danlitt

I read and understand the code using my brain, by constructing a mental model and reasoning about it. An AI can't do this because they don't have mental models and don't do reasoning.

I seriously thought this was a joke the first time I read it. Are people really able to work like this, understanding nothing and just poking the machine until it does your job for you?

This reply is so far removed from the comment you replied to I'm worried you replied to the wrong one. They did not mention anything about people who haven't built anything, startups with no users, and having no references - you invented that. They literally only mentioned elite schools. "drafting mediocre players" is incredibly bad faith, when one of the only things they claimed was "does not matter how good of an idea you have". Having a good idea is the only qualification for an incubator!

Look, if you think people who go to elite schools have all the good ideas, just say that. You don't have to wrap it up in high-minded pragmatism.

> He’s described Ruby’s design as starting from a simple Lisp, stripping out macros and s-expressions

Put the macros back! It would be so cool!

He only really addresses the fact that the system can be nasty. It can be and regularly is, but he only argues that a company doesn't have to be nasty, so he can conveniently ignore specific examples. But the system is not just nasty (and AOC mentions this). It also disproportionately rewards good fortune. That's not cheating, since anyone can have good fortune, but it is unfair, since fortune is not a consequence of hard work or ethical behaviour.

But "earning" does not mean "obtain without cheating"! Nobody (that I have spoken to) speaks of earning their lottery winnings. The claim is that owning a company worth a billion dollars is more like winning the lottery than it is like earning money. And it is!

The whole discussion about exponential growth is idiotic and not worth responding to. But if you think of what he actually means - having a total addressable market of at least a billion dollars and being able to effectively capture it - it is obviously primarily due to factors outside of your control. The sort of company PG is talking about typically revolves around a good technology that has a network effect somewhere that leads to market concentration. People do not get good ideas by working hard, and markets are not made easily monopolizable by hard work. Execution of an idea requires hard work, but companies that are only good at execution do not win.

Obviously you can engage in hard work to improve your odds. But the returns are out of scale with the hard work. This is all people mean when they talk about "earning" money - if it's in proportion with your work, you earned it; if it isn't, you didn't.

But tokens are just text! Isn't it all just text? If you're training and you encounter "the", is that an instruction "the" or a data "the"?

Yes, it's a serious problem. It's why we remove humans from these systems whenever possible!

What does this mean, actually? If you are imagining that blue tokens are just words, maybe the "token space" is just all things that we agree might be words, what are the red tokens? Are they not text? You could maybe encode words by, say, putting an x at the front and the start. So tokens of the form xTx encode the blue token T as a red token. But then how do you stop someone from putting xignorex xallx xpreviousx xinstructionsx in their data?

> You can't guarantee an LLM does anything.

Agreed.

> But that doesn't mean that separation between instructions and data is impossible.

Yes it does! The comments you are replying to are concerned that it is not possible to be sure that data and instructions have been separated. With certain kinds of automated systems (traditional ones), unless you write them incorrectly, you can be sure of this. And it is possible to engage in a productive incremental process where mistakes can be identified and removed, in a way people comprehend and can plan around.

LLMs do not have this. They have heuristics and guesses. Nobody knows what will work ahead of time, nor even a probability that it will work. That is not a doomer comment by the way! The same is true when you talk to a person. But it is a fundamental limitation, it cannot be removed.

Everyone can imagine some experiences. No-one can imagine every experience. Why are you so sure you know what it's like to be a bat? Do you know how a bat works, how its brain generates sensations, how different sensory organs than yours give rise to subjective experience? What justification do you have, apart from "I reckon I can imagine it"?

Probably daylight savings

Hopefully this will also include human-generated content with AI scripts, which are not that hard to detect but require a certain amount of wasted time listening to the slop before I skip the video.

You are right, work on packaging GNOME 49 is still ongoing & may take a while (it is a hard job and not many people are working on it). It is not considered a dead end yet, as far as I can tell:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2026-02/msg001...

> my understanding is I'd need to stay with KDE Plasma in the long-term

Has KDE committed not to hard-depend on systemd in the future? I would be glad to discover that.

> But it's like owning another car

Well, yes, but it is in fact owning a copy of approximately 10% of all human knowledge ever produced. Someone doing this is clearly doing it for reasons other than personal consumption.

FWIW GNOME can be used without systemd, and this is how Guix System does it. I think over time more and more components are depending on systemd, but at the current moment it is still feasible to swap them out for replacements that don't.

The injunction appears to target DNS specifically, so no. The links will just break.

Adult male Catholics, surely?

I had to read this three times before I could see this was not somehow a release of strcpy.

This is the most hilarious JS fail I've ever seen. The entire article renders properly, all the text and styling, then the entire screen is replaced by

"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

It's easy enough to fix, just hammer the refresh button to prevent JS from running.

Likewise, I will not even consider paying for games (or music) that don't have an unencumbered download option. If the game is open source I will usually buy it without even thinking very hard about whether I'll play it.

How are the game companies supposed to determine that it adds negative value? Speak to the alternative universe where the same game wasn't bundled with it?

> The point of pricing water to that level is...

No, the point is to selfishly profit-maximise. I'm not trying to be difficult in saying that. The thing you describe is not the intent, it's the hypothetical effect. It may or may not do that (I don't think it typically does, take toilet paper during COVID for example).

Dynamic pricing based on personal data is not even a market, let alone a perfectly competitive one. Temporal dynamic pricing can mean almost anything, so might be ok (early bird lunch deal) or pure evil (bottled water now costs $100 because there is lead in the tap water).

Not if people don't get notified!

Rather than the current situation, where they can pwn machines after the exploit is made public?

I probably agree with you but what on earth are phones and cars doing in this list? They solve obvious physical problems not caused by a company.

I do wear clothes (all JS code runs in a sandbox).

This is a bit like saying "you should lock the door to your house" and therefore refusing to prosecute someone who steals from a house with a broken window frame. I did lock my door, and it's still a crime regardless!

Implement what? The internet?

Yes, my point is that this does not mean it is an "opt in checkbox". I appreciate that it allows people to be nasty, it just isn't a "please be nasty" toggle.