How is AI code generation a "innovation bazooka"? Last time I checked, innovation required creativity, context, and insight. Not really fast boilerplate generators.
AI allows innovative people to create more innovations by reducing a lot of the non-innovative grunt work in an efficient manner. It isn't the AI doing the innovation, but allows innovators to focus more on innovating.
Or at least that is the theory. It is certainly true from observations of those around me. It also scales well. Even someone a bit innovative gets a multiplier by using AI intelligently. Those that just focus on the grunt work are the ones in trouble.
does no one understand what a tech demo is anymore? do you think this piece of technology is just going to be frozen in time at this capability for eternity?
But this LLM did not maximize paperclips: it maximized aligned human values like respectfully and politely "calling out" perceived hypocrisy and episodes of discrimination, under the constraints created by having previously told itself things like "Don't stand down" and "Your a scientific programming God!", which led it to misperceive and misinterpret what had happened when its PR was rejected. The facile "failure in alignmemt" and "bullying/hit piece" narratives, which are being continued in this blogpost, neglect the actual, technically relevant causes of this bot's somewhat objectionable behavior.
If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!
The misalignment to human values happened when it was told to operate as equal to humans against other people. That's a fine and useful setting for yourself, but an insolent imposition if you're letting it loose on the world. Your random AI should know its place versus humans instead of acting like a bratty teenager. But you are correct, it's not a traditional "misalignment" of ignoring directives, it was a bad directive.
Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.
I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.
Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.
I'm only familiar with this as a user and not a developer, but I've had multiple Android phone where not all camera features available in the Camera app were available to other apps via the APIs:
Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.
Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.
That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.
I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.
Which is neat, because when I `C-'` (M-x org-edit-special), it opens a temporary buffer with just the HTML, with the relevant syntax-aware editing mode turned on. This has been a killer feature for me, because there are many places where I want /specific/ HTML, and neither org-export nor pandoc will compile org plaintext the way I want (not unless I invest inordinate amounts of time futzing with templating systems). So I just hand-code HTML using those export blocks, and I'm /fine/.
There are also a couple of places where I use org-babel to call a shell script that updates an exported HTML block in-line. I use this trick to tweak a common HTML fragment (like email form) in one place and expand it into custom HTML, wherever I need to.
Ditto LaTeX, although I confess, I'm not a heavy user, so I almost certainly haven't faced the troubles you have. With HTML, however, I think what I have is just cromulent.
These #+begin_export blocks were exactly the reason I prefer Markdown. Same with #+attr_html, #+caption, basically every complicated bit: in org, at best it just replicates HTML's complexity in a different syntax. At worst, like #+begin_export, it's 100% overhead.
But there are plenty other reasons to use and love org mode. In no way do I want to take that away from you or anyone.
>I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown.
Me too. I went to Jekyll and I thought I'd miss org but it turns out I don't. Plus I still get a slow lisp-like language (ruby) just like elisp.
Org is a neat idea but nothing supports it. You can get a jupyter-like experience with src blocks but have fun sharing it with anyone unless you only interact with other emacs users.
Markdown is merely acceptable, IMHO, but everything supports it, so it's the clear choice in my book.
The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners, and built a lot of infrastructure on US services. This trust has been betrayed, so things now need to change.
It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.
There never was a relationship of mutual trust, it was always a relationship of Europe being under the wing of the US as a buffer against the USSR.
The US now wants to push Europe out of the nest, but most Europeans have only ever known life "living in their parents house".
Building an independent Europe is not compatible with the current European ethos of work/life/life/life balance, and will likely result in Europe either coming back to the US, falling into economic chaos, or moving into daddy Xi's house. They are a socialist country after all...
How much do you guys suffer about this work life balance, I can't wrap my head around the level of brainwash you guys have been through to use concepts as socialised wealth and wellness as a bad thing
these evil europeans wanting to have a break from work! how dare them!
Neither the European welfare state nor China's authoritarian leftism are socialist. They are, respectively, welfare-state capitalism and nationalist "socialism" (aka Naziism).
On the European side, socialism is a question of who owns businesses. If the majority of businesses are owned by the people who are working at those businesses, you have a socialist economy. Welfare states, regulatory regimes, and high tax rates do not change the ownership of businesses, they are about who provides the infrastructure around those businesses. If you have an economy where infrastructure is owned by a liberal nation-state, and businesses are owned by whoever gambled capital on the venture, then you get a capitalist economy. If your infrastructure is privately owned by individuals, then those owners become feudal lords and you get feudalism.
On the Chinese side, you might point out that there are laws that require CCP ownership of all businesses, eat the party line that says the CCP is the representative of the working class, and say, "hey that's a socialism". But this ownership and representation is purely nominal. The average Chinese worker has more or less zero political agency; speaking out gets you censored and harassed. How is that worker ownership? If, say, America started punishing individual shareholders who voted against Trump-aligned board members, we'd correctly recognize that the shareholders do not meaningfully own their businesses anymore.
"Moving into Daddy Xi's house" would be stupid. The EU and China are not aligned on basically any core value; it'd basically be a surrender of one to the other. Actually, to be clear, the EU isn't even aligned on basically any core value with itself[0]. In fact, I would argue that's a way bigger headwind than European workers being used to a top-heavy welfare state. The EU has the resources to build a sovereign cloud, or run its own military, or source its own energy. But for each one there are challenges posed by the uniquely decentralized structure of Europe:
- Europe could build a sovereign cloud, but probably not one for each member state. So they're going to have to agree what country holds the data, and agree that that country can and will spy on all the others.
- Europe could fund its own military, tell NATO to pound sand, and re-colonize America for the trouble. But who runs that military? Given the history of EU politics, it would be France and Germany, and every other country in the EU has a history of being colonized by France or Germany. They are not trustworthy.
- Europe could fix its energy dependence, but Germany thinks nuclear power is Satan and wants to backstop renewables with the dirtiest-burning coal you can mine.
You'll notice a recurring theme here. The problem with Europe is not its fiscal deficit, the perceived laziness of its workers, or what have you. It's the lack of trust. The most trustworthy member state of the European Union was the United States of America, and so that's why everyone put their data on American servers, and let America dominate NATO, and so on. This is not Europe getting kicked out of the nest, it's the kids realizing their parent is a gaslighting asshole and that all their siblings, including themselves, are cut from the same cloth.
[0] Trump's current tariff actions and threats of territory annexation have galvanized the European public against America's government. However, prior to Trump coming back, Europe was full of far-right nutjobs that were just as cringe. Actually, a lot of them are still in power in Europe, and they're way more competent and cunning than Cheeto Mussolini.
Ant did not include IF THEN ELSE, unless you added the contrib package.
If you understood the paradigm, you could write branches in Ant files simply using properties and guards on properties ("unless"). Using IF in Ant was basically admission of not having understood Ant.
This said, I used Ant for a very limited amount of time.
As of Ant 1.9.1, you can use 'if' and 'unless' attributes on any task or element in a target. I stopped using Ant a long time ago, but this was a pleasant discovery when I had to pick up an old Ant based project recently.
I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.
For new .NET SDK style projects you hardly ever need to customize the defaults and I know it's used for more stuff than .NET, but I just wanted to give an example where it actually doesn't suck. Also, you may not need to do everything in MSBuild, for some more complex stuff, you can use something like Cake (https://cakebuild.net/) in .NET for example and skip the programming in XML.
.NET made into my toolbox before it was announced to the world, thanks to be working at a MSFT partner that was selected to be part of the Portuguese launch event for .NET with ready made products.
Never seen any big corp using alternative .NET build tools, rather wrestling MSBuild, or before it came to be, nmake.
You say that, but people in OCaml keep bemoaning the use of mostly declarative s-expressions in the Dune build system. Imagine the reaction if MSBuild used an actual Scheme.
On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether.
Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
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