Piskvorrr

I mean, it is obvious for a human inspecting the one specific input and output sample, but how do you do this at scale? (Spoiler: cross your fingers and hope, that's how)

Except when they "extract" something that wasn't in the source. And now what, assuming you can even detect the tainted data at all?

How do you fix that, when the process is literally "we throw an illegible blob at it and data comes out"? This is not even GIGO, this is "anything in, synthetic garbage out"

In which case...what good is a model that predicts semi-randomly? Oh.

("But it works - when it works" is a tautology, not a useful model)

That is, literally, faith-based business management. "We suck, sure - but wait, a miracle will SURELY happen in version 5. Or 6. Or 789. It will happen eventually, have faith and shovel money our way."

By then, the startup will have folded, and the C-levels will have moved on to the next Idée Du Jour.

- terminally online

- DLC

- IRL

As in, "things that happened before my Xth year of life are Normal, nay, Traditional even. Everything afterwards is Ephemeral, and possibly Heresy as well."

Alas! All is ephemeral.

HTAs were equal parts great (for their time) and terrible (plus they stuck around until IE died): a bog-standard webpage, but IE-only and with local-user process execution powers. Also, the local persistence was...problematic.

Only similar in the vaguest sense.

I am afraid that you underestimate the power of organic, human stupidity.

How I envision this to work:

- vibe code a thing

- it doesn't work, but it was CHEAP

- hire someone "to fix it"

- actually means "rewrite most of it, but cheaper"

- also means "become the scapegoat"

To a developer, it offers most of the work for very little payment. Not an enticing proposition.

(Yes, I've been burned by various "it's 90% done, we just need a few fixes", and that was BEFORE the current slop era)

Data at rest, also? Meanwhile, same govt. invests in LLMs slurping power by the megawatt, but surely that is an unproblem.

IDK if any pulse dialing phones (as opposed to DTMF) are still capable of reaching the phone network at large, but I'd imagine that's the use case.

An opportunity to rant about South Africa, because that's surely what the email said - honest, that came out the request to transcribe!

In other words, a singularly noisy pipe. (yeah, I know, it's going to be great as soon as it starts being great)

And they're a best-effort, asynchronous store-and-forget^Wforward, reply-whenever-if-at-all solution.

It moves slowly enough that the wheel will approximately never turn enough to generate significant torque.

Well that's a bit of a balancing act, isn't it? "Why isn't this feature on the site, it would be more useful to me; also, that feature is annoying and useless to me" - says literally everyone.

Thus, we get a built-in editor (less friction, yay/too rudimentary, boo) and popups (OSM events, yay/Popups are now everywhere, boo). And endless discussions on "this should be more/less prominent."

I don't think there's any official edict, but the approach "I don't like this and I'll make my own version" is at the very least workable (as opposed to, say, Google Maps).

TLDR: files a flight plan, then does something completely different. FAFO ensues.

And that's a great example of missing the context right there. "There's this impossibly great offer here. OF COURSE I take it, because there's no way everyone's getting fired after the first year, why would there be strings attached?"

Attempting to unionize. Then the factory owners hired thugs to decapitate the movement.

Oh wait, that's not the disneyfied technooptimistic version of Luddites? Sorry.

Once you start taxatively naming "these are the Only Blessed Ranges," you'll be bitten by the usual brouhaha "email address ends with .[a-z]{2,3}". We all know how it went, and ".[a-z]{2,4}" didn't cut it, either, not even in 2000.

The Artist Formerly Known As Prince has entered the chat.

(the name was a unique symbol)

Yes, all abstractions leak, there will always be edge cases. Doesn't mean "JUST USE ASCII DUH" (the lowercase extension is for the wimps); a whole spectrum exists between these extremes.

There seems to be a vast gap between "free" and "more expensive than running LLMs". Also, the water seems...more necessary. Going without LLMs for three days will not threaten your life.

"Any speech" meaning "any speech you wish to suppress," obvs.

Although "make all speech technically illegal, only prosecute where convenient" has been historically authoritarians' usual next step.

And then of course, all you need to do is declare any speech pornographic. Voila, the 1st - neutered.

I have been trying. As I may not have been entirely clear the first time:

It's not that hard to wrap your python/java/whatever app in a polyglot executable that will run on your Linux box, on your Mac, and on your Windows box. Here's a much harder target: "I would like to take this to any of such boxes, of reasonably vanilla config, and get it to run there, or at least crawl. 'Start and catch fire' doesn't count, 'exit randomly' doesn't count." The least problematic way to do this is "assume Java", and even that is wildly unsuccessful (versions and configs and JVMs, oh my!). The second least problematic is "webpage" (unless you are trying to interact with any hardware).

The differences in boxes within an OS are often as large as differences across OSes. Docker was supposed to help with this by "we'll ship your box then," and while the idea works great, the assumption "there's already a working Docker, and/or you can just drop a working Docker" is...not great: you just push everything up a level of abstraction, yet end up with the original problem unsolved and unchanged. (There's an actual solution "ship the whole box, hardware and everything," but the downsides are obvious)

Aspirations are nice and all. Java's had them for three decades now.

"Please note this is intended for people who don't care about desktop GUIs, and just want stdio and sockets without devops toil."

The devil is in the details.

What do you mean, "requires Windows 11"? What is even "glibc" and why do I need a different version on this Linux machine? How do I tell that the M4 needs an "arm64", why not a leg64 and how is this not amd64?

In other words, it's very simple in theory - but the actual landscape is far, FAR more fragmented than a mere "that's a windows/linux/mac box, here's a windows/linux/mac executable, DONE"

(And that's for an application without a GUI.)

Looks like you haven't used a decent IDE: these things have been standard for decades, locally and with minimal requirements. But wait, now it happens in the Cloud (meh, that's not gonna fly anymore, too last decade)...AND requires massive amounts of power AND cooling, PLUS it's FUBAR about 50/50.

For an incremental improvement...not great, not terrible.

Extremely lucky, probably not. More in the sense "under different circumstances, this would have gone into the folder Uninteresting Landings, never to be viewed again." Ubiquitous smartphones mean petabytes upon petabytes of boring photos and videos - the "unusual" part is just in the event itself.

So, in essence, it's now incrementally better than a templating script (except when worse), but Have Faith, it will be Better Soon. TBH, that's the same song that's been on repeat since the Dartmouth Workshop. In 1956. Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, never any jam today.