ayrtondesozzla

Indeed, the first stage of the enshittification process requires mollycoddling the customer in a convincing manner.

Looking forward to stage 2 - start serving the advertisers while placating the users, and finally stage 3 - offering it all up to the investors while playing the advertisers off each other and continuing to placate the users.

If you've spent time with Nix, I assume you heard about Guix at some stage. And if you've heard about Guix and still make the above comment, I assume you have some reason(s) to think the Scheme programming language doesn't solve some/all those problems you mention.

Nonetheless, in case those assumptions are off - GNU Guix exists, and is written in and extended in (Guile) Scheme. Guile is general purpose, has the excellent Andy Wingo powering a lot of improvements to the language the last years, and some people are very fond of it. Perhaps you'd be interested in investigating, if Nix's DSL wasn't to your liking.

Ah ok - fair enough :)

It is not at all, it's being misused here to make it feel like that.

Wigner's essay is about how the success of mathematics in being applied to physics, sometimes years after the maths and very unexpectedly, is philosophically troubling - it is unreasonably effective. Whereas this blog post is about how LLM agents with tools are "good". So it was not just a catchy title, although yes, maybe it is now beibg reduced to that.

My experience couldn't be further from this. As an English-speaker natively, French was the alien language which took yonks to get, German was 1. oh, these 5 things are pronounced like that, now you can read anything with confidence and people know what word you mean when you talk, and 2. oh, here's maybe 15h worth of grammar to learn and now you can make sentences up to upper intermediate level, and they feel pretty intuitiive as soon as you start flipping verbs to the end sometimes. French was ten times the struggle!

I always thought it was from philosophy, Kant and the likes. Order, precision, detail (allegedly!).

Similarly for English and French, seen as practical and artsy, resepectively, due to say Hobbes/Smith and the likes of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.

Whether any of that makes any sense is a problem for the philologists, I suppose.

I think you and GP both mean that this TEAL is adjacent to crptocurrency, and therefore, who cares about stepping on toes?

This heuristic works well in most cases maybe, but will lead to false positives sometimes. May I gently suggest that this might be one of those cases. Algorand is the project of this fellow

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Micali

Credentials aren't faultless but they do provide a certain web of trust. If you browse the academic and professional history of this fellow, I think you'll agree.

Algorand is, I think, as serious and sincere a research project as any other.

For the specific idea, I'm experimenting with a piece of wisdom shared with me once by a friend who had an immense repertoire of Irish traditional tunes she remembered and played effortlessly. I knew a few hundred tunes, her, thousands.

I lamented the long road ahead of me, all these tunes to learn, and she said, no no, don't worry, just start by learning the tunes you already know!

https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html I can't remember what I saw that lead me to that essay, but it got me thinking I should give flashcards another go.

Like I guess many people, I also had tried once or twice, but very much the common downloading a couple of other people's decks then stopping a couple of days later.

I'm not inplementing what he suggests very much at all in the end - but the idea is at least hinted at there, I think.

I recommend using Anki (or whatever software does the job) to commit everyday, normal stuff that comes up to long-term memory.

Anki has desktop and phone apps, and if you make an account online, you can connect both to it and sync across the two devices with no effort. I can do my daily review and add cards from laptop or phone whenever something comes up.

I use no subdecks, and zero complex features. Add cards, edit in the "browser", delete sometimes if I've second thoughts. 40 new cards each day, reviewing is ~45 mins and a joy.

All that to say - it's a direct antidote to the issues being described here. I rush to new things less, and spend much more time consolidating and forming links between stuff I know or "knew".

It's directly pushing me towards behaviour that fits the reality of how my brain works. Tabs are being closed with me saying to myself - I'll learn the name of the author and book for now, that's a good start.

Great for birthdays, names, an anecdote you loved, a little idea you had, fleshing out your geography, history, knowledge of plants, lyrics, nuggets from the Common Lisp book you're doing, etc etc.

So for me one huge thing to reclaim your brain and get acquainted with your memory is - flashcards!

Absolutely. The ease and indeed hunger with which businesses went for this sort of language is evidence of how far removed they have become from reality.

They're high on their own supply, if you will.

> AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy.

Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly.

On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next.

Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated.

Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?

PAIP

RE4B