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1) not really, only one of them talks about opponents as enemies

2) the leader of only one of them is threatening to lock up journalists, shut down broadcasters, and use the military against his enemies.

3) only one of them led an attempted autogolpe that was condemned at the time by all sides

4) Musk is only backing the one described in 1, 2 and 3 above.

It's not really arguable, all this stuff.

The guy who thinks the USA should go to Mars clearly thinks he's better throwing in his lot with the whiny strongman dude who is on record -- via his own social media platform -- as saying that the giant imaginary fraud he projected to explain his humiliating loss was a reason to terminate the Constitution.

And he's putting a lot of money into it, and co-running the ground game. But sure, he wants to go to Mars. So it's all good.

I often wonder if Peter Thiel is somewhere, laughing bitterly into a glass of terrible overpriced gin that only a billionaire would drink: "this fuckin' guy... this is my schtick"

I'm sure this is fine, and there is no reason to be concerned that the same very rich person is behind this device as the AI technology whose worst outcomes it exists to combat.

Also there's a blockchain so that's great! I know you're not a crypto evangelist on Twitter anymore, or an NFT evangelist, and now you're an AI consultant and solutions provider. But here it is -- that great application for the blockchain you were all so sure was coming all along.

All tied up with one neat looped bow that can make you feel like it isn't somehow some empty, culture-destroying, billionaire-welfare griftapolooza.

And it's even a bit YCombinator because Sam Altman, right? He was always going to make it. He's got the killer instinct.

Ehhh though he does seem to think that taking the USA to fascism is a prerequisite.

(This is, I think, an apolitical observation: whatever you think about Trump, he is arguing for a pretty major restructuring of political power in a manner that is identifiable in fascism. And Musk is, pretty unarguably, bankrolling this.)

The course I did at uni, decades ago now, set us a Prolog assessment where we were not allowed to use the cut operator.

Code that backtracks is hard to reason about.

> 'Prolog + LLM' is not the answer to all questions, but it looks like a good step to move us forward.

Or it's a thing people can write papers about, and chase reproducibility on afterwards, as the shell game of claiming LLM reasoning continues.

> Again, Prolog is not magick. The article above and the papers it links to seem to take this attitude of "just add Prolog" and that will make LLMs suddenly magickally reason with fairy dust on top. Ain't gonna happen.

It frightens me that HN is so popular with people who will strain credulity in this regard. It's like a whole decade of people engaging in cosmic-ordering wishes about crypto has now led to those same people wishing for new things as if the wishes themselves are evidence of future outcomes.

It's actually pretty concise: Prolog isn't all that easy! That's why people don't use it.

Competent CS students fail Prolog courses all the time. A lot of Prolog on the internet will either be wrong, or it will be so riddled with unnecessary/unclear backtracking that an LLM won't be able to make more sense of it than it does words.

Because Prolog is difficult, and expressing fuzzy real-world facts and nuances in it is harder.

I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I really question the logic of anyone who thinks that a thing that cannot reason can write a prolog program that is really going to be much more successful.

Prolog is actually pretty difficult to do right, even if you are skilled. It actually requires reasoning. You don't just write out facts and have the system do the work. And many of the examples in the training set will be wrong, naturally simplistic or be full of backtracking that is itself difficult for a person to comprehend at a glance; why should an LLM be better at it? There can't even be that much data in the training set.

Ultimately, though: stop believing in magical solutions to fundamental problems. This is nuts.

This is magical thinking. If an LLM can’t reason it isn’t going to be able to express itself clearly in Prolog.

Suggesting otherwise is intellectually on the same level as trying to make up a small consistent per-sale loss with volume.

It's not universal but some of this stuff seemingly stems from the framework level -- Gtk and Qt.

For example, QGIS and FreeCAD are very good indeed on the Mac, and the quirky problems FreeCAD has on the Mac are generally Qt problems (font mapping, some window handling stuff, very occasional high-DPI things).

Command-line/server-based FOSS stuff is usually not a great challenge.

I guess this is kind of what one could predict, comparing Linux and the Mac. Though it's also the case that Qt and Gtk get more portability eyeballs on Windows, which again is probably what one could predict.

Exactly this. It's obvious that generative AI content is bad for search and indexing, and I wish more people would learn to extrapolate from the forms of the problem that already exist, that the quality of the generated content is not going to solve the "please, god, find me something a real person actually said about this real thing" problem.

I just don't understand how people can pretend this isn't happening just because they find each new twist of a technology fascinating.

It can open Affinity Designer files!? That’s something of a buried lede.

That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.

> Counterpoint: Most podcasts were utterly worthless before AI too.

Yet more "but humans also".

> If a month from now there are 1.3 million generated podcasts, what do you anticipate the fallout to be?

Is this a rhetorical question? Because the answer for podcast indexing and search services is surely pretty obvious.

> You can be a "senior full stack" developer in the WordPress ecosystem but you'll hit a wall once you start applying for more general PHP roles as everything from the standard coding style to how classes and namespaces are used are worlds apart.

I once taught someone to make this jump, who was convinced he would never be able to. It is definitely a mindset change but I think a good developer can do it. Especially since these days, class and namespace stuff and Composer dependencies are increasingly common in plugin development.

I love Laravel (especially with Lighthouse) but I think the hooks/actions model in WordPress is underrated in its simplicity and appropriateness for the task.

(I am not a fan of the standard WP coding style, TBH)

> So clearly you aren't a fan of Gandhi. He also very deliberately broke the law.

I have to say this is one of the silliest takes I have ever seen on HN.

You only need to look at the way Gandhi broke the law, the methodology of his disobedience, to see that you cannot possibly make a comparison with Uber that shows them in a good light. It's absurd to draw this comparison.

Right. WordPress is Windows for the Web, basically.

More enjoyable to develop for, IMO, but otherwise the comparison holds.

I would add that other PHP-based projects have had severe maintainability crises, poorer clarity of design, even worse code quality crises (Joomla, for example), major fallings-out and multiple forks (Joomla again).

WordPress got this far in part because it managed inevitable community fallings-out and egos much better. It's totally depressing to see what is happening.

> But I imagine WordPress is far from being displaced, even after everything that has been going on.

Right. But this is because of a very simple, undeniable fact that is unpopular around these here parts:

There is nothing close to as good as WordPress at everything WordPress can be made to do.

No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. There are no real PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to install, configure or use.

There are no CMSes that can get close to being as good for a bespoke mix of small ecommerce, member systems, digital downloads sales, form handling etc. Hosted or not hosted.

Say what you like about the block editor (personally I think it is an impressive but ultimately ten-year-plus project). But TinyMCE and shortcodes has proved painfully non-robust and there is no other block editor on an open source CMS that gets close to being open-ended enough for an extensible CMS. Gutenberg has some strengths over hosted solutions like e.g. the Squarespace editor.

There is no open-source CMS that rolls out security patches automatically the way Wordpress does, or can do so at the scale WordPress does.

HN people may dislike this, but it has not been out-competed because it is actually basically competent and extensible, and has no real jack-of-all-trades competitors at all. There's nothing with this level of contribution, extensibility, attention to detail, longevity or backwards compatibility.

Personally I think WP Engine needed a bit of a straightener; there are things they should not have done and there are things they could do. But this was not the way to go about it.

The damage Matt is doing, in particular with the "Secure Custom Fields" gaslighting bullshit is among the most depressing examples of willingly setting one's own hair on fire that I've ever seen.

(Edited for clarity, but sorry everyone, I'm waiting for a new coffee grinder to be delivered this morning)

I do so love the HN culture that laws are for little people.

> and now you're out here vigorously defending that dead model.

This is a bit of projection. But good for you, being open about your support for fraud :-)

> AirBnB destroyed home ownership?

What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.

> make more of thing until everyone can have it?

There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on which houses can be built restrictive due to geography (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does not scale. New property building both has not caught up with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term demand.

As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of general economic weakness; the number of "thriving holiday let" properties that are on the market now suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs problem is going to cause a bit of a bust.

But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for residents.

> Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise.

It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. They can no longer afford the houses at the prices at which they will be built and the rates at which they can be.

> because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb

Unless you were the very first person in the entire area to think to do so, then the existence of that very market for you to rent spare rooms on is actually driving up the prices of properties so you have to do so.

It's also driving up the prices of long term rental, because landlords make more money in the short-term rental market. The prices of long-term rental also affect the floor price of permanent ownership.

Do you lament e.g. Uber knowingly breaking laws, and then in the knowledge that they are knowingly breaking laws and under scrutiny for doing so, also actively building functionality into their systems that helps them criminally evade scrutiny?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

This is a level of deliberate, optional fraud that goes a step beyond, is it not? It's organised crime.

I need to?

Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty clear that my comment you are replying to includes the words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business".

I don't know why it did not happen before.

All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed utterly when Airbnb became a thing.

I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue before then; the relative complexity and process involved in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected properties and had greater requirements.

But either way, Airbnb did unambiguously change things. Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they're even able to rent a room or a flat.

Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up.

This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business.

The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.

Right. And actually this small detail is emblematic of the whole problem.

When you roll out an auto-updates mechanism you're saying to the people who enable it "you can trust us to do the right thing with your project while you are elsewhere -- this is a risk but it's one we manage for your benefit".

If you roll out a change for purely political/commercial reasons that are ultimately not your end user's concern -- we're not a party to that lawsuit -- then you're undermining the trust in that mechanism entirely.

It was a stupid, arrogant, underhanded thing to do.

If it is hosting-related, rather than WordPress-related, then are there not other structurally similar PHP CMSes and tools (Drupal, Backdrop, Magento, PrestaShop, Grav, Monica, maybe InvoiceNinja [0]) you could add plugin-based support for?

Magento is an extreme case but under the hood, most of the "hosting-related" things one wants to add intelligence for (backups, static content generation, caching, monitoring) are common to lots of PHP applications.

What about adding a library (if that's how your tool provides integration) for generic PHP (e.g. Laravel) applications?

That is, instead of pivoting to another single framework, what about pivoting to being PHP-supportive and framework-agnostic?

[0] InvoiceNinja may have licence restrictions that prevent you offering an integrated service, I've not checked recently. I guess others might too.