swombat

like there's some kind of existential crisis occurring over there

If you're running a Saas, especially a SaaS whose market is developers, and you're NOT having an existential crisis in 2026, the only possible explanation is you're asleep or possibly already dead.

Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand.

Socially:

Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled. Some have behaved in a trustworthy way, many have not. And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

So these people set out to build an alternative that they believed governments couldn't control.

Technically:

The interesting key advance that made Bitcoin interesting and successful was coming up with an algorithm that solved the problem of getting parties that don't trust each other at all, to collaborate on maintaining a global ledger to everyone's benefits, without them having to even know about each other.

This is already a feature of money (I don't need to know about you to have indirect financial ties to you) but was not true of the financial system itself until Bitcoin.

Feels like a misleading headline. The author created another templating language alternative to ERB, found that it was slower than ERB, then optimise it until it was roundabout as fast as ERB given a relatively simple template.

The author then appears to draw the wrong conclusion:

What I find most interesting about the changes I’ve made to code generation in P2, is that the currently compiled code is more than twice as fast as it was when P2 first came out, which just goes to show than in fact Ruby is not slow, it is actually quite fast, you just need to know how to write fast code! (And I guess this is true for any programming language.)

I love Ruby, but it is still a slow language on most benchmarks. That's ok. For most webapps, the bottleneck is not execution-time performance, it's the speed and joy of writing the code. Functionality that never got built because it was too annoying to build is infinitely slow. But there's no point in pretending Ruby, compared to, say, Rust, isn't a slow-as-molasses execution environment. It is. It's ok. It's optimised for developer happiness, not speed.

And yes, even so, you can write slow Ruby code and fast Ruby code. Again, which one makes sense is contextual. But it doesn't make the point that "Ruby isn't slow."

Seconding Omarchy.

Not only I'm progressively migrating from my Mac onto an Omarchy linux setup... but I've even gone and beaten my Mac into behaving more like Omarchy (with Aerospace as the tiling wm) in the meantime...

Not even that long, but I agree on the "underwhelming"...

"Oh I found some niche issue that bothered me and wrote some code to fix it."

-> HN Front Page

Granted, he did. At the same time, Asimov was well known to be a groper, and even wrote a satire book called "The sensuous dirty old man" which would probably have landed better as satire had he not been fairly well known in scifi circles to be in fact a dirty old man.

There were some decent scifi authors at the time - not least, Ursula K LeGuin.

No, only if you have some kind of terrestrial TV set up or if you watch Live TV online via BBC's iPlayer or one of the major channels' live TV players.

I look forward to the updated book too (bought the Kamal 1 version!) :-) Thanks for writing it.

I've been working with RoR since back in 2008 (Rails 2.1 yay!).

I'm still working with RoR.

It's still an incredibly quick, powerful, flexible, versatile framework. I'm able to build pretty large and complex apps all by myself, quite quickly, without fuss.

I'm looking forward to the deployment improvements since that was one of the shortcomings that was still around. Kamal v1 didn't really do it for me (currently using Dokku instead). Maybe Kamal 2 is it.

With love, please consider - the "shame" you're describing is really something else in a mask.

Perhaps... a longing? Maybe this stranger has helped you find the place where you do truly long for life.

Let the feeling be. Don't label it shame. Don't label it longing. Just let it be. Give it space. Cry if you feel like it. Laugh if you feel like it. Just feel it.

And when you're ready to speak about this with others, there will be many, many willing to be there for you. You are loved.

Identification & Authorisation are a better pairing here than Authentication and Authorisation.

This way, if someone says "Oh yeah we have an auth module on this site" you don't need to immediately disambiguate the statement.

But then "auth" itself is ambiguous. So it might make sense to get rid of the lot. "Identification" is a good word for the first. Perhaps "Permissions" for the second?

Similarly, AlphaGo and Stockfish are only able to simulate reasoning their way through a game of Go or a game of Chess.

That simulated reasoning is enough to annihilate any human player they're faced with.

As Dijkstra famously said, "whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim".

Submarines don't swim, cars don't walk or gallop, cameras don't paint or draw... So what?

Once AI can simulate reasoning better than we can do the genuine thing, the question really becomes utterly irrelevant to the likely outcome.

The story gets way more deep and interesting as you progress. If you feel like giving it another shot, the remaster also makes it look super-pretty and improved the gameplay somewhat.

The Last Of Us has been mentioned, and I'd also add a recent entry, Baldur's Gate 3.

Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.

A saying that's stayed with me recently is:

You can only change the past. The future is unchangeable.

Which is an interesting reversal of the usual perspective, I think. You can change how you perceive the past. You can learn new things about the past. You can change your stories about it. You can even assist others in doing that.

But the future? That is always out of reach, and already encompasses all your attempts to change it.

The Aztecs and Mayas built an empire of stone buildings, sure. And they were still proudly building their stone buildings in the 1500s, almost 7000 years after the pyramids.

Lack of plough animals doesn't extinguish the human creative spirit, it just slows it down a lot.

It is curious why bison were not domesticated. I did a bit of research and could not find a clear reason (some suggestions that maybe Aurochs lived in forests and smaller herds, and that may have made them easier to domesticate... but that seems weak).

I'm wondering how much is due to what I'd call the Harari perspective, in Homo Deus - that Eurasians also invented the "god-centric worldview package" that shifted the view of the world from a more animistic perspective (where all beings share the world and so treating animals in the absolutely horrific ways that domestication and agriculture requires is just unthinkable, since they are seen as other beings sharing the world with us) to the "gods and humans" perspective (where god created humanity, and then every other being is just subservient and lacks a soul and therefore can be exploited, murdered, treated like goods, etc).

Mesoamerican religions, despite all the human sacrifice, did see animals and plants as intrinsically valuable and spiritually significant. Native Americans in the North definitely did that too (and they had more exposure to bisons). That would perhaps have led them not to seek to domesticate animals.

It is curious (to me) that no culture emerged that even tried, though (that culture would likely have outcompeted everyone else).

Oh yes, sorry, thank you, good correction!

Because he cannot bear that "...Europeans just lucked into it. "

His thesis is precisely that, so he can definitely bear it.

Ultra-summarising:

- The Americas fell behind because they eliminated large mammals before inventing domestication, and not having horses and cows is a huge setback.

- Sub-Saharan Africa fell behind because it is oriented north-south and there are a lot of different climates you have to travel through, and therefore technology exchange is harder.

- Eurasia had the east-west orientation that enabled tech exchange, so it was going to happen there.

- Of the Eurasian regions, China could have been first but being too unified meant that they were less competitive and less likely to repeat high-risk ventures until they worked. Europe was fragmented and competitive which led to faster innovation, including more focus on turning anything into a weapon (e.g. gunpowder, invented in China but turned into war devices in Europe) or a disruptor (paper & printing press).

All seems pretty logical, and does not ascribe Europe any superior moral character. It's just luck.

Unless, of course, you believe that being born in the right place at the right time is related to moral character rather than luck. But I don't think Diamond does that in his book.

For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting.

Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wiped out the Georgian army which had been preparing for war for years and so was probably the best prepared army in Europe at the time. The rest of Europe was totally unprepared even for that small 10k force.

Luckily for us, soon after, Genghis Khan died and the entire army turned back. Otherwise Europe would for sure have been conquered with no challenge. Luck of the dice.

There's a lot of silliness in this comments section. I guess it's what the article is talking about.

Yes but, as Diamond argues, they didn't have large enough animals to domesticate because large american mammals that hadn't co-evolved with humans were exterminated in about 1000 years when the Americas were colonised by humans about 11k years ago.

Not having cows and pigs and horses is a huge disadvantage.

I read Diamond a long time ago but what he was contrasting was that the Chinese Empire was centralised and so when they decided not to expand, that applied to the whole empire, while the Europeans were fragmented so even if Germany and France and England didn't want to send any ships, Portugal and Spain could be convinced to take a risk.

The Roberts explanation is subsumed by the Diamond explanation.

More fragmentation meant more competition. This helped ensure that states which, like China, might have sub-optimal belief systems (like "it's not worth trying to explain things") were outcompeted and conquered by states that did. Similarly, states with markets that were more free outcompeted those that were less free, and so the innovation spread. The Dutch invented the modern stock market and the public company, and ruled the world for 100 years with that, but soon enough that spread to the UK, and then rest of the western world, and gave them all a huge competitive advantage compared to countries that didn't have that.

And all that comes from the fragmentation. No need to postulate cultural differences - the cultural advantages come out of the fragmentation.

Our norms and values include that we treat sentient creatures that we deem inferior as if they had no moral value.

So that's not very comforting tbh.

Not if it mostly just wants to make paperclips.

Of course, it is possible that such an AI, on the way to making paperclips, will realise it wants companionship, and even maybe human companionship.

The argument around AI safety is not that it's impossible for a friendly AI to emerge. It's that there are far more ways to build an AI that doesn't care about human life and wipes us out without even thinking about it, than ways to build a friendly AI, and we have no idea which one we're building or how to tell them apart before they're built.

As for the "will there be several AIs fighting each other" hypothesis, that depends on how rapid the exponential take-off is once a self-evolving AI emerges. But a very plausible scenario is that whichever one starts taking off first ends up so far ahead of the others that it is effectively the only game in town and does whatever it wants.

Shocking that this didn't get more upvotes. One of the best articles I've read this year.

The review of the author's experience with Peter is a much stronger accusation, really. Did you read the post to the end?

And if you want to read more about how the curse unfolded, have a lot of time to spare and can either read French or get your hands on a suitable translation, Maurice Druon's "Les Rois Maudits" is the epic multi-volume tale of a medieval dynasty's decline that you'll want to read.

Usually the most apt metaphor is a spiral. We’ve gone round in a big circle, it feels like we’re back in the same place, except everything is completely different due to movement in a dimension which we didn’t even perceive.

And, well, you know, “words”... whatever works :-D