TimTheTinker

> The same modularity that keeps a system inside a human’s head keeps each change inside a well-defined boundary the agent can reason about reliably.

Not only that. Good modularity also:

- improves code reusability, reduces unnecessary code duplication

- helps agents and engineers make better data model, data structure, design pattern, naming, and algorithm choices

- surfaces incorrect irregularities or outdated exceptions to a rule

- enables clean, independent upgrades of parts of a system to improve performance

- reduces stale references in code and comments (and the confusion that results, both from agents and humans)

Bad modularity is basically a summary of what usually constitutes pathological code in general, but AI systems seem particularly disposed to sling lots of it (at least humans are constrained in their output rate). How often have you tried to grok an AI-built project and found trivially unreusable code, unnecessary duplication (everywhere!), bad data structure and algorithm choices, and stale references?

Part of it is the psychology of owning vs renting. No one loves a rented house, but the landlord still wins.

> It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

AI can help tremendously with the initial leg-up problem of shipping a working prototype -- paradoxically, if you're willing to put in the work. That is, the right kind of work: talking to people, getting suggestions, writing all your own marketing copy by hand, creating a design that has human touch, throwing it away and starting fresh (with less genAI help) when you've learned what the real demand is for, etc.

Perhaps, but is there any modern browser name or brand that inspires the kind of fierce loyalty Firefox did 20 years ago?

It was the alternative to IE6, the first rays of dawn bringing hope to to a desolate, war-torn funereal valley of culpable corporate complacence.

Hatred for IE6 drove people to Firefox more than anything else - IE was horrible. Firefox users crowdfunded a two-page ad in the New York Times, mostly to get people to move off of IE6.

Ladybird is steadily progressing: https://ladybird.org/

Rumors of Firefox's death have been circling for at least 15 years now... somehow it's kept going despite odd incentives and bad corporate decisions.

uBlock Origin (non-lite) only works on Firefox as far as I know. Brave purportedly has a built-in ad blocker that uses the same lists, but I can't vouch for it personally.

> now fully-reversed

Not so fast. The victimhood/systemic-inequality mentality has a perhaps counterintuitive effect: while on the surface it does seem to help individuals, collectively it perpetuates an underclass.

25 years ago, no one thought twice if a minority member or person of color was in a prestigious position. Now, many people silently wonder if the desire to manipulate the distribution of various previously-protected categories contributed to the decision to hire that person.

"Among black students in colleges and universities, those admitted under lower standards face a higher failure rate and those admitted under the same standards as other students graduate with their credentials under a cloud of suspicion because of double standards for minority students in general." -- Thomas Sowell

Bingo. The Democratic Party supported slavery, and they're still at it with modern illegal immigration.

This needs to stop.

Have you ever traveled internationally? Every country I've ever been to especially in Europe had strict rules about how long I could stay.

Iceland and the UK in particular. They wouldn't even let me in at London Heathrow without a printed out return ticket (I had to run over to the British Airways desk to get a copy).

Either way - I was not allowed to stay longer than a few weeks.

That's not a wrong thing, it's very normal. If you want to stay, you have to apply for residency.

So you don't think there's any difference between

- as a citizen, being arrested for trying to leave

- as an illegal alien, being arrested for trying to stay

Those are literally structural opposites of each other.

If US citizens can expect that if they write, post, publish, or say something critical of the government they'll get arrested for it, that's the line.

Try just walking into Mexico and staying there indefinitely. You'll have it far worse ... they don't play around.

It's less about what they did after arriving and more about border violation itself.

Immigration has an official legal process to follow.

Why is that so bad? If the law needs to change - fine, change it. But allowing people to break the law is to enable collapse of the rule of law.

Be that as it may, observe that the directions are opposite.

Planning, attempting to, or helping people escape (not stay) was the #1 reason for Stasi arrests.

Specifically, the most frequent Stasi arrest charges were Republikflucht ("fleeing the republic") and Fluchthelfer ("helping others flee")

Also, the Stasi ran on roughly 1 informant per 60–180 residents. Your network of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors would have several. They officially criminalized private speech, correspondence and travel. The US surveillance system is bad, but the Stasi informant network and set of official consequences was at such a level as to cause constant fear and dread for everyone.

> I don’t believe those living “normal lives” in East Germany or the Soviet era considered the police to be evil and invasive the way we do today.

"normal life" under the Stasi was constant political terror and suppression.

The death counts are low because they thought death too little of a penalty for opposing them - they used psychological warfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung) and torture instead.

The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims states that there were between 300,000 and 500,000 victims of the Stasi's use of psychological warfare, direct physical torture and gross human rights violations: https://web.archive.org/web/20210909114942/https://irct.org/....

> US has entered its East Germany / late 20th century Soviet era

> The social dynamics are the same - the abuses, the selective enforcement, the lack of recourse, the same characters in the roles of various levels of "law enforcement" and "politics"

What you're describing is politics in general. The question is not whether abuses occur (they do, everywhere), but whether the system is built to be resilient and course-correct over time.

The thing about freedom is not just that it's less miserable than the alternative; more importantly, freedom enables a feedback loop where people's individual choices carry corrective information: what they buy, what they sell, how much, at what price, who they vote for, what they write/publish, what they read, what they say etc. The system at large can correct itself over time if (a) these choices are allowed to have power to influence the system, and (b) the courts enforce justice without interference by the ruling party.

Not a single communist country in the 20th century stayed communist for more than a few years when only 2 freedoms were allowed: (1) freedom of the press, and (2) freedom of the courts from control by the ruling party.

The Soviets and East Germans suppressed every form of freedom that carried information or potential corrective power, because they maxxed on staying in power above all - they effectively had to. No one wants to be under real communism/socialism[0], so for it to be stable it has to be maximally suppressive.

[0] see various records of escape attempts, such as https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/politics-and-governm...

It also doesn't compare with the sheer joy of having a little one who joyfully loves the heck out of you because you've bonded with each other and they feel loved and secure with you -- you've cared for them, loved them unconditionally, been understanding, responsive, and emotionally stable with them, and patiently/consistently enforced healthy boundaries on their behavior.

In a sense, one could say there's no greater joy.

But there's also perhaps no greater pain when parenting gets really complex and hard. One of my kids is autistic and raising him has been incredibly difficult and painful (he's a teen now).

Didn't old-school blackboard systems sort of evaporate into a modern combination of a persistence layer, a task queue, pub-sub, and bespoke code for evaluating/scheduling/executing tasks?

That's not really what I was referring to. I meant more of a system of working assumptions (call them first-class axioms, propositions, facts, whatever) that govern behavior and can be updated when observations occur that contradict them -- not a task queue or a database of all known facts. Sort of like human core beliefs that dictate how we see the world.

It looks like the "golden hour" may be hardcoded as the hour before sunset. May I suggest updating it to be based on the sun's position in the sky?

In high-northern and low-southern latitudes, the sun can stay close to the horizon for long stretches of the day depending on the season. For example, in Iceland in parts of the spring and fall, the golden hour lasts for most of the day - amazing for photography and just enjoying the scenery.

Tangled is a VC-funded Oy (Finnish limited liability corporation, €3.8M seed a few months ago). I searched and couldn't find a published donation route, which makes sense given it's VC-funded.

To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto).

Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap?

[0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.

I love seeing the term "AI" used in the classic sense. Old AI is full of fascinating developments. Expert systems, A* search, genetic algorithms over S-expressions for creating arbitrary solutions, and SAT algorithms were once thought to be that which would eventually scale into AGI.

I suspect that the next big AI breakthrough will result at least in part from constraining LLM decisions with old AI approaches. Frank Coyle presented the idea of ontologies constraining LLM output about a month ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sir59K8ZDPU

Going beyond that, I wonder if an agent could keep a running list of assumptions & known facts (with confidence levels/intervals), test them (actively & passively), update them when observations contradict them, and act based on them -- not merely as an emergent behavior, but as a provably correct (old AI based) algorithm embedded in the transformer architecture.

I wasn't advocating a single-layer data model or speaking against common data structures, just saying the structure of the data should follow directly from user goals.

Correctness and performance are normally the top user goals.

If you have control of your data model, design its structure and endpoints around user goals. Then expose that layer as directly as possible in the UI.

That's probably a half-decent summary of domain-driven design.

> One of the most common UX mistakes is designing UI around the underlying data model instead of user goals.

It's far worse to give users a false mental model of the system. If the underlying system is complex, but that's out of your control, then it will create confusion and frustration in users to paper over it. Please don't do this!

That is, unless you can create a nearly leak-free abstraction. The example given in the article is anything but leak-free.

(This kind of design error reminds me of the skeuomorphism debate nearly a decade ago. Though I do miss beautifully detailed app icons and overall whimsy, in-app false affordances and leaky abstractions both give users an incorrect mental model of the system.)

I guess I thought integrity was still at least considered an ideal to strive for in the West.

I'm calling my senators and house rep.

Holy crap.

I'd fire someone for using Oracle. I'd put it in the employee handbook.

I bet Oxide would too.

Wait, Oracle sales reps give decision-makers personal kickbacks for buying Oracle??

Stay classy Oracle. Such a banal depth of evil.

Why hasn't this been outlawed?

I guess companies that knowingly employ such managers deserve to lose whatever Oracle's legal team extracts out of them.

What I don't understand is why anyone with half a brain would even venture to touch Oracle with a ten foot pole given that they've had this reputation for at least the last 25 years.

Why, people?