mike_hearn

It's quite misleading to take a two week period and describe it as "last winter". No wonder people give blank looks, it was a transient spike that means nothing. The idea everyone should feel sad is based on arguments about long term averages.

In the early years, when compilers were quite bad, it was common for people to write whole programs in assembly even when they could have written C because their output was higher quality. And there were in fact die-hards who just refused to use a compiler in principle, even long after that became irrational. Rollercoaster Tycoon was totally written in assembly, not a single line of C or C++ anywhere. In the mid 90s!

But now only a small number of people need to know it and learn it. For everyone else we let the "artificial intelligence" of the compiler work it out. And whereas it was once worse than humans at writing assembly, these days it's usually better.

Does anyone care? No. It wasn't important.

Radiologists already got told years ago they were doomed by no less than Geoff Hinton. There are more of them working today than before and their salaries are humungous.

https://fortune.com/article/ai-godfather-radiologists-obsole...

Lawyers are the best protected of anyone. The whole industry is caked in laws that lock in the existing cartels. You can't just do law, it's not an open industry like programming is.

https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

It didn't go above freezing this year, which is unusual (actually I think it may be the first time on record!)

Sea ice extent is a fair bit above the record low in 2012, where "record" here means arbitrarily starting in 1981, although sea ice extents have been observed much further back.

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today/sea-ice-tools/charctic-inter...

Greenland mass balance was entirely average and is currently at the top end of the known observations, it seems:

https://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/

It's really time to stop considering degrees evidence of anything. Universities let students cheat, they let professors cheat. What does having a good degree really prove? Why does anyone still ask for one?

I have a company that makes Conveyor, which is very good at distributing JVM apps. It's primarily meant for desktop apps and replaces jpackage with something that can cross-build, make apps self-updating, auto-minimize the bundled JDK and so on.

Adapting it for servers is something I think about sometimes, and in fact it does already support that to some extent, but it produces debs for that use case.

It's just sort of unclear what JVM developers lack here that isn't already solved by build tool plugins and Docker. Or are you thinking about CLI tooling? Because I have something cooking for that which might be pretty nice.

On the other hand, images faked by AI is a real problem.

Rust has a smaller library ecosystem, I'd say. Kotlin can use Java libraries on the server side, and on the client side on Android, and the ones needed on iOS are easy to convert to KMP - IntelliJ can do it semi-automatically. And KMP has the libraries that matter on mobile, for hardware access, animations and so on.

• No 3G! This made the whole "i" part of the iPhone mostly worthless when not connected to wifi. Other phones had 3G.

• No installable apps. Many argued about whether it was a smartphone at all.

• No copy/paste.

• No multi-tasking.

etc. Probably more I forgot. Its competitors had all of these.

https://github.com/pierrecomputer/pierre/blob/main/packages/...

... albeit using React inspired terminology like props and hydration.

I mean, it's not impossible - I wrote a "coding agent" with GPT-3. It sucked balls. The idea was you write a Markdown spec file and the tool then compiled it to an equivalent source code one shotting it every time, but it hardly worked at all. The file changed too much every time and instruction following wasn't good enough, so it'd keep changing the interface exported by the file, and there were lots of bugs etc.

KMP can be seen as a token optimization at this point. Business logic is shared and doesn't have to be rewritten in Swift.

This isn't intended to stop a model like Astra hacking its way out of course, it's more like guardrails on a staircase.

My personal container manager tool has an intercepting SSL proxy and small Javascripts on the host can rewrite or block HTTP requests. The agent gets its own isolated home directory and can't tamper with mine. Local caches like Maven are mapped read/only with a write layer on top.

The actual problem is that computer security is a black hole. If you let it, it will suck in everything and destroy it. Nobody knows what works so you can spend infinite amounts of time and money on it, then still get popped by a teenager in Belarus. Your security team will accept no responsibility for this, there will be no falling on swords or personal liability, and they will just use it to demand even more money in an infinite spiral.

So the average executive looks at this situation and says, OK, something we can put infinity effort into and still suddenly fail at without warning is a total non-starter. What are we obliged to do? How do we show we made an effort?

And that's how you end up with a culture oriented around passing audits. It's not wrong, and it's not lazy. It's just really hard to do better because it's not clear how to set budgets without a concrete goal to aim for.

It may not feel like this to you because a lot of the dollars right now are going into security bugs which you can't perceive. But it's definitely happening.

At the company I own I've got AI employees autonomously triaging backlogs and fixing long tail bugs. The software is definitely getting better, although by definition long tail bugs aren't ones you are likely to encounter. The subjective "feel" of how robust the software is won't change quickly.

New tech is always applied in apparently boring ways because we are imagination constrained and people harvest the low hanging fruits first. Remember claims there was worldwide demand for only about four computers? When Gates said he wanted a computer on every desk and in every home people laughed at him. What would people do with all those computers, they asked. But he was right about where the world was heading.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

>RESOLVED to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity,

Now you might say, ah! This text also says that decisions must be taken as closely as possible to the citizens. Yes, the treaties do say that, the EU just doesn't do it. Of course it makes no sense, the claim about subsidiarity is in direct contradiction to the first part of the sentence, you can't be both in an ever-tightening political union and also have decisions made by local governments. In practice the first part is chased and the second part is ignored. EU decisions are taken in Brussels - far away from the average citizen - even about many issues that don't need to be decided there.

If you want to understand the real origins of the EU and where it's going, you need to read the Ventotene Manifesto. Written during WW2 by a group of imprisoned Italian communists led by Altiero Spinelli, it calls explicitly for a communist revolution that would unite all of Europe. Spinelli's document can be found here:

https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/the-ventotene-mani...

It says things like, "In order to respond to our needs, the European revolution must be socialist" and "By this dictatorship of the revolutionary party a new State will be formed, and around this State new, genuine democracy will grow". It goes on like that in quite some detail.

Although the document is insane Spinelli went on to be one of the founding architects of the EU. He is officially credited as a "pioneer of the EU":

https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

and a "founding father of the EU":

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

He became one of the first members of the European Commission and was a member of the European Parliament. He was also one of the primary authors of the "Draft Treaty for establishment of the European Union" in 1984 that directly led to the creation of the modern EU itself via the Maastricht Treaty, which imported a lot of its ideas. The Draft Treaty can be found here:

https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/draft-treaty-estab...

It not only mentions the goal of ever closer union (with no mention of subsidiarity), but mandates it legally in Article 11, which defines "cooperation" to mean control by member states and "common action" to mean things directly controlled by the EU institutions. It then states in plain English that a topic may be moved from cooperation to common action, but never in reverse. It also states that powers go through this one way transfer to the EU based only on a vote of the EU Parliament, with member state parliaments themselves getting no say in it.

So the idea of abolishing national states has always been very visible among the EU's "founding fathers".

The people who call themselves federalists don't actually want a federation. They just use the name because it sounds more acceptable. Read Spinelli's Draft Treaty from 1984 or his Ventotene Manifesto. These documents don't describe the creation of a federation but rather the creation of a unitary state.

It's written into the treaties that this will not be so. The goal of the EU is "ever closer union" and the people at the top of it routinely talk about a federal Europe in which the individual states disappear.