oalae5niMiel7qu

Money as voltage is an interesting idea. I've determined that "wealth" is really just low entropy (both in terms of energy and information), and economics is really just thermodynamics underneath it all.

"Technological advancement" could just be a decrease in the amount of thermodynamic waste created by an economy (or a particular company) as it converts oil/uranium and calories into useful work.

There's another layer of thermodynamics where wealth acts like heat. Moving jobs from a rich (hot) country to a poor (cold) one is like attaching a thermal conductor. Eventually, the two countries reach equal temperature and it's no longer possible to extract useful work (profit) from the heat transfer. AI is probably like an infinitely cold heat sink that can absorb all the heat you pour into it until your heat source reaches absolute zero.

The purpose of this project is probably to create something that can be pointed to while saying "This is evidence that the entire Linux kernel could be rewritten in Rust! So now you have to agree to rewrite the modern kernel!"

That's odd. Abstractions in other programming languages reduce the line count.

I've gotten rid of it even on Linux. You're right in that the full-featured desktop environments all do it the FreeDesktop way as far as I know. Even old-school XDM demands that D-Bus and seatd exist, which it didn't in the pre-Systemd days.

Seat belts are one thing, a car with a top speed of 35 mph is something else entirely.

So if Bethesda fires all its developers and then gets its next game made by hiring those same developers as independent contractors, then Bethesda would be a solo developer?

When Python got its popularity, programming was an in-demand skill, so the thing that determined adoption was being easy for beginners to learn. Python was extremely beginner-friendly, so it became popular.

Now, the thing that determines popularity is popularity. So Python still wins, even though its beginner friendliness isn't so important anymore.

Our entire profession has been moving more and more in the "bondage-and-discipline" direction over the past 10 years or so, tracking with broader sociological trends that are also justified with arguments involving "safety". That by itself can explain why Lisp has such low adoption. While Lisp has never been the most-popular language, it was never as unpopular as it is today. If that pendulum swings the other way, Lisp will get more popular again.

>This matches my experience because you don't chose who you work with.

That's what job interviews are supposed to be for. It should be easy to hire only the most skilled programmers, especially with the massive number of unemployed programmers out there right now.

You have it inverted. Your "Light Side" is what previous generations of programmers called "Bondage and Discipline", because this philosophy assumes that a good programming language has built-in shackles to impose the will of a so-called "benevolent dictator" on all programmers.

What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?

If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."

If that's how it was developed, then it wasn't made by a solo developer. What you're describing is called a team.

What does this have to do with my comment? You don't get to the "negotiating a price" part if you never knew what the customer might buy.

>While working with networking stuff, I deployed OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines for routing, security and email serving. I was always in awe that I could just do stuff easily. You want to do something at boot time? There is a script that gets run at boot time; put whatever you want in it.

Linux has this too, it's called Devuan. 90% of the reasons you'd want to move from Linux to BSD can be addressed by getting rid of everything associated with FreeDesktop.org.

The hard part is even knowing what someone would pay for. I don't know if a sales guy knows that or not.

Whether you can score a remote gig without a cost-of-living penalty affects your ability to achieve FIRE. If you're in the Bay Area at only $200K, you're on a treadmill.

...and then you just get fired one day.

It specifically makes it worse for high-skill drivers. If you were the sort of driver who never uses more than 10% of your tires' grip (even if it requires slowing to absurd speeds whenever there's a curve), you wouldn't see sudden braking.

The one time I rented a car with this feature, it claimed there was a car in my blind spot when there was none. It seemed to be reacting to a car that I had already determined was clear of my path.

The fact that it beeps at you is also them blaming you for the problem.

If you simply lock everyone up for their whole lives, you can prevent all kinds of deadly accidents. Eventually, somebody will argue that we are all morally obliged to accept being locked up for this reason.

What we've become numb to is the massive amount of overreach that has already happened.

There is no limit to how much paternalism most people will accept. Therefore, we're bound to lose all of our personal freedom eventually, "for your protection."

Submit it as a CVE.

It has been locked away for the few from the beginning. They call it "safety", but the things it refuses are all about control. The big companies keep internal models that don't have the refusal training for things only the "right" people should be allowed to do with it. That's how Mythos discovered those thousands of zero-days. It would've refused to find you any zero days, but it'll find zero-days for the "right" people so they can use them against you.

It's easy if you have enough data on Kevin Warsh, as the Big Tech companies probably do. They can probably predict when he'll print more money, and who he'll give it to.

It's not obviously creating any wealth (which is just anything you own that you can get money for). What it's obviously doing is creating a whole lot of people who used to have money and no longer do, and a handful of people with massive "net worth" based on the belief that AI companies are going to make a lot of money one day (from what buyers? everybody is going to be unemployed, and therefore poor, and therefore unable to afford any product that might come out of the other end of the AI investment craze, at least not at a price that would support a profit).

The only way AI can turn a profit is from a government bailout.

"Value", being subjective, is just warm fuzzy feelings. You can't measure it, let alone prove that it's proportional to anything (such as price, which is objective), and you can't pay bills in it. They say how much "value" something has is determined by how much is satisfies someone's wants. But you can't sell how satisfied you are. Money is what determines what you can afford, not "value". If you have money, or can get money easily, you are rich, and if you don't have and can't get money, then you are poor. Money IS zero-sum. For someone to acquire money, someone else must spend money. The only exception is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of nothing and hand it to their friends.

OpenCode, and all these other AI consoles, all do terminal I/O in the dumbest way possible.

A good terminal program, like Emacs, uses escape sequences to create viewports, scroll text, etc. These sequences tell the terminal to do these things internally.

All the modern AI tools ignore these escape sequences (which they wouldn't even have to know if they used ncurses) and just do frame-by-frame animation. So when OpenCode wants to scroll text, first it sends the text to the screen, then it sends ^[[1;1H and sends the whole text again, minus the first line or so, adding a new line to the bottom. Then it sends ^[[1;1H again, and sends the whole text AGAIN, cutting another line from the top, and adding another new one to the bottom. As if the terminal was a graphics device and you had to draw each frame.

The flickering was probably due to sending ^[[2J to clear the screen before "drawing" each "frame."

I oversimplified, though. OpenCode sends hundreds and hundreds of cursor-positioning escape sequences per "frame" of "animation".

Even though it doesn't flicker anymore, "drawing frames" makes the scrolling noticeably slow and choppy if you run OpenCode (or any other terminal-based AI agent) on a different machine than the one your monitor is plugged into, even on a wired LAN.

No AI model can give a believable explanation of why these apps (or their TUI libraries) are written this way.

Docker also does this, and it drives me mad.