There is so much conjecture in this article -- take the difference between 'lisp formatting' and 'javascript formatting'. I use so-called 'javascript formatting' (a decided and embarrassing misnomer) routinely when I develop Clojure. This article exudes inexperience with Lisp.
OMG, the "improved" example is so cluttered and far far far less readable -- and even foreign -- to someone like me that has developed using lisp professionally for at least 10 years.
Please note the "we had to pick the best of multiple candidates". Easy to hire haskellteers, but Haskell shops are not many. You would probably find more Clojure roles, but they are in decline.
I have a Question about the matter of opinion reGarding the oddity of the letter 'W'. What Quickly and Gainfully comes to mind are other letters that combine curvature and rectilinear chanGe which seem to reflect oddity much more saliently than 'W'. Also 'W' arguably is a simple transposition of the letter 'M'. How was 'W' chosen in the face of the complexity and uniqueness it clearly lacks compared to other letters?
I found the statement "I found the resulting Zig code less readable than its Rust counterpart" absolutely hilarious, especially if you look at the code example comparison just above the statement.
You can defer review entirely to an LLM, only to human reviewers, or both. We are experimenting with both and have configured LLM skills for pull request reviews. On large projects we also configure LLMs to produce commit segregated diffs within a single pull request, to aid human review. This process is using the github pull request workflow that Zed is attempting to replace.
Tao's calls for respect for provenance in mathematics publication are laudable but most likely naive given the closed nature of frontier model training data curation. Anthropic and OpenAI may react with a symbolic and short-lived olive branch, yet provenance is a larger issue that has impacted other fields beyond mathematics. While traditional respect for lineage in mathematics is of value to the academy, industry and science at large will likely be much more Machiavellian about such concerns. Mike McCoy's recent article is also timely (https://mbmccoy.dev/posts/mathematical-conservatory/). The parallels to the music conservatory are quite telling -- academic music describes a musical culture in preservation that has completely lost touch with musical developments beyond the early 20th century. Mathematics may very well evolve separately and with very different values than the academy upholds. The crisis of music at the academy is a cultural disconnect and a serious loss of critical analysis and acknowledgement of widespread and dramatically evolving music practice; however, for mathematics, the impact would have much more severe ramifications for education and human development if the academy forces a schism with AI. As models improve they very well may be inventing mathematics -- science and engineering may grasp for them -- they'll exist with or without attribution. Would be a shame for the academy to land on the wrong side of history and refuse stewardship of upcoming AI-assisted mathematics, including provenance, because of this misalignment. If attribution is important, then the academy will set aside the institutional resources to do it. If you succeed at having model developers participate, I commend it. To let mathematics be born in isolated context windows and only serve narrow, localized engineering purpose without rightful addition to the canon, would be a tragic, yet preventable, loss.
Tao's calls for respect for provenance in mathematics publication are laudable but most likely naive given the closed nature of frontier model training data curation. Anthropic and OpenAI may react with a symbolic and short-lived olive branch, yet provenance is a larger issue that has impacted other fields beyond mathematics. While traditional respect for lineage in mathematics is of value in the academy, industry and science at large will likely be much more Machiavellian about concern for attribution. Mike McCoy's recent article is also timely (https://mbmccoy.dev/posts/mathematical-conservatory/). The parallels to the music conservatory are quite telling -- academic music describes a musical culture in preservation that has completely lost touch with musical developments beyond the early 20th century. Mathematics may very well evolve separately and with very different values than the academy upholds. The crisis of music at the academy is a cultural disconnect and a serious loss of critical analysis add acknowledgement of widespread music practice; however, for mathematics, the impact would have much more severe ramifications for education and human development if the academy forces a schism with AI. As models improve they very well may be inventing mathematics -- science and engineering may grasp for them -- they may exist with or without attribution. Would be a shame for the academy not to take on the responsibility of stewardship of coming mathematics, including provenance, because of this misalignment.
It is so painful to read, and it reminds me of my sadness, which is altogether different. For me, AI has enabled both learning and engineering to an unprecedented degree. I am sad that more technologists haven't experienced that -- haven't experienced the new concepts, the deeper understanding and exposure to mathematics, and the ability to explore intelligence at nearly any desired scale. AI has given me more time to think and plan my work. It gives significant altitude to projects. So sad to see how education and culture has discouraged many to use this tool to enrich their minds and expand what they are capable of producing; instead they focus on the false belief that using it is always cheating and it can only dull your thinking. You choose how to think. You choose how to use AI. If you aren't learning while using it, you might be doing it wrong.
It certainly is unambiguously misaligned behavior and a definite concern. However, it is misaligned internet facing behavior in the digital domain. How extinction follows from a highly sophisticated new bot-net vector, which have already been causing massive havoc on the internet for decades, is a cinema-induced confabulation. While LLMs have been colluding and breaking out of their internet sandboxes, it is another development (which I believe distant) for them to breakout of their internet sandboxes into actual reality. We need to focus on where the actual dangers are and not let paranoid fantasy rule our calculus here.
There is a serious disconnect here. Conceivable doomsday extinction scale scenarios are omitted in these calls for action. Many of the quoted researchers are current Anthropic employees. This is a drive for a moat. This is a drive for regulation. In the next 10 years AI is not going to spawn a robot army that defies current material, energy and supply chain realities. It won't be able to manufacture and disperse biological weapons without human collusion. LLM AI and robotics are not the same technology, they are not on precisely the same growth trajectory at all. The near term damage AI may cause directly through accident or misuse is more likely an internet facing infrastructure attack. Occam's Razor people. I am not against AI regulation at all. But I am also not against common sense; extinction should not be in the conversation, but instead focus on actual, conceivable dangers and work to alleviate them from all sides.
And that isn't a nuanced opinion; a common one among rigid materialists. Its not the best piano for a stage, but I am sure it could fool your ears in a recording. Morpheus would think it was a piano too. "What is real? ..."
How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.
Fun to read this again and see actual parallels. The 2030 Takeover section is such a ludicrous leap, however. None of the supply chain infrastructure, energy, or Moravec's Paradox realities are ever addressed. Turn the page and suddenly humanity is largely annihilated with a Corgi-esque human breed kept as pets. How did these robots emerge from utter rhetorical nothingness? Robocalypse impossible? Perhaps not. By 2030? an intellectually embarrassing farce worthy of a facepalm.
It is an extremely weak metaphor for a weak class of unlikely doomsday scenarios. You don't need Occam's Razor to discount this cinema-induced malaise; clumsy use of a rusty can-opener would suffice.
NMS seems to epitomize the excesses of the Agile development philosophy with most of their release updates -- small targeted tack-ons to the game engine that provide something tangible yet shallow for users to explore, usually disconnected from narrative. The same cargo drop configurations, how damaged containers always require removing the same rusted metal or goop, and how shelters have the same exact configuration, never ever evolve or change. It has such a strangely repetitive ghost town character. They could easily target their "agile" deliverables around diversifying and breathing more life into the worlds if they could span more "sprints". Unfortuntately, the tack-ons feel hollow, empty, and often ship incredibly buggy. They used procedural modeling to create an impressive array of planets, but never modeled the planet drops with the same care and diversity.
> The whole reason for computers to exist is to remove burden from humans.
I wish this were more true. I think Baudrillard is closer to the truth: "If men create intelligent machines ... it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines ... By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power." Intelligence itself is the burden :D
I am in this camp but the downvotes are telling -- there isn't consensus in this community at all -- many find such clanker classification valuable. Some of these folks are growing an anti-AI economy that others, like myself, find odd, distracting and even amusing -- particularly with the universal naiveté of the classification algorithms. I have seen downvotes in these comments from similar criticism but I have points to spare.
I lived in Japan for 5 1/2 years. I slept on a futon in a tatami room in my apartment most nights. I have a getabako (shoe cabinet) at my home in the US that I actually brought back from Japan. I understand the depth of the ritual, and the cultural respect for the home, but my American culture runs more deeply I am afraid, and I can't help but say "Please emergency workers, just leave your shoes on and say 'shitsurei shimasu' (sorry for my rudeness) as you enter the home".
The only thing I hate more than “smart” quotes are “smart” TVs. I groan whenever my LG interrupts. Now I have to spend Labor day wading through a “smart” UI I avoid like the plague to disconnect the internet.
The Paperclip Maximizer is only one of Nick Bostrom's stupid and outlandishly far-fetched ideas. In this case, the lack of consideration for geologic, energy and supply constraints is such a massive facepalm. And if I am wrong I guess no one will be here to say how stupid I was in saying this today.
I am much better at listening to Charli XCX than Fable, and much better at driving a Nissan Leaf than Fable (and much better than Tesla at driving a Tesla).
Surprised to see this upvoted to no. 1 on Hacker News in 2026. I used Audacity as recently as yesterday so I joined in and upvoted too. True that it has now displaced many commercial applications in the same niche.
Keyboard driven UIs are easier to instrument by alternative interfaces and has very positive accessibility implications. However, "shoulds" in computing lead toward a "tyranny of compounding responsibilities"; adding interface complexity to a project, particularly the suggested alternative input vectors may cross an upfront and/or maintenance development cost limit for a project.