If you get the urge to try Capitalism again, you should take a look at Capitalism Lab [1]. It picks up from the original Capitalism series and adds a lot of UI enhancements / quality of life stuff as well as some new features and moddability.
1,725 karma · joined October 4, 2012
You can also put a shortcut to a program on your desktop and - horror of horrors! - clicking the shortcut will execute the program! How crazy is that?
I get that some people don't want the markdown functionality in notepad (you can turn it off very easily, btw). But I don't understand why suddenly the idea of hyperlinks is being blasted as a terrible security vulnerability?
Surely there has to be more to this, in order to generate so much hubbub, than just people not understanding the basic concept of hyperlinks?
Personally I'd say none at all, unless the government itself provides it as a free service, takes on all the liability, and makes it simple to use.
It also defines personally identifiable information as including "pseudonymous information when the information is used by a controller or processor in conjunction with additional information that reasonably links the information to an identified or identifiable individual." But it doesn't specify what it means by 'controller' or 'processor' either.
If a hobbyist just sets up a forum site, with no payment processor and no identified or identifiable information required, it would seem reasonable that the law should not apply. But I'm not a lawyer.
Clearly, however, attempting to comply with the law just in case, by requiring ID, would however then make it applicable, since that is personally identifiable information.
You can still run a train on those old tracks. And it'll be competitive. Sure you could build all new tracks, but that's a lot more expensive and difficult. So they'll need to be a whole lot better to beat the established network.
But GPUs? And with how much tech has changed in the last decade or two and might in the next?
We saw cryptocurrency mining go from CPU to GPU to FPGA to ASICs in just a few years.
We can't yet tell where this fad is going. But there's fair reason to believe that, even if AI has tons of utility, the current economics of it might be problematic.
On the one hand, software is like a living thing. Once you bring it into this world, you need to nurture it and care for it, because its needs, and the environment around it, and the people who use it, are constantly changing and evolving. This is a beautiful sentiment.
On the other hand, it's really nice to just be done with something. To have it completed, finished, move on to something else. And still be able to use the thing you built two or three decades later and have it work just fine.
The sheer drudgery of maintenance and porting and constant updates and incompatibilities sucks my will to live. I could be creating something new, building something else, improving something, instead, I'm stuck here doing CPR on everything that I have to keep alive.
I'm leaning more and more toward things that will stand on their own in the long-term. Stable. Done. Boring. Lasting. You can always come back and add or fix something if you want. But you don't have to lose sleep just keeping it alive. You can relax and go do other things.
I feel like we've put ourselves in a weird predicament with that.
I can't help but think of Super Star Trek, originally written in the 1970s on a mainframe, based on a late 1960s program (the original mainframe Star Trek), I think. It was ported to DOS in the 1990s and still runs fine today. There's not a new release every two weeks. Doesn't need to be. Just a typo or bugfix every few years. And they're not that big a deal. -- https://almy.us/sst.html
I think that's more what we should be striving for. If someone reports a rare bug after 50 years, sure, fix it and make a new release. The rest of your time, you can be doing other stuff.
However, a decade ago, a coworker and I were tasked with creating some scripts to process data in the background, on a server that customers had access to. We were free to pick any tech we wanted, so long as it added zero attack surface and zero maintenance burden (aside from routine server OS updates). Which meant decidedly not the tech we work with all day every day which needs constant maintenance. We picked python because it was already on the server (even though my coworker hates it).
A decade later and those python scripts (some of which we had all but forgotten about) are still chugging along just fine. Now in a completely different environment, different server on a completely different hosting setup. To my knowledge we had to make one update about 8 years ago to add handling for a new field, and that was that.
Everything else we work with had to be substantially modified just to move to the new hosting. Never mind the routine maintenance every single sprint just to keep all the dependencies and junk up to date and deal with all the security updates. But those python scripts? Still plugging away exactly as they did in 2015. Just doing their job.
robots.txt main purpose back in the day was curtailing penalties in the search engines when you got stuck maintaining a badly-built dynamic site that had tons of dynamic links and effectively got penalized for duplicate content. It was basically a way of saying "Hey search engines, these are the canonical URLs, ignore all the other ones with query parameters or whatever that give almost the same result."
It could also help keep 'nice' crawlers from getting stuck crawling an infinite number of pages on those sites.
Of course it never did anything for the 'bad' crawlers that would hammer your site! (And there were a lot of them, even back then.) That's what IP bans and such were for. You certainly wouldn't base it on something like User-Agent, which the user agent itself controlled! And you wouldn't expect the bad bots to play nicely just because you asked them.
That's about as naive as the Do-Not-Track header, which was basically kindly asking companies whose entire business is tracking people to just not do that thing that they got paid for.
Or the Evil Bit proposal, to suggest that malware should identify itself in the headers. "The Request for Comments recommended that the last remaining unused bit, the "Reserved Bit" in the IPv4 packet header, be used to indicate whether a packet had been sent with malicious intent, thus making computer security engineering an easy problem – simply ignore any messages with the evil bit set and trust the rest."
No kid or hobbyist or person just learning was spending $1400+ on a compiler. Especially as the number of open-source languages and tools were increasing rapidly by the day, and Community Editions of professional tools were being released.
Sure they were going for the Enterprise market money, but people there buy based on what they're familiar with and can easily hire lots of people who are familiar to work with it.
Last I looked they do have a community edition of Delphi now, but that was slamming the barn door long after the horses had all ran far away and the barn had mostly collapsed.
But mostly I don't. My work notes are on my work laptop and my personal notes are on my PC. I might copy them onto a mobile device if I'm traveling, but I might not bother. Mobile devices don't have the good keyboard and large screen to really be useful for stuff like that. But I have copied them over before just in case I wanted to find something in them.
Guess he never heard of the Rust Belt (or maybe thinks it's something holding up Iron Man's pants after a rainstorm?)
Coincidentally, that's also the period right after the Green Revolution and the time of the popularization of standardized intermodal shipping containers and also the filling out the U.S. interstate highway system. And when most passenger trains were shut down and the freight trains given free reign on the rails. Those logistical changes made a huge difference.
And it was also a time when communications and tech were making it much easier for businesses to coordinate cross-country and internationally.
Offshoring and outsourcing got really big during the early 1970s - mid 1990s. First with manufacturing and such and later with call centers and professional white-collar work.
By the late 90s, when the author says the stagnation ended, most of the things that could be offshored already had been. Then it was time to move on to things like JIT logistics, lean manufacturing, and automation.
Coincidentally the mid-late 90s were also the time when the internet was opened up to average people, and the PC market boomed, and just shortly before high long-distance charges were dropped. That is, when normal people began to get the ability to communicate and coordinate and automate some things as easily as big business had been for a couple decades.
There's also something to be said about the huge tax cuts for the wealthy during those stagnation decades. The shift in executive compensation becoming much more in stock, and the shift from paying dividends to doing stock buybacks. And it was also the era of corporate raiders. So many corporate raids and LBOs.
Meanwhile the government began shifting away from antitrust actions and started encouraging deregulation and consolidation instead. All of those changes largely were major shifts during that timeframe.
So yeah, globalization and neoliberal financialization were major impacts which, although they had not stopped, had somewhat stabilized by the 2000s.
They certainly didn't all start with NAFTA. That's just a loony idea.
For a couple of cultural notes, a full decade before NAFTA, Wal-Mart had a huge "Made In America" ad campaign in the 80s, and my grandparents insisted on shopping there because of that.
Back to the Future had a joke where Marty and Doc were arguing about a circuit that failed:
Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan". Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Doc: Unbelievable.
You didn't have to be reading the business section of the newspaper, or even be an adult, to see it at the time.
It couldn't help me except to reference a few sites that no longer exist, one that's HTTP only so now causes browser warnings and was mostly only links to more sites that also no longer exist, and an old general gaming forum that doesn't even have a search function.
It didn't mention the mailing list archive site which has 21 years of discussion, indexed and searchable, still available. Or the still-active site where some fans archived all that they could from the old sites some years back, along with emulators, binaries, and instructions to get some of the old fan-made software running again on modern systems.
Neither of those sites are new since ChatGPT was trained, they have been around much longer than ChatGPT. But it knows nothing about them or their content.
I then asked it what it could tell me about the topic of a blog that ran for 10 years, with 314 posts, most of which had around 100+ comments, and the site it most often linked to. ChatGPT's answer was simply: "It seems like I can’t do more browsing right now. Please try again later."
So no, you can't "just ask ChatGPT." Contrary to popular belief, it doesn't know much about what is or was on the internet, even at the time it was trained, nor about many topics.
Given the way the web has developed over time, it seems quite likely to have huge gaps on anything related to the small web, any niche hobbies or interests, etc. All that non-commercial stuff that you can't easily find in modern search engines, ChatGPT doesn't know about it either.
Those big chunks of content that wink out of existence whenever a hosting company goes under or someone just stops paying the bill for a site that they used to love but haven't actively maintained in awhile? It doesn't know any of that either.
Entire online communities rose, developed, created a great deal of stuff, then slowly atrophied, and eventually disappeared. ChatGPT knows nothing of them.
Luckily there are (currently) multiple playlists of it on Youtube.
But they might not be there next year.
Back then, the PC came with the language and tools already.
As a kid, you probably didn't have much money to buy software anyway, so if you wanted it to do something, you had to learn to program it yourself.
And once you could figure out how to read input from the keyboard or a file and write output to the screen or a file, that was most of it right there. You yourself could write programs that did almost anything that the professional programs did.
Because it was just that simple. No networks, no frameworks, no layered stacks, no APIs, no GUI libraries, no 139 processes running in the background, no nothing.
Just you and the 'bare metal'. PEEKing and POKEing and GOTOing until it did what you wanted.
And from there it was a simple step up to Turbo Pascal, inlining Assembler for performance, etc.
The whole system back then was just so simple, you could comprehend and fit the whole thing in your mental model. And yet you could make it do almost anything it could do with just that simplicity.
We lost that around the time that Macs and Windows came out. And it's just gotten ever more complex and inscrutable since then. Much more powerful, and tons of free stuff, but there's no longer that simple entry point. Javascript isn't, Python isn't, nothing is or will ever be as simple and fully-capable of an intro as we had during that short period of early home computers.
And it means a full-screen Text User Interface, which is quite different from a line-oriented CLI (Command Line Interface). Instead of a command line, you have a full screen interface with menus, dialogs, buttons, checkboxes and radios, listboxes, windows, scrollbars, etc. Just all in text mode using things like the box drawing and shading characters.
So at least 30 years ago. Probably the early 80s, although I'm not sure of that. But that's when some programs started going from CLI or forms-based to actually using that full-screen TUI style.
The earlier forms-based programs were basically just a hard-coded text-mode screen with blank fields that you could fill in the blanks, then hit a key to either submit, escape back out, or use a hotkey to pull up a different form screen. They didn't have the various interface widgets that we got used to with the TUIs and later GUIs.
And yes, people did use it recreationally. But it wasn't really a problem. If they took enough that their capillaries burst, they were the only ones getting hurt. And they could easily buy more for a few dollars at any store, so there was no crime associated with it.
Now it's illegal mainly because 'war on drugs' is fun for some people or something. Crime rates were dropping so they needed to invent new crimes.
Or maybe even just looking up the update online to see whether any problems had been reported before deploying it wholesale across their organizations.
Are these the same IT people whose systems all went offline in the left-pad incident because they 'accidentally' set their production servers to be dependent on a third-party repository?
I've worked at some low-budget places that didn't have much in the way of a vetting process, but even there auto-deploying unknown updates to third-party dependencies into production was always a capital N No.
So yes, air conditioning is very common there, even if you're poor that's one thing you will try to find a way to get.
In the ghettos it's normally an old window unit, not central AC. Also shotgun shacks, which are houses setup with a straight-through floorplan so that if you open the front and back doors the whole thing becomes kind of a wind tunnel. Not as good as AC, but better than nothing.
In those neighborhoods, you'll also often see people (especially elderly and children) hanging out at the neighborhood church or mom and pop store, where there is air conditioning, if they don't have AC or it isn't working.
So far though, they show no intentions of doing non-hostile advertising. Instead they're constantly striving to make it even worse.
So I'll keep the adblocking as it remains a reasonable and necessary defense measure.
I think some people like to have specific configurations like "open these 4 programs in these 4 positions" though.
But after having read these comments, it really drives home his point that you can get a room full of lots of very smart people who all know what they're talking about, and they'll all disagree about the understanding and interpretation of box plots.
It's a little surprising, but the evidence in these threads pretty much cinches the argument for me.
And the ones made by corporations were prohibitively expensive. As a teenager wanting to learn, or a hobbyist making programs for fun, would you really pay $4500 for a compiler to tinker with projects in your spare time? There's one reason hardly anyone uses Delphi anymore. By the time they finally released a Community Edition, there was no community left that had grown up learning Pascal.
There's a bit of spatial knowledge involved to understand that you're walking in a circle around the north pole. But the reasoning needed to get the answer to the question is based on the language.
Specifically, the language tells us that our starting point is at the north pole. Then the language of the 4th point states "to pass your starting point", which has two meanings - to cross over the starting point (as in passing the finish line in a race) or to pass by it off to the side (as in passing a store as you're traveling along a road). But since we're walking in a circle around it, we'll never pass it in either sense of the word.
Had it used different language like "How far did you have to walk to complete a circle around your starting point?" then the answer would be quite different, as would the reasoning.
But that wasn't the language used. So the language completely determines the answer and the reasoning involved, including whether you even need to think about distance.
One could also argue that all four of the answer options are wrong, partly since 1km is not a very far distance, and therefore you were always close to your starting point, depending on your ideal of 'close'. But more specifically simply because the language saying you "never came close" to it would be nonsense because you started right at your starting point, and of course can't get much closer than that. So again you don't even really need to account for distance. The language alone determines it.
I think this supports the article quite well too. This idea that LLMs 'hallucinate' or that you can't 'trust' them is a clear illustration of the underlying problem.
I've never seen an LLM hallucinate or give an untrustworthy response. But I've seen many many people claim that they do.
Those people are usually attempting to use a language model to do mathematical calculations, instead of using a calculator. Or to lookup facts, instead of using a database. Or to get an overview of a topic, instead of using an encyclopedia.
So naturally, they have about as much luck as someone trying to chop down a tree with a phillips head screwdriver or trying to drive a screw into the wall with a chainsaw. Or even, trying to use a phillips head screwdriver to drive a phillips head screw, but doing so by holding the tip and banging the handle against the screw as if it were a hammer.
Too many people aren't using the right tool for the job, and even if they are, they don't know how to use it correctly. That requires some understanding of the tool, some aptitude, and in the case of a language model, some literacy.
But these LLMs are being marketed as if they are general purpose artificial intelligences that can do anything, when they're obviously not. And their users don't understand that and aren't using them properly.
However, if you use them to pseudorandomly generate natural sounding text, given their training and context, then they absolutely do in fact do that correctly. No 'hallucinations', no 'wrong answers'. They randomly generate natural enough text which fits the topic, pretty much every time.
The issue is marketing them as something they're not, to people who aren't literate enough on the topic to know the difference.
And if, as the article claims, half the people aren't even literate enough to use them, let alone understand when and how to use them, then it's not a good idea to use them as a standard interface nor to make promises about what they can do, when the people that would be using them wouldn't be able to make them do those things.
Back in the day, you pretty much had to be able to understand and program a computer to use one. But imagine if your standard cellphone or laptop nowadays just booted up to a BASIC prompt or even a DOS prompt. Most people would be lost. These days we have UIs such that almost anyone can use them, without that understanding and without having to write their own programs.
LLMs are still in that earlier stage. Where you need to understand them to get value out of them. But they're being dolled up and advertised as if you don't.
I agree with you, they can't successfully replace jobs when people don't even know what they want or how to use them.
For instance, I've seen people saying they can ask it for help with how to code something and it will help them. Although the results aren't perfect, they can be helpful.
However, I recall years ago asking a more senior developer how to do something. They could've just told me how, but instead they asked why I was doing that. Then they told me not to bother with writing code at all, and to instead do this other, much simpler thing which would have the same effect at solving the client's request. ChatGPT wouldn't have had that insight.
Years later, a junior dev came to me asking for help with his code because it wasn't working. We went over the code line by line and he explained what it was trying to do and it all looked good. But when he ran it, the web server crashed. I told him to try adding a comment:
// Do not remove this comment.
Which is not to say that it's useless. But it lacks greater context and the insight to go beyond the parameters of the question on its own initiative. Then again, so do humans most of the time.