notarobot123

The suffering of the slave isn't the only evil of slavery. What it does to the master is to alienate them from the creative process and turns them into a dependent consumer of the work of others. The master becomes detached from productive work and therefore dependent and less free themselves.

Digital homesteading is the essence of the IndieWeb. Building things with one's own resources and know-how is part of it's DNA, whether or not that is acknowledged.

Because it's anti-platform and pro-ownership, content is secondary to the means of distribution. It's why it is bound to be a tech-heavy sub-culture and never a real alternative to big platforms.

Sure, but code isn't the only barrier that's been lowered. A competent entrepreneurial team can also scale their sales, marketing and customer success workflows with AI.

I'm not saying business is easy now. I'm saying that a small team of smart people can do a whole lot more with the tools available to them. You still need strategy and vision (or the ability to copy someone else's playbook) but execution is a lot cheaper.

The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower.

The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics. AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production. What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

SaaS isn't going to sublimate straight into consumer built tools but the boiling point for competition has gotten a lot lower.

What about design, build, marketing etc.?

I don't get why the maker market complains so much about the idea of businesses selling products at a healthy markup. Just because you know how the sausage was made doesn't mean that the logic of operating a business is any different to how it works in the consumer world.

If you're skilled and motivated enough to make it yourself, you might save some money. You'd loose a lot of time though and that's worth something too (perhaps a lot more).

A piano is not inherently a better musical instrument than a harmonica. You could argue that a piano is more complex and more puzzle like requiring more of an investment to learn for similar results.

A harmonica has a much lower barrier to entry and can be mastered over years of practice. So can a piano but with a lot more effort for more or less the same result. They both make music after all.

Ultimately, it comes down to familiarity and basic preferences. Pianos and harmonicas are basically the same if you've used them for long enough and you can get the same results with both (but a harmonica requires a lot less fuss and "games")

[I wish piano players would stop looking down on harmonica players - stop being so tribal!]

There is a fair question here (though presented with questionable integrity) about what notability means in programming languages. Especially for more recent and perhaps not widely used programming languages.

I have a particular interest in programming language design and, for what it's worth, I have heard of Odin. For someone like me, understanding different design decisions for languages that depart from mainstream languages is valuable. It isn't what academic journals are interested in and there are no notable publications for hobbyists or language design experts (that I know of).

Notability *is* worth questioning for a field like this since there isn't a clear signal outside of blog posts and user community discussion. There's no clear place where general discussions around program languages is happening to a reasonable level of depth and quality.

On that note - @dang I would love it if https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang continued to update. It was a cool resource for finding discussion on new programming language designs here on HN.

I've been thinking the same thing recently. I'm in conversation with a friend of mine who's much more aligned to the right and our philosophical conversations route their way around consistent logic in order to arrive at certain assertions about "reality".

Much of the reasoning is about what it opposes and where the error lies in the "other side" (nearly always a strawman) rather than a positive argument. Where there is a positive argument, it's logic doesn't consistently apply to other analogous areas. It's often a justification rather than a commitment to a reasonable principle or idea.

To be fair, wisdom isn't reducible to a set of rules or principles. It's a weighing of values and priorities and accounting for the impacts and implications.

I suspect there is something to the notion that consistent reasoning has a "liberal" bias in its nature. Whether this means there's more wisdom in that reasonableness is another question all together.

I see this kind of thing as the future of SaaS. Passionate developers out competing incumbents on both quality and price. One off purchases from "1000 true fans" is enough to make the effort worthwhile. It's a win-win for indie devs and their customers.

Like making food supply work

Producers make what will sell but without any incentives, subsidies or regulation this would be a mess of profit chasing, unsafe practices and fragile supply chains.

In my view, the value of the public sector is in setting the rule of the game for private actors in exactly this kind of way (rules and incentives) instead of the politics of picking winners and losers directly or making direct decisions about what to build where, etc. Rule makers play the meta-game of designing how the game works and they leave agents free to play as they wish.

So why submit a PR at all if you're not even going to try to understand the aims of the project?

What happens when VCs, governments and tech companies drive demand for a genuinely game changing technology beyond consumer's appetite for it?

pooling resources

Your argument would suggest the EU developing a European model would be a better direction. A heavy-weight competitor would help advance the field after all.

getting bureaucracy out of the way and encouraging real investment

I don't think this is really about regulation - it's about network effects. The only way to compete with strong network-effects is to create your own.

This vaguely-nationalist world view around tech

Nationalism breeds nationalism and it is the fundamental reason European states feel the need to build their own expertise. Can you imagine if your country was subject to the whims of an aspiring dictator?

What does cursor have?

users

Power and intelligence are not completely unrelated. Are government officials, politicians, CEOs, judges, etc, usually above average intelligence? Probably. Do the institutions they work within make intelligent decisions? Sometimes.

The fallacy is assuming intelligence automatically equates to power and influence. University professors and doctors have very little power in their institutions even though they may often be more intelligent than their bosses.

A worse fallacy is assuming intelligence creates better political outcomes (in the broad sense of politics as contested collective decision-making).

I don't know many people who would willingly trade their freedom to make a bad decision for the enforcement of the "right" decision by a superior intelligence.

Wow, I didn't know about ping attributes.

Advertisers have really shaped the Web right down to it's core specifications.

Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans

Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?

I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.

It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.

I happened to talk to a teenage relative about this possibility the other day and she said that she'd be fine with a ban. It seems that it's not as big a deal if everyone's in the same boat. Parents genuinely have a hard time navigating this because drawing a line for their own children has the effect of socially excluding them.

It's not ideal in many senses (what age checks are we talking about here) but its worth thinking about some of the positive effects this might have on the young people growing up in the mess we've made of new media.

How people become rich in your society is one of the most important things to understand about it. You can't let your beliefs about this be determined by ideology, or movies, or historical examples that are centuries old.

The idea of becoming rich is as old as society itself but it has not been a static concept. It is an idea shaped entirely by the things mentioned - ideology, culture and history. There is no wealth accumulation without ideology of one sort or another.

It's fair to resist a view of wealth that may seem flawed but it's disingenuous to assume this can be done from a neutral position.

Mass adoption trumps good design every time.

However consciousness is defined its evidently an emergent phenomenon. Emergent properties are real even if they are not a "thing" in themselves. Being rooted in a material reality doesn't prevent emergence of something else/additional that has qualities not easily understood by just understanding the individual mechanisms that give rise to it.

scruples are also often a surface of friction that get in the way of business objectives.

I think this is largely right. Software engineering as a stable, high-earning and in demand career is a thing of the past.

Those who make it work from here are those who've changed their work completely to resemble something more like a hands-off tech lead. There will of course be the lucky few who've made it work as artisans without direct commercial pressures to conform to the new "right way to do it". But the careers many of us have had is not a path available for others to follow anymore.

The irony of automating away "inefficiencies", "drudgery" and the "labour intensive" parts of other professions stings all the more when the sharp end of that shtick is pointed back in our direction.

discussed previously here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48379664

This seems like a significant possibility for a rogue AI scenario and not one I'd considered before. Market competition between corporate controlled systems seemed like a self-regulating feedback loop (however imperfect) but this wouldn't have any of those constraints. Maybe I'm naïve but this scenario hadn't occurred to me as a potential risk.

Why not both?

I've always wondered, do people who complain about virtue signaling just simply not believe in the concept of virtues or integrity at all? Human nature is pure vice mediated by violence and contract law, that's it.

I get the cynicism about performative acts vs. authentic values but where's the line? Putting your money where your mouth is has to count for something.

Just to play devil's advocate, couldn't sending zero-day exploits to a foreign nation's intelligence service potentially cause the sender significantly more trouble.

Well the market clearly thinks most of us will be without software engineering jobs by the end of the decade. There's clearly enough proof that the trend is heading in that direction to justify huge capital investments.

Yet even those who aim to remake the state change their tune when they become the state.