username223

It's a wall of text sprinkled with Halloween-colored AI slop images (look for the text artifacts). Which parts, if any, were produced by a human?

> The global average cost of solar panels is $90/kW.

I don't remember where I read about it first, but the fact that Pakistan is installing gigawatts of solar panels per year made me smile. It's not a coordinated effort, either; people choosing between (1) relying on janky transmission lines, (2) feeding a diesel generator, and (3) buying a rectangle that creates electricity and a cheap battery tend to choose option 3.

"E-bikes" are much more efficient than electric cars, but they're just electric scooters with governors at this point, and only called "bikes" for regulatory reasons.

A skim of his Wikipedia bio suggests that he's smart, but mostly just interested in making money for himself. Since high school, he's spent time at: some fintech place, a Q-and-A site, MIT briefly, another fintech place, then data labeling and defense contracting. He sounds like a cash-seeking missile to me.

> The web is crazy complex these days because it is an entire app platform.

I'd prefer something that's not crazy complex, that's not "an entire app platform" designed and implemented by Google. Google essentially controls the W3C (Mozilla would vanish if Google stopped funding it), and controls the monopoly rendering engine.

Half of websites are better without JavaScript and web fonts, and 99% are just text, images, and videos with maybe a few simple controls. For the other 1% I can fire up Google Chrome and suffer the whole platform.

I want a web rendering engine for the 1%, that does the simple stuff quickly and isn't a giant attack surface around 30 years of technical debt and unwanted features calling itself an "application platform."

> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision,..."

I got serious uncanny valley vibes from that quote as well. Can anyone prove that "Alexandr Wang" is an actual human, and not just a server rack with a legless avatar in the Metaverse?

Interesting. I was a fairly serious amateur guitarist in a former life, and the physical skill was the hard part. Playing a Bach lute suite, or something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQXvMWojs28), takes an incredible amount of strength and precision. With 1-2 hours per day of practice, learning that kind of material took weeks or months.

"If you’re running a local LLM for privacy and security..."

What? You run a local LLM for privacy, i.e. because you don't want to share data with $BIGCORP. That has very little to do with the security of the generated code (running in a particular environment).

"Naughtiness," to use the technical term (https://paulgraham.com/founders.html).

I dunno... it sounds better than giving Apple/Mozilla/etc. dump-trucks of money to make Google my default search engine.

"Stringly typed programming" is the phrase I was looking for. It's the equivalent of a shrug from the programming language designer: "I don't know what to do about that, so I'll just add a magic string and let someone else figure it out."

That and one or two other examples in the article smelled vaguely of PHP to me: features piled up in response to immediate needs instead of coherent design. For a language that famously refused to add generics for years (then did them badly, IMHO), it seems off-brand.

Go has certainly come a long ways from its initial mission to be a simple language for Rob Pike's simple coworkers.

    type User struct {
        Name     string `json:"name"`
        Password string `json:"-"`
        Email    string `json:"email"`
    }

So you can specify how to serialize a struct in json using raw string literals containing arbitrary metadata. And json:"X" means to serialize it to X, except the special value "-" means "omit this one," except "-," means that its name is "-". Got it.

What Wikipedia are you looking at? It's one of the things that has survived the longest on the Internet without being enshittified. It could live on in Cockroach Mode forever off the money from a modest solar farm or investment in an index fund. If someone sociopath bought the Wikimedia Foundation and tried to strip-mine Wikipedia, the Wikipedia editors could easily take a copy and go elsewhere.

Ironically, I was just listening to an interview with Jimmy Wales in which he said that, as individuals, most humans are basically good. They don't meet someone on the street and think "what is the rate of return on interacting with this thing?"

That and how smooth the customization curve is, from tweaking settings, to recording keyboard macros, to writing small helper functions, to creating whole packages. Compare that to something like Eclipse or IntelliJ, where there's a huge gap between changing settings and creating plugins. It's a sweet spot between semi-configurable text editors and full-blown "living ball of mud" systems like Lisp and Smalltalk.

On the one hand, I don't understand: a reliable EV costing only a few months of the median US income would be world-changing. On the other hand, I do: high-margin EVs like the Cybertruck are an easier way for car companies to make money in the next quarter. Why would you ever sell a vehicle that the people building it could afford, when the margins are so low?

Do you have a practical sense of the level of mischief possible in the sandbox? It seems like a game of regexp whack-a-mole to me, which seems like a predictable recipe for decades of security problems. Allow- and deny-lists for files and domains seem about as secure as backslash-escaping user input before passing it to the shell.

Color me skeptical. We're running into the speed of light when it comes to transistor size, and the parallelism that made neural nets take off is running into power demands. Where do the exponential hardware gains come from? Optimizing the software by 2x or 4x happens only once. Then there's the other side: if Moore's Law works too well, local models will be good enough for most tasks, and these companies won't be able to do the SaaS thing.

It seems to me like models' capability scales logarithmically with size and wattage, making them the rare piece of software that can counteract Moore's Law. That doesn't seem like a way to make a trillion dollars.

I don't think there's a unifying reason why programming languages languish in obscurity; it's certainly not because they're "too powerful." What does "powerful" even mean? I used to care more about comparing programming languages, but I mostly don't these days. Actually used/useful languages mostly just got lucky: C was how you wrote code for Unix; Python was Perl but less funny-looking; Ruby was Rails; JavaScript is your only choice in a web browser; Lisp had its heyday in the age of symbolic AI.

Forth and (R4RS) Scheme are simple to implement, so they're fun toys. Some other languages like Haskell have interesting ideas but don't excel at solving any particular problems. Both toy and general-purpose programming languages are plentiful.

Matlab/Octave is great for numerical programs that perform within an order of magnitude of Fortran. If some things aren't fast enough, you can rewrite them in C or Fortran without too much trouble. If you're doing anything other than numerical computing, it's awful, and you should use a different language.

(Source: I did a PhD using a mixture of Octave for numerical stuff, Perl for text-processing and automation, and C++ for the parts that were too slow. Choose the right tool for the job.)

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."

Would Sam Altman even understand the original, or would he just wander ignorantly into the kitchen and fling some salt at it (https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629...)? I'm not optimistic about our modern oligarchs.

> new major version release that mostly has bug fixes, some minor performance improvements and minor new features.

It's sad that "bug fixes and performance improvements" has become a running joke as the explanation for software gavage, and this is even worse. "Fewer bugs and faster" is at least something most people want; "fewer bugs, faster, and random changes you didn't ask fork" is a lot less desirable.

> it's hard to mentally model code you didn't write.

Back when I learned to code, I was told never to copy-and-paste, even from my own code. It wasn't that it wouldn't save time, but that typing the stuff would force me to think about and understand it.

Throwing slop at walls and yelling "why error?! fix!!" if it doesn't work is good enough until it isn't, at which point it fails very badly, and no one has the knowledge to fix it.

"Programmers" exist on a (not always "the") spectrum. At one extreme, there are frontend developers changing JS/Ruby frameworks every few months. New stuff is fun to play with. At the other, there's there's Tony Hoare's quip that "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran." (https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computing...). In 2025, quite a few of the numerical routines powering LLMs are built on top of BLAS, LAPACK, and other frightening FORTRAN IV code that shouts at you using very short words like SGEMM and DGESV. It's a big tent; get comfortable.

Was this human-generated? Clearly it's self-submitted, and the useless "hero image" looks like lazy AI slop with Pixar characters, but did a human generate the text?

When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

TEXT EDITOR.

-- https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

Nathan Benaich, who hasn't updated his profile in awhile: https://www.twitter.com/nathanbenaich . Probably not helpful.

> I think they're intended to use sidewalks and bike lanes, so should address concerns about cars clogging up streets.

If I walked or biked in these places, I'd be worried. Sharing the sidewalk with robotic wheelie-bins seems like a bad idea.

> developers, founders, or marketers

I'm none of those things, 10x or otherwise, and would be ashamed if I were. I do run a personal website, though, and most of the traffic is bots that ignore robots.txt. I wish those developers, founders, and marketers would stop doing that to me.

It sounds like AI researchers have used too much of their own bad sci-fi as training data for models they don't understand. Goodhart's law wins again!

Imagine if we spent a trillion dollars to turn the internet into infinite degraded copies of LinkedIn. Business influencer spam generated by robots for other robots, with occasional corrections by the cheapest English speakers in the world. That's dark.