarely spoken that they will be like COBOL. The future of programming is maintenance programming. Legacy systems won't be rewritten, they will be "maintained". If you know what a PROCEDURE DIVISION you'll always have a job.
Jim Farley doesn't understand what is actually happening. The majors are all in denial. (Rory Sutherland on selling an electric car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTOKws45kCo )
I just drove from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Florida to Pittsburgh without touching the steering wheel. The car planned the route, planned the charging stops, and backed into the charging spaces.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke (I had a career in vision, AI, and robots yet it still feels like magic)
The price of electricity to "fill up" was about 1/4 the price of gas for equivalent miles. "Fill up" times at chargers averaged about 10 minutes.
I have had my car for 15 months. I rotated the tires and added wiper fluid. "Lower total cost of ownership always wins" is basic economics.
And now Grok listens to my trip stops and updates navigation. Talk to Grok, touch "start full self driving" and relax.
"The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed," -- William Gibson
Tablet that reads text-to-voice using local AI. Download a .txt book or a PDF and it reads it to you.
I bought FSD on Sept 19th, 2025. I have not driven my Tesla on a public road since then. It is all done by FSD. I just completed a trip from Pittsburgh to Louisianna to Florida and back to Pittsburgh without touching the wheel. Perhaps the author ought to try it.
Ecology is a dirty word to many people.
They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"
They retreat into death games and other violence, "hiding their awareness from the terrifying necessities of this moment.
If any human sees a clear choice between life and death, then chooses death, we call that insane. Why do we accept it when it happens on a world scale?
We must shake the sleepers—gently and persistently, saying: "Time to get up."
— FRANK HERBERT
I spent my 53 years in robotics and AI. I started at Unimation doing robot research, joined IBM doing robot research, worked at CMU doing robot research. I worked at IBM doing AI research (using neural nets from PDP Rumelhart), did graduate work in machine vision, etc.
It turns out that it was all a waste of time (but great fun).
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262680530/parallel-distributed-...
Simple. If Democrats take the House then they will impeach Trump. Therefore Republicans need to falsify the premise. Texas hopes to add 5 Republican seats which will swing House to a safe majority. They tried a special session to vote on changing voting maps. Democrats left the state so there could be no quorum and thus no vote. Special session ends so the Democrats have returned to the state. Another special session will be called. There needs to be a guarantee that Democrats have to show up to vote. Each Democrat had to agree to be paired with police escort 24/7. One Democrat said she wouldn't agree to that so she can't leave the building. A modern-day Rosa Parks moment.
It won't matter. Might makes right.
I own roughly 8 thousand books. If you know, you know. Otherwise there is no way to explain the joy of a physical book, partially read, with a bookmark waiting for your time and attention.
Hmmm... so if someone is riding in a Tesla Model Y robotaxi, grabs the wheel, and causes a crash... Tesla stock will get destroyed.
Note that the "safety driver" is actually in the passenger seat.
Nonsense.
Old Mainframe story... We had a VM/370 system with 8 Meg of memory used by 82 programmers. VM/370 used virtual machines, one per programmer. The virtual machines were faithful copies of the hardware.
I was a systems programmer. In the virtual machine you could issue meta-commands such as 'shutdown' by putting the prefix "#cp shutdown". The prefix "#cp" could be changed at boot.
Being curious I tried booting VM/370 in a virtual machine. The embedded VM/370 could then create sub-virtual machines. Which, of course, raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in one of the sub-virtual machines? Well, it certainly worked. I set the command prompt to be "?cp" in the sub-virtual machine.
Which raises the question... Will VM/370 boot in the sub-virtual machine? Well, it certainly worked. The command prompt prefix was "@cp".
Rise, Repeat... I was 8 levels deep and it still worked. Time to get back to work. So I typed "#cp shutdown" instead of the latest chosen command prompt...
I had absolute priviledge on the real hardware so "#cp shutdown" was executed by the real, main VM/370 image. Which promptly shutdown the real machine.
Of course, only I and my co-worker systems programmer knew what actually caused the outage.
I don't think people realize that we are entering a new Dark Ages. Religion rising, science falling.
That's odd. Tesla's per-car warranty repair costs last year was less than 1/2 of Ford and about 1/3 of GM. I'm not sure where you get your comment that they "fail and fall apart at a rate few other auto manufacturers can match". The warranty fund is available in the manufacturers financial reports.
Please cite your sources for your claim since it clearly is not from the public financial data.
I'm thinking of "published designs" for communities which detail the necessary and sufficient items required for "mostly" self-sustainability. The hope is to provide guidance for town planning.
A return to local farms, animal labor, barter economics, cooperation, etc. would be the basis for a model. On the other hand we have a lot more refined materials readily available such as aluminum, copper, steel, etc.
This used to be true historically.
Probably. But I have children who might benefit.
That's an interesting place to investigate. The Amish don't seem to depend on technology they can't create and they tend to develop their own food source.
I'll look into it further. Thanks.
Ah, finally a blueprint we can use!
Is there any program to run text-to-speech (for reading text files) that runs locally?
Nuclear power plants have a design life. The flux from the reactor causes permanent damage to the surrounding structures. Think of putting a bullet through a wall of your house once a day. Do you still think it will be safe after 40 years? MIT has a free course on nuclear reactors and they mention this damage as a lifetime limiting factor.
So I'm not the first, nor likely the last.
The paper was published in Nature which means that ordinary mortals like me cannot read it. Sigh.
Literate Programming in the Large https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av0PQDVTP4A&ab_channel=NextD...