nurbl

You don't think there are any other aspects worth considering than the mere quality of the code produced?

I'm professionally a python programmer with no C/C++ experience, and I do some hobby programming in zig. I tried rust but it seemed complicated and kind of boring. Zig was a lot easier for me to get into. I don't mind that it's obscure and a bit of a moving target, but I have yet to do anything really "serious" with it.

I think the point of the saying is that as systems tend to expand, sooner or later we become part of them. That means that we can no longer see them from outside, we're now part of the system and our goals and the system's goals will align. Then the purpose of the system can't be anything else than what it does.

Carrion Comfort was my introduction to Dan Simmons, I loved it. Not as good as some of his later stuff but it's really inventive, and never boring.

Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.

Yes. There will always be people who see opportunity in using it destructively. Best case scenario is that others will use it to counter that. But it is usually easier to destroy than to protect. So we could have a constant AI war going on somewhere in the clouds, occasionally leaking new disasters into the human world.

Interesting. I like the discussion about "Shadow of the Colossus", it's one of those few games that goes its own way and really sticks with you.

Also, weirdly, the article references Brian Moriarty's "Who buried Paul?" but not "An Apology for Roger Ebert" which seems even more relevant :D

I think the effort is indeed a big piece of it. For example, consider sports. I don't imagine that a lot of sports fans would be interested in watching completely AI-generated video of their favorite teams playing, even if it's totally believable. Surely the main point of the whole thing has something to do with humans at the top of their skill, measuring up against each other, and experiencing it together with them?

For me it's the same with music. I am sure I will be fooled by some AI generated music now and then, but what does that prove?

Though in principle they serve similar purposes there are some big differences though. Python with types is still just python. Typescript is a different language from JS (guess it a superset?) and it being controlled by a large company could be considered problematic.

I suppose JS could go in the same direction and adopt the typing syntax from TS as a non-runtime thing. Then the typescript compiler would become something like mypy, an entirely optional part of the ecosystem.

I don't have experience from any larger application, but from my smaller usage Preact seems like a drop in replacement. It's been compatible with the react libraries I've tried. It also works great with ES modules. So for simple stuff, I think it's worth a try.

I think a better word may be "explicitness". Zig is sometimes verbose because you have to spell things out. Can't say much about Go, but it seems it has more going on under the hood.

I find that I always learn something valuable by diving in and trying ideas out concretely. High-flying plans can also cause a lot of wasted coding on things that won't work out.

Apart from the benefits you already mentioned, mainly that TUI applications are usually keyboard driven.

Seems to be precisely what "free-rider" means; entities benefiting from public resources without contributing anything back.

Possible, but taking the bus halfway around the world would also produce a lot of emissions.

The hammer example made me remember something. I did some Aikido long ago, and the instructor spent quite a lot of time showing us how to grip things like sticks. As I remember it, instead of the instinctive way of just forming a fist around it, we should instead start from the little finger, wrapping the fingers one by one, but letting the index finger actually rest more along the handle than wrapping it. That way, supposedly, the grip is just as good, but more flexible and the index finger can help with control.

Maybe the story you're referring to is https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Tricky Towers is fun and while it has various silly features that adds randomness (e.g. wind), it still rewards skill enough to feel fair.

It follows the tetris logic of pieces staying in the "grid", until they touch another piece. Then they turn into "physical" 2d pieces with weight, friction etc. So it's very much like tetris in the beginning but unless you keep your tower very regular, it becomes increasingly harder to place new items. I bet it was a lot of work to tune the physics engine!

I think a contributing factor is our obsession with measurement. Happiness is hard to prove, and having money is hard to fake. So money can become a proxy for happiness even though it may only be an enabler.

Visidata is a relatively modern example.

Looks neat! It seems at least superficially similar to https://github.com/getludic/ludic which I quite like too.

"Antifragile" is even more focused around this.

It's also funny how the later examples almost look like they could be terminal UIs. Based on this trend, I predict that the next version of Windows ("Windows One") will look like DOS.

What makes you say it "could have gone right"? From what came out about the o-rings behavior at cold temperatures, it seems they were taking a pretty big risk. Your perspective seems to be that it's always a coin toss no matter what, and I don't think that is true. Were there engineers speaking up in this way at every successful launch too?

I think the point is the opposite; they have decided to build a new "web stack" from scratch, not just build a new "browser" (or invent a new GUI framework). Hopefully the web engine is not deeply tied to Qt, but you need something in order to draw an interactive window. The article mentions that they will also use existing libraries for things like font rendering. Seems like a pragmatic decision to me.

If the movie "the Cube" has taught us anything (and I guess it hasn't) it is that it's possible work on something without knowing what it's actually for. With some misdirection, an AI could probably run in a data center that is on paper doing something completely different. Do most people maintaining cloud servers today even know what they are running?

Consider that in a world where almost everything is automated and reacts quickly, some faulty logic somewhere could cascade and lead to a lot of bad stuff happening before anyone even has a chance to notice. Introducing some latency, need for validation, etc, at the right places could mitigate this. I don't think just sprinkling slowness everywhere is the idea.

I do think that the efficiency hype has made us all a little speed blind. It's not like faster = secure either...

As I remember it, a major thesis of the book (which I recommend, it's a fun read!) is that Europeans had the benefit of several, mainly geographical factors. This was just one of them.

It's been a long time since I read the book, but I do think he made the point that part of what gave Europe a military edge was the fact of lots of natural geographical borders like rivers and mountains, giving rise to lots of small kingdoms instead of one big one. So there were constant conflicts, driving innovation.

And the thing about latitudes I think applies more to mobility of things like crops than to human travel, since you need to cross climate zones.

I support a few podcasts on patreon. They have regular open RSS feeds and then a locked down patreon feed, containing special episodes, extra material etc. One podcast only charges for each locked episode, so if they don't make any for a while I'm not charged. They are all pretty niche and I don't know how much they earn from it, but from a user perspective it's working fine.