gumby

Think about it this way because the issue isn’t specific to allocators: it’s pretty good in general but can often be beaten if you have special understanding of what you need to do. That’s OK.

You can buy cars and trucks that are optimized for driving on freeways and residential streets carrying stuff people often carry. But then there are special vehicles like fork lifts and such that are kinds of large special cases. And then there are weirdo specialised vehicles that have four wheels but are rare and their users can’t live without them.

Languages like C++ let you plug in special allocators if you want. But most people don’t. Some, like HFT people do crazy headstands to avoid slow allocations. I don’t ever want to do that but if they want to, why not. I don’t think they complain that the default case doesn’t fit their needs!

In theory we will delegate this to agents, but really companies can already do that (plenty of software does upgrade itself in backgroud (some doesn’t because the user may want to peg an older version).

But really that cacophony of upgrades etc isn’t about user control, but just companies reminding you they exist. It’s spam, and like spam fighting, agents will not be able to handle it adequately.

The origin of these protections in the US date back to the early decade of the general purpose credit cards. They started out for business expenses (the first one was branded “Diner’s Club”), but they were so profitable that the issuers wanted to branch out to consumers, but those were wary: many already had credit with their local merchants and didn’t see the point. (The local merchants offered credit bc women couldn’t have bank accounts).

Anyway, the credit card companies (Diner’s Club and Bank Americard, now Visa but still retaining the original color scheme and logo) lobbied Congress in the late 60s to get these protections enshrined in law so that consumers would get a benefit over using cash as a positive incentive to switch.

These days ppl often (usually?) simply ask an LLM to replce something rather than debugging it (or if they ask the LLM to debug they get a different snarl of code).

So rather than debug a steaming pile of code you might be be able to treat it as a greenfield opportunity.

In the US you have several legal safeguards that are not provided by debit cards. Fraud liability limitations, chargebacks, and so on.

You can still implement “if I can’t afford something, I don’t buy it” with a cc. I pay mine off every month so it’s financially the same s a debit card but use a premium card for its purchase benefits.

Thank you for this comment. You’re right.

The better prescient reference is John Brunner’s triad of The Shockwave Rider (origin of the computer virus, too!), The Sheep Look Up, and Stand on Zanzibar. They very much foreshadow the shallow pop star president, contempt for expertise, mass poverty, and incoherent direct action scenarios of technocracy/mass surveillance/prediction markets (shockwave), climate and pollution (the sheep), and population (Zanzibar). Great, if chilling stories.

They were written in the 60s and 70s but felt disturbingly predictive when I first read them in the 80s and even more so today.

(Big fan of both Ballard and Gibson too, though they are very different)

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I hadn’t realised that DECT is still in use. It was pretty good in its heyday so glad it’s survived.

Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.

Trains in the US are super useful…for freight. Pretty much worthless for passengers in most cases. Canada and Australia are similar.

Europe puts people in trains and freight in semi-trailers. China and Japan are more like this.

India dedicates its rail network 100% to passengers and also 100% to freight. Somehow it works.

> One question of course is: what does society think we should do with thieves who create road accidents and who render trains inoperable?

They should be liable for consequential damages.

Change x to xcancel and read it that way.

It’s just the macro perspective. Down around the Planck limit, there’s something going on all the time, everywhere, all at once!

Bill Pollock (who is nonstarch press) is a very serious editor so I would not worry about that with NSP books.

Of course it’s a small operation, and so isn’t under the same pressures of a big operation. When you’re a boutique operation your only differentiation is quality. Your rule of thumb is unfortunately probably pretty good in the general case.

It’s convenient when people you’ll want to avoid label themselves up front

GPL says that you can give that link to anyone you want.

If someone on HN has received one of these links, feel free to post it here.

Except the article says nobody there knows how to make them these days, at least affordably.

And doesn’t use as many tokens, at least for now.

I use the front page raw feed.periodically I skim it and then mark all as read.

The flaw was the belief that it was possible (though they were not sure that they two could pull it off). Gödel showed that it was not an impossibly difficult task but an actually impossible task.

Good idea. We did have one a few years ago: the Covid pandemic. Societies around the world did not handle it well, or worse, many of those that did spawned smaller chaos monkeys.

Indeed, the standard domain I use for my mail is family-name.org. And so many people do try familyname.org.com that when I have to give my mail address over the phone or in a shop I just say familyname.com

You mean you don’t have a framed, signed, bug-bounty cheque from Alfred North Whitehead on your wall??

More seriously, there is indeed a huge logical error at the heart of the whole enterprise but it was not discovered until much later by Kurt Gödel.

Nope: it surprised me too, but we did a small survey and unless you’re a nerd, anything not ending in either com or your own nation’s TLD structure is considered dodgy and/or hard to type (.co being a notorious case — people type .com instead).

This is mitigated slightly by the fact that people don’t use URIs much any more and even if they do they usually type something into a search bar or chat bot which DWIMs what they typed anyway.

I ignore the feed but there are comments here saying that posting stuff has helped them get consulting clients.

I just use it 1 - to stay in touch with people I know professionally and 2 - when I have a meeting with ppl I don’t know, to look them up and see if we know anyone in common or at least see what other stuff they’ve been doing.

People are ignoring climate change too even though they know about it. It’s hard to make good decisions over these long lifestyles, which is why pay as you go taxes or structured retirement savings as part of your paycheck work better than just telling people they should be prepared.

> “while taking the time to figure out how open source should work in the agentic era”

I can’t even guess what this means

When Australia decided every address should have a number (early 60s I guess) my grandmother simply refused to comply. She continued to use the name of the house in all correspondence (including the gas company, milkman, voting, whatever) until she finally moved out of her house around 1998 when she was also in her 90s.

I have lived my life this way and I’m surprised more don’t. I gave a talk every year to MBA students and inevitably most of them seem confused by my work history. They are missing out!