sbuttgereit

As a couple of others have mentioned, the original split between the original Java Edition and the now Bedrock Edition happened in 2011. This is several years prior to the 2014 acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft. So while Microsoft may have had motivations in Mojang promoting or expanding Bedrock adoption, that train had already left the station by the time Microsoft entered the picture.

Bedrock started as "Pocket Edition". Probably the best place to get the story is at: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Pocket_Edition

I like Minecraft quite a lot and am not concerned with interoperability between Java and Bedrock... but will only play the Java Edition because of game-play differences between the two; differences in which Java Edition comes out as being materially better than Bedrock... at least from my perspective.

I guess this is one of those cases where, "if you know, you know."

I'm not sure of the link on the post though... I didn't see anything at all that jumped out as pertinent to this "Tangled" thing. I get that many posts on HN just aren't meant for me... but this seems to take that to an extreme.

Edit: yes I see the URL is Tangled... But that is a very subtle cue that I didn't notice until the third time I clicked through to see if the landing page really said nothing about Tangled.

I have a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 monitor which basically does this. It basically has a simple KVM built into it. So my keyboard and mouse connect to the monitor, but then the monitor is connected to my desktop and a laptop. Using the monitor controls, I select which system I am using and get the display for that system as well as the keyboard/mouse activated for that system. There are different options for having them both on screen at once, but only one active for the controls, but I don't find that as useful as just having one system at a time being the sole focus.

And for a longer form discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttgqp0hR1Z8

Just one quick note...

...(although things like Postgres’ hstore can help)...

Back when this blog post was written, this advice would have been reasonable. Today, I don't know anyone reaching for hstore since the more featureful json support was added.

Just as a casual test... I opened up Microsoft Word (online version). There's a button on the Review ribbon labelled "Spelling & Grammar", click that and the realtime, inline suggestions and squiggles are off no matter how many errors are present... click that button again and they're there.

So there are two modes... and have been for as long as I can remember (maybe since automatic spell check was there) and it is just a button press.

Now knowing that it's there... well... how many people review feature documentation these days, especially for something that is "feature rich", like Word?

I can't help you with any of those questions... but back in the 90s I use to be one of those employees that looked at the image on the screen and typed the address information in Salt Lake City.

Quantitatively, I don't know the stats, but qualitatively I can confirm it felt like a lot.

There were several editions. My copy (sitting on my bookshelf as I speak) was the '73 edition (though I think a later printing), but they did revise it including releasing it for the then prevalent home microcomputers.

I first learned programming converting these things to run on my VIC-20 (and later C64). That earliest effort was prior to those later editions... and I'm kinda glad... I had to learn what different things actually meant and judge what was important and not.

Yep. Ahl's book was first released in 1973... about 10 years before GW-BASIC.

To be fair to the original commenter though... the actual title of the TechCrunch article is:

"NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission, setting up a race with SpaceX"

That title establishes a context in which looking at their relative goals is completely valid.

What do electric cars and rockets have in common?

Electric motors? I imagine there are differences but the super heavy grid fins are electrically actuated (I have heard these motors were sourced from Tesla, though I don't have a great reference for that on hand). The thrust vectoring is also electrically actuated... again, I imagine there are differences of what's on the rocket and what's in the cars... but there are cross over areas of research and engineering.

Also, in a hand-wavy way, rovers share some traits with electric cars; again electric motors, wheels, steering, etc.

So while I don't believe a traditional car company is exactly trying to build space hardened/ready equipment in the normal course of business... it's not as far fetched as some combinations could be.

Unless you are seeing the population decline issues in China... then blame socialism and it's long time one child policy. A system predicated on the socialists in power having a sort of "paternalistic wisdom" that it can enforce on society regardless of the individual interests of any set potential parents in having a larger family than their socialist masters wish.

Postgres was written in the 1980s

This is a pretty poor take. Sure the software that we call "PostgreSQL" started to be developed in the 80's... but they didn't stop there. PostgreSQL has been in continuous development, including improvements, changes, and additions, and by some very smart people at that. It's not static and as long as I've been a professional user of the database, decades, it has continually evolved and in some cases even led the way. If we were to survey the software, wouldn't you at least be interested to know how much of code base actually dates back to those long ago decades and how much is more modern before making such statement?

It would be a mistake to take what PostgreSQL actually offers: an excellent database that has be continuously developed and updated over many years (i.e. "maturity"), for some arbitrary idea and evidently baseless idea that somehow "new" must be better.

If new is better, say why; and do so with more actually true statements than it's not extensible. Want it in rust? Well, OK, sure you can give hand-wavy reasons about security and such for why that might be beneficial; but if you want to be convincing you need to be much more specific about the problem in PostgreSQL and the specific way in which your recommendation actually and convincingly moves the needle. If you can't do that, you're simply giving us an emotional outpouring rather than a rational one.

If you're going to try and use this analogy, you need to compare Elixir to Kotlin or Scala or Clojure rather than Java. Elixir is a language written for the BEAM which was created for Erlang. The BEAM happened to be useful VM for these other languages such as Elixir, Gleam, LFE, & Luerl.

Check this out...

https://rubbishtalk.com/media-kit/

Whoever put this together couldn't even be bothered to compete the template they were using.

Sort of... this was version 3 of the engine, a fairly big redesign and for version 3 this was the first flight.

I think that's part of it, but not necessarily the whole story. I haven't criticized them in the thread yet... so here goes.

Previously, I posted critically not because they were running businesses without humans, but because their post just described going through the motions without actually discussing if it really was effective or not. Sure the AI got through the day, checked off tasks on the list, but did it actually do that effectively or efficiently in any important way? Who knows... wasn't discussed.

I think where I come down now is that repeats of this same gimmick feel like just that: they're just playing a gimmick for attention. I can't tell that they're really demonstrating any special or significant capability... but man, just the story of trying to run a business without humans will get you that sweet, sweet attention.

Unfortunately, looking at least the first post, I stopped reading their "we let AI run X" posts. I think the only thing I really came away with is how thoughtless and mundane are most aspects of running a small business actually is; something I knew, but it really drove the point home. I didn't learn anything unexpected about AI tools or their products that seemed compelling or unexpected.

Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer.

I couldn't more highly recommend it.

I thought this is technically impossible

No, very technically possible... though, with good randomness, very, very unlikely.

But nothing technically prevents a UUIDv4 from generating a duplicate value.

There are a number of assumptions in what you say that don't necessarily hold.

1) That school is simply about landing a job.

2) That there is a value in students knowing how to have the AI do problems for them.

3) That follow-on effects of manually solving difficult problems is discountable compared to the direct output of the work.

I would say you're absolutely correct in that people pay for the result and they don't really care how you got there. But that's a pretty shallow rationale which overvalues the ability to be the conduit from the source of requirements to the final output and undervalues the individual ability to think for one's self when faced with the challenges of technological, geopolitical, or simply uncontrolled personal circumstances.

"The conduit", who you seem to be believe is the one with marketplace advantage, is exactly the person I would say is the most vulnerable. Not because getting the AI to produce demands is without value, but that its quickly becoming a task that doesn't need the intermediary at all. Those magicians that can prompt/agent/mcp/etc their way through to positive successes are actively being challenged by the very AI producers which our conduits people now depend on. Removing the need for intermediaries would be a great competitive advantage for any AI vendor able to achieve it. But insofar as intermediaries create output from LLMs, they'll not be very well differentiated: the common wisdom tends to be the output, lest the AI be accused of hallucination or being overly supportive. But when everyone is using AI for everything the opportunities will be in arbitraging that which is missed by common wisdom... filling in the cracks that any responsible AI would simply never venture to consider. Our conduit-person will be at a decided disadvantage because it takes real thought to know when it's best to color within the lines, and when it's best to not do so.

And that's really it. A good education is teaching you about the process of thought and becoming practiced at thinking. I would expect a better educated, thinking person to more easily adapt and make use of technology such as generative AI to solve problems more so than a person that just knows how to deal with today's prompting needs. The thinking person will be able to understand the bigger picture to better get a consistent and high quality series of results than the person just getting results as needed.

And that's really it. The output of a good education is you as a thoughtful & knowledgeable person: the output on the page is merely a means to that end. But if you focus solely on the answer on the page and the only important thing... you're really evaluating the AI, not the person that acted as intermediary.

In otherwords, if the person following your advice comes for a job, simply ask them which AIs they used in the interview and then just sign contracts with those vendors instead... you'll get better bang for your buck cutting out the middleman.

Looking at the discussion below this comment, I'd just add this video by AlphaPheonix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8

Good discussion in the comments there as well.

I skimmed through this, and maybe I missed it... but what really are they trying to prove? Are they trying to show that AI is capable of arbitraging consumer desires vs. market products/services into a successful business? Are they trying to show that once you get to financially managing a business that the ruthlessly efficient demands of the AI can mean points to your margins? Or are they simply trying to get attention in an otherwise arguably overcrowded market for AI service s (maybe the AI suggested something like this)?

The only thing that I saw demonstrated, and again, I skimmed, is what many thousands of software developers using AI tools to write their boilerplate already know: these tools, as of now, are great at going through the motions. A successful retail business, and I spent many years in the retail industry, isn't about putting together a nice store front, hiring clerks, and selecting just any-old-products: it's about being profitable. In traditional retail one of most important things is getting the right real estate for your target market... seems like that choice was made already in this case. Yes, a nice store front and good clerks are important, but I've worked in chains which were immaculately designed and built stores with great clerks that failed... and some that opened little more than fluorescent lighted hellscapes with clerks that barely cared that succeeded. In both cases the overall quality of the decisions and strategies relative to the target markets mattered to the success of the business. Just going through the motions didn't.

So if all is this is to say AI can do the things people generally do in these circumstances then sure, you didn't need this much human effort to prove that.... developer types do that at scale everyday now. If there was something different that this company is trying to learn, I'd be much more interested in that.

I think this really needs to be party of the message. It's great that Claude found a vulnerability that apparently has been overlooked for a long time. It's even proper for Anthropic to tout the find. But we should all ask about the signal to nose ratio that would have been part of the process. If it only was successful... That would be worth touting, too. But I expect there was more noise than they'd care to admit.

Or put another way, the context matters.

They've pretty clearly demonstrated the ability to get to orbit but have, quite reasonably, not actually put the thing into orbit. Given the size of the rocket they've been needing to demonstrate things like the relight for control after achieving orbit and have prioritized other issues like figuring out reentry.

So yes, you are literally correct in that they haven't put one in orbit, but it's more out of caution than capability. What they've only demonstrated in the most recent tests is that they have good reason to believe to believe that they can deorbit in a controlled fashion. But... now they've upgraded everything: raptor 3, booster v3, starship v3. Those need to prove out those capabilities again.

So I wouldn't be surprised if they continue the suborbital program for the next 3 or 4 tests. Given all the redesign, they aren't exactly at the beginning, but they have to show that they haven't broken what they previously fixed.

As others have mentioned, that's simply not going to tell you anything. AIS can and is often times turned off in such situations and it ships can spoof their location by sending false AIS... something that situations like could encourage, at least one could well imagine.

I find Sal Mercogliano's "What's Going on With Shipping?" to be a better source to understanding what's happening in the Strait. Here's a link to yesterday's episode "Strait of Hormuz 3-Week Recap | What is the Status of the Ships, Transits and Escort Mission?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q64cOs7GN_4

"Someone once said ..."

Someone also once said that the Azores are the remains of Atlantis. I simply didn't put any credence in it.

While behavioral changes around a self-driving car are plausible; they're common enough now that, at least where I live in San Francisco, regular human drivers should be pretty well acclimated to them.

As someone that constantly reached for some sort of GUI/TUI tool to work with git repos, I can understand the hesitation. The normal git CLI is sufficiently opaque and my interest in it is sufficiently low that those tools were really the only way I could work done efficiently since they made the arcane ways of git a bit more evident.

The curious thing for me is that with jj I find that I don't ever really reach for a GUI/TUI anymore. At first I did try a GUI, but then I realized that the vast majority of what I want to get done conceptually didn't require it. So most of what I do now is just using the jj command line and very rarely do I reach for any sort of other tool.

The exceptions to the GUI/TUI use are resolving conflicts. For me being able to see the conflicts side by side and much more interactively choosing which I want is still more comfortable than simply hand-editing the file. And I also find I'm searching or chatting with an LLM anything I want to do something a little more advanced and less common, like rebasing all my feature branches on the most current mainline branch in one command... jj has a rich set of functions and pattern matching which I haven't (and may never) take the time to learn. But the majority of day to day interactions... just me and the command line. I would never say such a think using git by itself.

Is this anything similar at all to:

https://github.com/openai/symphony

I'm not very familiar with the space, I follow Elixir goings on more than some of the AI stuff.

It is curious... and refreshing... to see Elixir & the BEAM popping up for these sorts of orchestration type workloads.

Fair enough.

The automaton in the film is a "Pierrot" style of clown:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot

From the Wikipedia entry...

*His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown [...]*

A modern "Pierrot" style clown is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puddles_Pity_Party

I have to admit... I wouldn't know about the Pierrot style of clown if it wasn't for Puddles...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf1w5GUturU