WCSTombs

This is a cool concept and something I was looking into recently!

IMHO, XML as a concept is a bit underrated and misunderstood nowadays. Unfortunately the way the culture of XML has evolved over the past decades probably has a lot to do with that, but that shouldn't mean we have to throw out the baby and the bathwater.

For one small example of what I mean, Jupyter notebooks are JSON, while it certainly seems to me that XML would be a better fit, minus any concerns about tooling. A cell's content is represented in the file as an array of strings, while in XML it would just be a text node with the literal contents. But more generally, I increasingly feel that XML should have become the lingua franca for abstract syntax trees of all types. Hopefully it can still become that, and Invisible XML seems like a good step in that direction.

By the way, I should point out that the CommonMark AST has an official XML representation, but as far as I know that's the only Markdown dialect that does, and I also don't know of an ixml grammar. Wouldn't it be great if every Markdown dialect had an ixml grammar though? If Invisible XML has any limitations that prevent this from happening, then IMHO those really should be addressed, since if it can't represent Markdown, then it's probably just not very useful after all.

Yes, and I think that's more likely to be the issue with nytimes.com (from my completely unscientific investigation).

The difference between big-company and FLOSS UX design, including profit-motivated behaviors (a bit indirectly, but it's definitely there), is specifically addressed in the article, so I don't think that's a very fair characterization.

I actually agree about customization, but that's only part of it, and seems to be pretty orthogonal to what the article is talking about. You can only customize to features that are actually implemented by the system, and coming up with those seems like the harder problem.

> The final, particularly strong, objection from the tech community is "don't touch my stuff". People get angry when they have worked hard to get their desktop environment just as they like it and something changes to disrupt that.

Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.

The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.

Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.

> Capable people with decades of experience can successfully automate away a lot of tedious work, and still end up with a final product identical to what they would have done by hand.

Come on, I don't think the last part is remotely true. It's certainly an extraordinary claim that would need to be backed by research. If it were really true that the final product was identical to what the developer would have written by hand, that alone would solve most of the deeply problematic ethical issues that seem inherent to LLMs, but I think it's bullshit, and moreover there's no way to accomplish what's claimed (except for simple autocompletion, which is a very special case).

There's also this:

> The license of source code they produce is legally unclear.

If you really think that, how is it not an immediate blocker for LLM-generated contributions? Aren't you putting the whole project in legal jeopardy?

I completely agree. When the docs are in the same repository as the source code, at least you can keep the documentation atomically synced to the code. No other method allows this (not counting setups with Git submodules, which is the same thing with more steps), and that should be an immediate dealbreaker.

Docs being updated to reflect the code can then (and must, IMO) be a blocking constraint on all pull requests.

> Or is it because they then publish those docs somewhere else?

Exactly, I use Sphinx to make a nice website from the markdown sources (although it doesn't have to be markdown). That includes generating a full API reference page from all the docstrings.

There was another article submitted today lamenting the slowness of the modern internet, using nytimes.com as an example. Comparing that to this site gives, IMHO, a big part of the answer: don't try to fix what isn't broken. (I also disagree about the UI being horrible.)

> U.S. download speeds increased 174% from 2020 to 2024. 5 Gbps is almost 90,000x the bandwidth I had in 1996. So why are we’re still dealing with slow, bloated websites?

Yes, because the web is more bloated now than it ever was, but also because you're conflating latency and throughput. If the server takes multiple seconds to send the first bit of data, no amount of bandwidth will ever get you within the 0.1-second deadline.

Conflating latency and throughput is a surprisingly common error, and at my last job processing sensor data in real time, I had to make a huge effort to convince other people that latency was the performance metric that mattered, much more than throughput.

In case you feel like branching out beyond the digital completely, I'll leave this here (no affiliation): https://inktober.com/rules

> and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.

> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...

Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...

I don't understand the Ong quote:

> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.

Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?

I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.

You had me with that one. (I don't mean had...you know what I mean.)

> When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.

True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.

`git add --resolved` is a wonderful idea, and definitely something I would start using.

It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)

I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.

While I pretty much agree with what's being said here, and I certainly agree with the conclusion, I disagree with this point of view:

> It follows, Sartre argues, that the act of writing, as a means to convey a thought to a reader, may only be completed through the act of reading. Reading can only be done by others; writing, therefore, only exists to be read – it can serve no other purpose.

That seems like a pretty extreme view, and I find the act of writing can also be useful to the writer. But I think this actually supports the author's conclusion more than Sartre's claim.

That is not what I said at all. For research whose ostensible purpose is to increase human understanding, the absolutely bare minimum we could ask for is for the authors to understand their own work well enough to write their research paper themselves, without having an LLM crank it out. I'm not saying anything about LLMs at other points during the research. Unless I'm missing something, the TMLR policy does not forbid using LLMs to generate entire research papers. It only says the authors are "responsible for the content" and warns against "low-quality contributions."

This is the journal's policy on LLM use by authors [1]:

> LLMs may be used as general-purpose assistive tools. Whichever tools are used, authors are fully responsible for content on which they are listed as (co-) authors. This includes, but is not limited to, content generated by LLMs that could be construed as plagiarism or scientific misconduct (e.g., fabrication of facts). Low-quality contributions (be they submissions or reviews) that appear to be largely LLM-generated will be closely examined for evidence of the issues mentioned previously, such as scientific misconduct. LLMs are not eligible for authorship. We will periodically revise this policy as new information about the use of LLMs in the scientific process becomes available.

While it doesn't outright encourage using LLMs, it's right at the door, and IMO a policy this weak is actively contributing to the problem the article's author is complaining about. In my opinion any policy weaker than "using LLMs to generate any part of your submission is not allowed and considered a serious breach of ethics" is insane. People like to say that such policies are unenforceable, but that's really not the point (at first), since there are other things like (somewhat ironically) p-hacking that are pretty hard to detect but still widely recognized as unethical. We haven't exactly solved p-hacking either, but at least most of us can agree that p-hacking should be eliminated.

It's hard for me not to read between the lines here. Maybe it's the tinfoil talking, but it being a machine-learning journal, it probably embodies a generally pro-AI philosophy, and thus may not want to discourage too much of it...

It may also be worth noting that this journal apparently uses AI itself on the reviewing side [2]. I'm not claiming this is super unethical or anything as long as the main review is human (although I have concerns), it probably should be part of the conversation.

[1]: https://jmlr.org/tmlr/editorial-policies.html

[2]: https://medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ai-reviews-at-tmlr-for-assessing...

Apparently I'm a bit slow today, because my brain started completing the headline as "Diplodocus, Long Thought Extinct, ..." before my eyes could finish reading it.

> The animal’s fossilized remains — 14 well-preserved tail vertebrae and several chevron bones — were unearthed at the La Tejería site near the city of El Castellar in the Spanish province of Teruel.

According to Wikipedia (if I'm reading correctly), the chevron bones are also part of the tail [1]. It's pretty cool how such a small part of the skeleton can carry so much information!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haemal_arch

Please just write in your own words, and don't filter your writing through AI. Doing the latter will make you a worse writer.

It's not unheard of, like when the South Korean government lost a bunch of its data in a data center fire. Don't have the only copy of your data in a data center, and you won't have to worry about such a thing happening to you.

It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.

(2025).

If it primarily targets infinite scrolling and autoplaying videos, those are straight-up dark patterns, and having less of them is good in my opinion. That said, I have no idea how likely any of this is to withstand the inevitable lawsuits.

(2025).

This is by far the most perplexing part of this article for me:

> People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust programming language mandatory. I don't like Rust and, above all, I don't like its community of little extremist characters who are trying to make everyone swallow their crap by rewriting projects that have been working for decades, doing social media brigading, and other nice little gems worthy of any tiny group with totalitarian delusions. That's why when I see that a project aims to "force" the use of or the switch from C to Rust, to the extent of my possibilities, I flee from it as if I were pursued by the Balrog of the Lord of the Rings with his whip.

I've been programming for a longish time, and I've acquired my own set of opinions about programming languages, but I can't think of any that I dislike so strongly that I would need to boycott projects that use them under the hood. Moreover, even if we accept the "community of little extremist characters" claim for the sake of argument, is that at all relevant to the Git situation? I haven't seen any evidence that introducing Rust into the code base is the result of extremism, rather than just a mundane technology choice. Finally, when Rust is made "mandatory," it does not mean you must use Rust now, it just means that Rust is required to build the source code. The vast majority of people wouldn't even know that Rust was used. Even most Git developers wouldn't need to use Rust, since after more than a year from the original proposal, the Git source tree is still almost entirely written in C and shell scripts, and the amount of Rust code is basically a rounding error.

The whole Rust issue seems like a big nothingburger, and this reaction seems completely irrational to me.

Okay, but I fail to see how this eventuality results in the end of ads. Owners of websites, at least the popular ones, won't stop running ads just because they don't strictly need to. We've seen this play out repeatedly with companies pushing ads to paying subscribers who are not paying a small amount to access their services.

The other unfortunate outcome I immediately foresee is that by adding an element of risk to visiting a new site (of wasting money on something useless, even a tiny amount), people will be even more inclined to stay within walled gardens they already know rather than explore the internet. This takes a problem we already have and makes it way worse.

Please don't filter your writing through AI or use it to revise your writing. Learn to write well in your own words. Leaning on AI will make you a worse writer, not a better one.

Revision is an integral part of the writing process. I won't say it's the majority of the effort, since in my experience finishing the first draft takes more work than anything else, but I'd estimate revision is still like 25%. If you want to be a good writer, you need to learn how to do it yourself.

I think it's okay to use external tools to find spelling errors and typos. Ideally you fix them yourself, so you train yourself not to make them in the first place. Grammar checking should also be fine, and again, ideally you fix your own words. These are all things with pretty clear right/wrong answers most of the time (although rules of grammar can be broken occasionally by good writers).

You could also have an LLM review your work and give feedback, basically having it play the role of an editor. This might be okay, but I'd advise extreme caution. How well do you understand the biases of the AI model? Studies have shown that people tend to put way too much trust in LLMs, and anecdotally talking to people I know who use AI for various things, I've been shocked at how much they trust it. In any case, in this mode of interaction with the LLM, you keep your own words at the end, but it still won't necessarily make you a better writer unless you can pretty deeply reflect on what it tells you.

However, anything else where the AI directly makes edits to your work is by definition changing your voice unless it's really small stuff. You are no longer writing in your own words at that point.

> I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art.

At its very high points programming approaches art, but programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose, not aesthetic value. I'm pretty sure for most of us the choice to use LLMs or not has nothing to do with it being art or not art. If I estimate a cost-benefit analysis, the true cost of using the LLM is much more than it would likely ever provide, so it makes little logical sense to use them except in very limited situations.

By the way, I have to say this is a really strange type of article, an explanation of the supposed opinions and attitudes of non-AI-users written by an AI user, seemingly without any input from the former group. It reads a bit as if it's building a strawman to justify the author's own views.

I think you're describing the the Diátaxis framework [1], which would further split your (1) into fully guided tutorials and discursive explanations.

[1]: https://diataxis.fr/