fvdessen

thanks, very interesting.

Yes, this is trying to prepare for a future in which AIs have enough agency to be legal person or act as if. I prefer the term humanist.

Licenses are more powerful than just the legal enforcement they provide, they are also a contract that all contributors agree to. They build communities.

Hey, I'm the author of this post, in a sense I agree with you. I doubt it will ever be mass adopted, especially in this form, which is more a draft to spark discussion than a real license.

I am not against AI, I use it every day, I find it extraordinarily useful. But I am also trying to look ahead at how the online world will look like 10 years from now, with AI vastly better than what we have now.

It is already hard to connect online with people, as there is so much commercial pressure on every interaction, as the attention they create is worth a lot of money. This will probably become 100x worse as every company on the planet will have access to mass ai powered propaganda tools. Those already exist by the way. People make millions selling AI tiktok tools.

I'm afraid at some point we'll be swamped by bots. 99% of the content online will be AI generated. It might even be of better quality than what we can produce. Would that be a win ? I'm not sure. I value the fact that I am interacting with humans.

The protection we have against that, and the way it's looking to progress towards, is that we'll depend on authorities (official or commercial) to verify who's human or not. And thus we'll be dependent on those authorities to be able to interact. Banned from Facebook / X / etc ? No interaction for you, as no website will allow you to post content. Even as it is I had to gatekeep my blog comments behind a github account. This is not something I like.

I think it's worth looking at alternative ways to protect our humanity in the online world, even if it means remaining in niches, as those niches have value, at least to me. This post and this license is one possible solution, hopefully there are more

> There are plenty of ways to maintain state, including server store, sessions, localstorage, cookies, etc. Say you want the user to be able to customize the app layout: that doesn't need to be in the URL. Now say you provide a search functionality where the user can share the results: now your search criterias definitely should be in the URL.

> It's not a black or white, one actually has to think about what the application must achieve.

You are explaining quite well why it's hard to manage the state in a htmx app. As your app grows up all this mumbo jumbo of url, session cookies, cookies, database models becomes tangled spaghetti. You don't have to do any of this in a Vue / React app, and that reduction of complexity alone is worth the weight of those frameworks.

I have been using htmx to build a web app and came to the conclusion that it is a dead-end.

The main problem is that the state of your frontend application is in the URL. This is not flexible enough for modern UI where you might have many different zones, widgets, popups, etc. that all need their own local navigation, activation states etc. Putting all of this in a single global url is extremely hard. Designing your app so that you don't need to put it all in the global url is harder.

This problem is trivially solved by React / Vue that all provide their version of a state store that can hold the state, and make it easy as well to have elements shared or not between the tabs of your browser.

If you build your applications like phpBB forum this is not a problem, but nowadays users expect better.

indeed, a centralized database with transactions was implied in the solution. You're right to point out this is not always available. I did not talk about it simply because the software I worked on never reached a scale beyond what a centralised database can take. I will edit this article to make it clearer.

I agree with you but many programmers really enjoyed the fiddling with the lines of code and solving the puzzles more than actually building the thing and are not liking the changes. I saw it as a means to an end (which I enjoyed getting good at!) and I am loving the change.

So many copying monks screaming that the printing press will ruin books forever

It seems very reasonable to me for a first version of a system to only support the most popular platforms. Especially since this is open source, nothing stops enthusiasts to port the mechanisms to more niche platforms later.

the first smurf drawings had pointy hats, the curve is most likely a stylistic evolution.

https://www.lm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/schtr...

This is almost certainly completely wrong, the smurfs get their hat designs from the type of hats that gnomes and dwarves and goblins usually wear in germanic folklore, the most well known of all being the garden dwarves, whose design also inspired the dwarves in snow white. The design of garden dwarves is quite recent and apparently come from miners. The hats were filled with straw to protect the miner's head from the ceiling.

Because app navigation is not linear like the url history. Think of a popup with tabs within a page. There's the navigation within the popup, and the navigation within the page. When you close the popup, you don't want 'back' to bring the popup back, you want it to go to the page before the popup. This is hard to replicate with just urls and server side rendered html.

Also you don't want that store server side because there can be multiple parallel tabs and you don't get notified server side when the tab is closed to properly cleanup the associated resources.

That is just the location of a page, and indeed that should be put in the URL. But a modern js app has much more state than that: partially filled fields, drafted documents, scroll position of lists, multi-path navigation history, widget display toggles, etc. etc. In react/vue you have 'stores' to hold and manipulate those info. In HTMX you need to choose between the url, the session cookie and the dom. And what you can usually keep just keep in the dom with client vue/react can't be with HTMX since the backend needs to be aware of the state to correctly render the new widget.

HTMX is indeed simple and lean, but unfortunately that doesn't mean solving common frontend problems with HTMX is simple either. After a decade of frontend dev and being tired of react/vue/etc, I tried HTMX, wanting for something leaner, but IMHO it has big problems, and I am back to react/vue.

The two biggest problems with HTMX is that being fully server side controlled you need to put the whole app state in the URL and that quickly becomes a nightmare.

The other is that the code of components is split in two, the part that is rendered on the first time, and the endpoint that returns the updated result. You need a lot of discipline to prevent it from turning that into a mess.

The final nail on the coffin for me was that the thing I wanted to avoid by picking HTMX; making a rest api to separate the frontend and the backend, was actually a good thing to have. After a while I was missing the clean and unbreakable separation of the back and front. Making the rest api was very quickly done, and the frontend was quicker to write as a result. So HTMX ended up slower than react / vue. Nowadays react/vue provide server side rendering as well so i'm not sure what Htmx has to bring.

In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' the argument is made that the most important cultural changes happen outside the debate, where new structures of thought are being built without being noticed. As without a competing thought structure we are unable to even perceive the new structure. It is the dissonances and the debates that lets us introspect our own ideas. Without the dissonance we do not notice new ideas taking hold of us and changing ourselves, and it is only unnoticed that truly radical changes can take place.

Similar to the 'Gini coefficient', named after Corrado Gini, former president of the Italian Genetics and Eugenics Society and author of 'The Scientific Basis of Facism'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Gini

Ah cool! thanks for the research, I couldn't find references and was sometimes doubting I remembered the story correctly

Here's an interesting, related European history tidbit;

Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.

The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.

This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.

I suggest you to try to let the AI think through race conditions scenarios in asynchronous programs; it is not that good at these abstract reasoning tasks.

Turing test is not really that meaningful anymore because you can always detect the AI by text and timing patterns rather than actual intelligence. In fact the most reliable way to test for AI is probably to ask trivia questions on various niche topics, I don't think any human has as much breath of general knowledge as current AIs.

Then like what happened with the cookie banners, everybody is going to put the minimum date, and the only winners will be the lawyers selling consulting in EU regulation compliance with the publishers.

That would require a complete re-architecture of game engines and complete rework of how the games are developed and published. If I had to satisfy those requirements next year, I just wouldn't release in Europe, and I say that as an European.

I developed a few commercial games on unity a while ago, here's why some of what's proposed is harder than you think,

- The original developper is not working on the game anymore, another company is maintaining it and has no capacity for making significant changes to it.

- You can't release your server source code because you will be using a lot of proprietary add ons that can't be released, and those are usually absolutely essential.

- Your server is going to be built against a now unsupported version of the engine, that you probably can't even install on current year operating systems

- stripping the source code of 'proprietary stuff' is significant work, there's no package management, code is copy pasted.

- Your protocol is based on third party commercial code and that other company doesn't like reverse engineering

- Changing the way the networking works to remove the lobby is significant development work, the networking framework is out of date, not maintained, and the devs are most likely not available anymore.

Modifying the game so that it runs offline is supporting the game. Three years after releasing a game, the devs who made it are usually long gone, busy on other projects, the libraries and framework used are out of date, out of support, etc. at that point making any change (or even building the project!) is a significant effort.

That they can activate latent mental illnesses that wouldn't be activated otherwise is the main risk of psychedelics, and is absolutely a real problem

I find it excellent news that all the techniques that make agentic coding more efficient also make human coding more efficient. There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite. Clear code is important for AI productivity, so it now matters even more, because the difference of productivity is immediately and objectively measurable. Before AIs what code was well factored or not was largely a matter of opinion. Now you can say; look how better Claude works on codebase A vs codebase B, and present your case with numbers.

I believe the main purpose of tracking based advertising is to know your gender, politics and social class to show you the right kind of car and pet supply.

This discrimination is quite important and before internet people would self discriminate on those basis and buy different magasines, see different movies, walk different streets and advertisers could target their demographics based on that.

Now everybody goes to the same social networks so the tracking is used to provide this discrimination

A good example is gym membership. There's 20eur/month and 300eur/month ones. The 300eur/month ones really don't want to advertise to everybody, they have a really specific demographic target in mind.

I think we should use the airbus model and copy 1 to 1 the AWS platform. Exact same apis, same control panels, same everything, just copy. Start with the most important functions. At least it would be clear what the end goal is and only a matter of funding and execution. It would also make it much easier for existing businesses to migrate away from real aws to euws.

This 'courthouse' is not just any courthouse, it's the biggest courthouse in the world, it is so big that it was the biggest building in the world until NASA made the VAB to build Saturn V. Bigger than St-Peter's Cathedral, it is a demented place erected at the top of Belgium then industrial might, costing then more than half the entire state budget for public construction during the 20 years it took build. The architect was given unlimited budget and complete freedom. It was supposed to be even bigger with a ziggurat styled tower to top it off but the architect died before the completion of the building. A more reasonable golden dome was constructed instead. Still to this day nobody understands how this was allowed to be made, and it is way too expensive to maintain, and has thus fell in disrepair, but it is also too big and too incredible to demolish

There are renovation works ongoing, I jumped a fence and took a sneak peak, and I think it's going to be great.

Here is a website with some pictures: - https://tchorski.fr/12/palais-01.htm - https://tchorski.fr/12/palais-10.htm