yayitswei

Interesting literacy regression: this newly discovered Babylonian hymn was routinely copied by schoolchildren 3,000 years ago, while yesterday's article about why English doesn't use accents showed that by 1100 AD European literacy had contracted so much that monks were essentially writing only for other monks.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, ancient Babylon had institutionalized childhood education for complex literary works. Medieval Europe treated literacy as a specialized craft. So much for exponential growth.

Early cljs/react adopter here. Found "the next react" in Hyperfiddle's Electric Clojure — it eliminates the client/server boundary entirely. Write one function that spans both sites, compiler handles the network automatically. The amount of plumbing code that just disappears is staggering.

I agree. Reminds me of that story about chess grandmasters having incredible memory for valid chess positions but performing no better than average when remembering random piece arrangements. There's likely some efficient compression you can achieve by playing real-world music patterns rather than random notes. And it sounds better!

An interesting middle ground might be using LLMs to generate plausible melodies based on real-world music patterns and emphasizing the unfamiliar patterns, but if the goal is to play real music fluently, nothing beats practicing with actual pieces from the repertoire you want to play.

I predict this will evolve into bot warfare! For example, here's a snippet to advance pawns: https://gist.github.com/yayitswei/442cd5128b2dbfbd95a101b70f...

With driving in the age of autopilot, there's yet a new skill - staying engaged enough to intervene during that 0.1% of the time it tries to kill you.

At first I thought they were going to implement it in MIT Scratch.

This is excellent satire. It's like a Rorschach test for the commenters.

Same Krugman who wrote "Bitcoin is Evil" in 2013.

Simple and abstract are subjective, but for me: PHP, jQuery, htmx, Electric Clojure.

I wouldn't say Rails is the most simple and abstracted way to build a web application. More so than Next.js, yes, but there are both older and newer technologies that keep things simpler.

I chose death and never looked back. Favorite replacement has been Diatomic, currently looking into Rama.

What if SteamOS included kernel-level anti-cheat? Seems like an elegant solution compared to the current approach of running invasive third-party anti-cheat software.

From a statistical definition, it does. But yes, we can do better.

Letting the Guardian publish on article about the cabin is the opposite of security through obscurity.

'Buzee' pronounced as 'boozey' (from the readme) is a similar to a common slang term for intoxicated or alcohol-related.

The database I'm working with, Rama, has an interesting way to do "instant migrations" at scale. Your migration function runs on every read until data is durably migrated in the background. So you get migrated data immediately after deploy, while Rama quietly persists the changes during normal processing. No downtime.

https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/09/30/migrating-terabyte...

Now do the wrench attack.

For comparison, here's a talk about Overwatch's netcode: https://youtu.be/W3aieHjyNvw

Overwatch has a long time-to-kill, interesting to compare tradeoffs.

Is there a good tool for scraping a multi-page website (e.g. documentation) into plain text to send to an LLM?

What's up with Germany?

A PR that moves the needle is worth 2-4 weeks or more. Small improvements or fixes can be handled by the team on the defense rotation.

YC did not have prestige in their early years (Jessica mentions they had to beg their friends to come to demo days). Yet people were dropping out of Harvard to join. So it seems prestige is not necessary for success and in fact may be a negative signal.

He's targeting a particular audience in this essay. Doesn't mean he hates everyone else. In fact, in other essays he says that being an older founder can actually be an advantage in some ways.

Could it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

(ht Claude)

Is this a repost? I swear I've seen a similar post recently with near-identical responses.

Reminded me of this article about how centering things is the hardest problem in computer science (with plenty of examples).

https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/

Simple != Easy

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I'm not sure if the author succeeded or not, but at least the goal is clear.

Or you could start a startup that codes circles around its competitors (see Nubank, which became large enough to acquire Rich Hickey's team). There's a growing list of Clojure unicorns, most of whom have a tech-forward culture.

Agree with the challenges you mentioned using new tech at a more mainstream company.

Have you tried it? I was skeptical too until I built a few apps with it. The learning curve is easier than it seems (I started by modifying the examples) and it really does cut down on development time - turns out much of modern web programming revolves around network management and its associated complexities.

> Does the tech have any local caching options to make this a little more sane for a worst case an end user?

This is trivially solved in Electric- as long as you hold onto a client-side handle of the data, it won't be unmounted.

I largely agree with the comments here, that LLMs struggle with Clojure but Claude does it best at the moment. I also use it mainly for writing individual functions, though it occasionally correctly generates a simple Electric app with my desired functionality (Projects help, along with giving it lots of examples).

The most optimistic outlook I've heard on AI+Clojure is that AI is not magical and still benefits from good abstractions. So hopefully as models get better at reasoning, using something like Electric Clojure will help them write clean, maintainable code.