shevy-java

Despite not being the best medium for music, I find cassettes to be a really impressive piece of technology particularly due to how easy it is to write content to them.

I like old tech too and in the 1990s I recorded a lot of audio stuff straight from the radio, but nowadays with USB everywhere I just would not use tapes anymore. I just find USB sticks so much more convenient. I kind of transitioned into the digital world only and while no transition is perfect, I feel that the trade-offs are in favour of digital only rather than audio.

Even listening to the radio is different, I'd just use mpv and record the stream into a local file, as-is. It is strange how new technology obsoletes old tech but I also don't want to go back anymore. Though old hardware is cool, I love old computers from the 1970s and 1980s. They are so much cooler than the modern computers, even though the modern computers beat them performance-wise with their eyes closed.

The problem is: Haskell is a really, really difficult language. Prolog was much simpler.

Python on the other hand is a pretty simple language. We have different trade-offs here.

Prolog is strange. On the one hand it makes sense. On the other hand it seems to just be not a very practical language. People don't seem to stay with Prolog whereas they stay, say, in python.

I think the only way to stop that is to put the responsible folks in prison permanently. Small criminals are being jailed permanently on repeated offence. I think big guns with a lot of money need to get much higher sentences by default. And no monetary way to avoid that. The whole prison system is kind of screwed up here. A leech system for lawyers and judges.

One thing I always wondered ...

There used to be libgen. Then it went down. It went semi-back up but ... it is still kind of down.

Those issues kind of coincided with the big greedy mega-corporations leeching off data en masse; Anthropic was not the only one, Facebook is another example here. I always wondered whether the decline in quality, fewer liberated books published, coincided with what the big corporations were doing. Would be great to be able to see any underlying strategy here. Imagine Anthropic, just as a scenario, leeching off of everyone else, and then also sending in their lawyers to try to close down what they leeched off here. I mean the rise of bots kind of coincides with the rise of AI. So why not them also trying to make it harder for the rest of the world to access liberated books.

"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"

They took that from Google!

Aka acceptable ads.

Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.

Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)

Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:

"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."

This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.

That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future, otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that field for your age: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 - Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)

Folks - don't work for Evil. Any startup or smaller or even some medium-sized companies should be better work-places than the big greedy corporations. Granted, greed is an addiction and most people will fall to whoever pays most (that's understandable), but think of the ethics factor as well whenever the income is considered. Working for Evil comes with a karma penalty; Google taught us thus whenever an ad is infiltrating your computer.

Better than giving my money to Apple for sure.

I mean, the reason why these dominate in Europe is because largely of the medieval era and a bit before that. Once gunpowder became more widely used, castles became increasingly obsolete. Nowadays they have only touristic value really or movie values, such as the castle in the movie Monty Python and the holy grail. Other than that they are just stone ruins really, some more polished than others. They have no real worth nowadays other than wonder how many resources went into building them.

Also, as others pointed out, the map is missing many castles. I also doubt the spread over China, the map only says about 7 castles in whole China? So that seems totally wrong. The definition for a castle must be incorrect, because Japan has attributed many more and that is simply objectively incorrect. Is the chinese palace classified as a castle? If not, why not? If yes then why not other palaces in China? The map is really not very good here. It should begin by a good definition of what is meant with a castle.

It's funny to have squishy buttons. But I also hate eye-candy. It just takes away time. Time is so finite these days...

I believe a perfect solution exists.

The article seems too focused on over-engineering.

Achieving 100% is often much much harder than, say, 95% or so. Just good enough. This is the old "Worse is better" problem. Why did Linux outcompete, say, Minix or something else? Worse is better is a more practical focus. You don't need to achieve 100% perfect per se. Momentum is often more important. You can still have a lot of efficiency if the momentum is the main driver.

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

Perfection is nice in theory; in practice it will be whacked into submission by the worse-is-better speedy wizards. The hobo programmers built for speed. You make fun of them. Then the top 500 supercomputers all use what they wrote ... like Gandhi they were winning.

They de-facto created a monopoly. You can reason that its services are useful, but without also pointing out that they established a de-facto monopoly, this "analysis" is very incomplete.

what people celebrated about Google

When exactly? Google initially was not anywhere near as problematic as it is today. I don't see many celebrate Google these days.

what made Google such an attractive place for people like the author to work.

Was it ever? It also feels it used to be more attractive in the past. Nowadays you do not see any such yubilant posts about Google anymore. People complain a lot more about Google.

What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.

That's also not true. Some of Google's service are still popular such as Google Maps. You see very little criticism about it. But in other parts, Google revealed how truly evil it is. Be it the fight against ublock origin or Google locking down Android or dominating the www via abusing adChromium. Nope, sorry, the criticism against Google is totally warranted. Years ago I did not understand the de-google movement. Now I am of the opposite opinion and even more extreme. I think Google has to be removed from this planet as entity. Someone needs to chop it up. The US courts are too corrupt and bribed to change anything. I think the people need to fix Google, by no longer using it. This is difficult, I get it; I am still using Google, such as youtube. That's actually my biggest use case of Google. The browser (thorium) is the second loophole here but in theory I could use firefox.

So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?

That's like saying Al Capone is a saint. You try to connect evil with good. There is no connection here. Google remains an evil corporation even if it makes useful services. But it also kills existing services - look at the Google graveyard. Look how they crippled its search engine. Google pisses off people - why do you not see this? You basically wrote an eulogy for Google here. No specific criticism at all.

The Voice of Google - should be silenced. I don't want to hear any more Google propaganda in general. From "acceptable ads" to trying to kill ublock origin - enough is enough.

Both the USA and the EU are doing Evil here. However had, this is not solely confind to biometric data only - this is about selling data to outside agencies, so the EU betrays EU citizens here.

This kind of reveals that the EU is undermined by lobbyists. The real actions are too obvious - this is an act of betrayal by EU "politicians".

Then again this is not uncommon either:

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

At the least the orange king does not hide his attempt to pillage as much money as possible while refusing to explain who all visited the sexy Epstein islands. I have a ... slight suspicion some billionaires not known yet have also partied with underage girls there.

On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies?

I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).

Couldn't trust a company funded by Google to maintain an ad blocker.

Agreed. Google can not be trusted. They once tried to run the "acceptable ads" campaign. That one died down quickly after people pointed out the hypocrisy by Google. Nowadays it seems nobody likes Google anymore, so it is much easier to reject its various rubbish claims. See also how Google is waging war against ublock origin.

Well. I already decided some time ago that I don't want to have my money go into US corporations as long as the orange King is living out his genocidal fantasies (and even without that, I am already annoyed to no ends about Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google abusing everyone else so blatantly and violently, including buying legislation - look at the mandatory age sniffing movement before you can access information on the www any longer; this is fascism, and children are abused as fake reason for change here). But I am not all that happy about China becoming so dominant in the whole product chain either. I think the production should be more balanced world-wide, globally. And also, very much so, locally. I am also aware that this is very hard to do, for various reasons, but still if I have a little influence then I really would rather not empower the USA or China any more than they already abuse everyone else here. And both do, by the way.

I think most will agree that it improved on Erlang.

For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.

Looks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.

GitHub needs to solve the problem when one owner suddenly becomes inactive. Yes, you can fork things, but it would be so much easier if just new maintainers could continue as-is.

Naturally some problems must be solved for this to work, but I now have a few examples of projects that kind of died when the old maintainer (solo guy) became inactive. For instance the guys at BG2 at spellhold-studio solved this via a fork (from spellholdstudio to spellhold-studio). But it would have been so much easier to just let them continue as-is. This is one example of many more that could be given here.

I am not sure. I think SO died way before AI and that graph seems incorrect too.

Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years

Nah, their decline was already readily apparent before AI. You only need to go through old discussions and other people noticing it. AI may have accelerated the decay, but the decline happened already largely prior to AI.

This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined.

It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can manage to come back, with or without AI slop. It would basically require a lot of re-design and some things that never worked, such as the karma system, should be changed. Also moderators - they kill sites. That happened to reddit - I gave up after censor-mods constantly restricted everyone.

I liked the old LEGO up to around the 1990s or so, give or take. When I look at LEGO nowadays, of course they have some of the old spirit still in place, but in other areas they are just overpriced now and addicted to maximizing cash influx. This was a bit different in the pre-1990s era. 1990s already got more commercialized but I still would say it was somewhat ok. Then something shifted and I am not sure what. The creativity seems to have been degraded. I saw some huge LEGO sets for several hundred euros as collectors edition. And I understand that he had fun building it with his kids, but to me this was no longer LEGO. The most fun I had was assembling my own pieces back when I was young. For instance, after seeing the old movie Tron, I built a few of the objects in the "matrix", in particular those floating T-like thingies. These were quite easy to build via LEGO. I did not need instructions, I just experimented until it worked. I think this was the biggest selling point of LEGO, to be able to build things on your own. When I look at those huge expensive sets, that seems to have shifted. I get it, different portfolio and what not but this is also corporate fluff. It changed what LEGO is, and IMO it changed it to the worse.

The EU is like a tiger - without teeth, fur or claws. I think the only thing that works here is total boycott of airplanes that constantly unalive people through mass crashes. (Wikipedia really gathers useful data here in a simple-to-read manner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...)

Until the next mass crash ...

The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand.

Working on it:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

And they also deleted old code too. A lot of the old code could probably be removed, but is it really that relevant whether you have 4 millions line of code or 2 million lines of code? C is in my opinion too overbose. Rust is even worse. Which language would yield fewer lines of code without speed penalty? C is king largely because of the speed gains. We don't see people use python for an xserver.

But compare it with to photosynthesis

Artifical solar capture systems exist. Synthetic biology also bridges that gap as well and the genetic basis is known and has been manipulated. Granted, coming up with more efficient photosynthesis is very hard, but I don't share your "we humans are stupid" opinion here at all whatsoever.

or butterfly metamorphosis

Nothing fascinating here. It is just a genetic program. Viruses have similar programs too - yes, no metamorphosis, but take retroviruses and the syncytium. Mammals only reproduce thanks to retroviruses (not 100% correct, but look at this here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0707873105)

or the fact that microbes can double their population in a few hours

Wow, we humans surely do not have cells that double. Oh wait ... nevermind. Humans consist of cells. Who would have thought...

Yes, microbes are much faster, but they don't have to coordinate as much as humans do in 3D, not even in a bacterial biofilm. And we have to double a lot more DNA than bacteria do, so of course they are faster.

about a rose or a redwood tree than all the random and superficial activity the chimp brain produces

That comparison is weird. A rose is thinking as much as a chimp brain?

The human brain is special. Chimps are very clever too but humans have very solid abstract thinking. Animals have this too, to some extent (predator hunting prey, chimps have hunting strategies) but e. g. look at mathematics - animals don't waste their time coming up with higher order theorems.