smartmic

Can't comment on Mercurial, but "for all my personal project where I don't need to care what anyone else thinks" I am using Fossil. Ever since that decision, I've felt a bit, well, held back, or rather, I don't feel quite as comfortable as I do at home when I have to use Git.

A culture rooted in φιλοσοφία (greek, philosophia in Latin). So yes, I meant that literally. There were times, already 2500 years ago, where people wanted to study to become wiser.

It is worth to have a detailed look into the original essay and its arguments. My interpretation is https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/

> I only work with LLMs in domains I'm expert in

This. Should become a general rule for any non-trivial use of LLM in a professionel setting.

Advertising prominently with "AI native" seems necessary today, at least for some folks. To me, that's kind of off-putting, since it doesn't really say anything.

Can anyone of the AI enthusiasts here explain, why, or, what is meant by

> As a compiled, statically-typed language, it's also ideal for agentic programming.

Many comments here to your creation, PeakSlab, but not yet a dedicated praise. I didn't know it but I have to say it is really cool and innovative! The performance of the dictionary is indeed superb and I will definitely bookmark this for future reuse. So, in a nutshell: thanks for sharing!

> I'm sure it was very difficult to program in machine code, but if now (or soon) anyone can just write software using a LLM without any sort of learning it changes everything. LLMs can plan and create something usable from simple instructions or ideas, and they will only get better.

Did you read the section "Power to the People?" ? In it, the author dismantles your thesis with powerful, highly plausible arguments.

If you're interested in Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet," I also explored it in the context of LLMs: https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/

I wonder, isn‘t any Lisp, be it Clojure, Scheme, etc. not exactly suited for such tasks?

> Many CLI tools, SDKs, and frameworks collect telemetry data by default.

Any of those are using a dark pattern and before exploring new ways to opt out you should look for and spend your energy on an alternative which respects your freedoms upfront.

I am currently enjoying WYSIWYG with GNU TeXmacs for long-form or scientific text editing. Both, the concept and the tool, are amazingly capable and a breath of fresh air after all the LaTex, Markdown, Org s …

Gone are the days of deterministic programming, when computers simply carried out the operator’s commands because there was no other option but to close or open the relays exactly as the circuitry dictated. Welcome to the future of AI; the future we’ve been longing for and that will truly propel us forward, because AI knows and can do things better than we do.

Have a look at Janet. It is not as powerful as Clojure but for smaller projects, prototyping, scripting etc., it is really enjoyable.

https://janet-lang.org/

A System „Card“ spanning 244 pages. Quite a stretch of the original word meaning.

Correct[0]. This was also my first thought after reading

> Unfortunately, unlike many other languages, SQLite has no formal specification describing how it should be parsed. It doesn’t expose a stable API for its parser either. In fact, quite uniquely, in its implementation it doesn’t even build a parse tree at all9! The only reasonable approach left in my opinion is to carefully extract the relevant parts of SQLite’s source code and adapt it to build the parser I wanted

Did they made a proper problem research in the first place?

[0]: https://sqlite.org/lemon.html

AIpocalypse. Eaten too much Copilot dog food.

AI has become a commodity- for the better or worse. And yes, we should treat it as such, especially no more big ideas from (C-level) managers, please.

It’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.

Interesting how often they use the word „craft“. For me, a sign that AI fatiguge is a real issue, not only among Windows users. Good, maybe a small, first step towards down-regulation of the hype.

An immense amount of time, dedication and talent must have went into all those achievements. This requires mastery of body and mind at an exceptional level. Putting aside all jokes and acting roles, the martials arts is where he earned my full respect and that will also stick in my memory about him.

I wouldn‘t say this is the core argument of No Silver Bullet. I wrote a short review of Brooks paper with respect to todays AI promises, to whoever is interested in more details:

https://smartmic.bearblog.dev/no-ai-silver-bullet/

Of course, we can’t leave out a mention of Fossil here — the SCM system built by and for SQLite.

https://fossil-scm.org/

After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982

For me, also highly intestering is the internal data model and serialization, see section "TeXmacs' content model" in https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html

No, not necessarily. It's the ratio and for most basic research the numerator of the fraction is also approaching zero.

I am somewhat concerned about the volatility. All three languages have their merits and each has a stable foundation that has been developed and established over many years. The fact that the programming language has been “changed” within a short period of time, or rather that the direction has been altered, does not inspire confidence in the overall continuity of Ladybird's design decisions.

> The role of the human engineer […] has been to reduce risk in the face of ambiguity, constraints, and change. That responsibility not only endures in a world of Write-Only Code, if anything it expands.

> The next generation of software engineering excellence will be defined not by how well we review the code we ship, but by how well we design systems that remain correct, resilient, and accountable even when no human ever reads the code that runs in production.

As a mechanical engineer, I have learned how to design systems that meet your needs. Many tools are used in this process that you cannot audit by yourself. The industry has evolved to the point that there are many checks at every level, backed by standards, governing bodies, third parties, and so on. Trust is a major ingredient, but it is institutionalized. Our entire profession relies on the laws of physics and mathematics. In other words, we have a deterministic system where every step is understood and cast into trust in one way or another. The journey began with the Industrial Revolution and is never-ending; we are always learning and improving.

Given what I have learned and read about LLM-based technology, I don't think it's fit for the purpose you describe as a future goal. Technology breakthroughs will be evaluated retrospectively, and we are in the very early stages right now. Let's evaluate again in 20 years, but I doubt that "write-only code" without human understanding is the way forward for our civilization.

> Not sure what house would last that long

Not necessarily houses, but there are some old buildings around almost everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_extant_building...

What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc.

All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.

> For the first time in my life, I’m suddenly wary of meeting other "computer programmers" in the wild. I feel like there’s a decent chance we won’t actually have much in common, let alone values or morality.

Maybe the social group the author is referring to has split up (forked)? For example, I wouldn't call anyone producing vibe coded AI stuff a "programmer". That noun will be reserved for the original group.