browsergap's comments

I think that's good logic about suitability, but it shouldn't mean it's universally the only language that programming languages use. By the same logic, I think an argument could be made for Japanese. Or Korean!

That's not actually true tho.

Chinese Mandarin has ~ the same number of speakers as all English speakers, it's just your Englo-centric bias that makes you see the world in your skewed way, where English is the center of everything, which is exactly what I'm railing against (in English no less)!

It does have international currency, but that's blurrier than you might think. French and Arabic both have enormous regional currency in EMEA. It's not the only candidate. Spanish in South America. There's plenty of places where English is few and far between (try Japan).

But the point is, even if you can say it's global (which it's not if you're taking a truly global perspective and thinking you can "go anywhere and speak English and you'll be operating fine!"), so what? There's huge populations of people who are not speaking English and they're just as good programmers, so why not have programming languages arising from their language? It's a possibility.

It's a historical accident that English with coding, that's all.

Really? You're gonna fight over some discrepancies in sources, as if that changes things.

The main point is that there are huge numbers of people who speak these languages and there's nothing special about programming and English beside history.

I disagree with your conclusion from your [1]. Any of those groups could create code based on their own languages. There's nothing at all logical about English.

For my sources, just type "X speakers" or "X speakers in the world" into google and the infobox results is what I use.

Your wikipedia source is way outta date. 1.12 Bn Chinese speakers? Come on. China's population is ~ 1.5 Bn now (was 1.4 in 2018).

French is 270 million. Sorry I said above 300m, but it's within 100% of the number that speak English natively, is what I was saying.

Now to everyone else, because it sounds like you will find this very hard to listen to right now, I think a good antidote to the fake narrative that "the Chinese government does not represent the Chinese people" is history. China in 20C had the bloodiest most awfully brutal civil war for the last 400 years. It was a popular revolution overthrowing a corrupt, lazy, anachronistic, incompetent dynasty (and then republic) and basically stretched from 1911 to the end of the cultural revolution. Then, the governing system they created out of this, has gone about in the last 70 years lifting more people out of poverty than anywhere else, and building something truly amazing. I hope you'll, you know, give the Chinese and their system some credit. Anyway...my point is, that if the Chinese people are not happy with their government, there's no other place on earth where the government would be more afraid of their people's wrath than China. Just look at the history. Look at the hunger they have for creating a better life. Look at how the government is forced to deliver. And look at the complacent stagnation and lazy woolly propagandist rest-on-yer-laurels thinking that has metastasized in most of the Western world.

So, contrary to the popular, but incorrect anti-China notion that you can't trust the Chinese government, I think you can trust them more than any other place on Earth right now to deliver as they say, and to deliver results for their citizens. Simple as that, really. And I think most Chinese are proud and happy to have such a system.

This shrieking Western hysteria smacks (to me, anyway) of bitter nostalgia for imperial glory-days where we could pull off stunts like "the treaty of Nanking" and "the Opium War", the "United East India Company" and wiping out native populations of N and S American, and Australian aborigines.

I'm not anti-West. I'm just balanced between both places. And speaking up against the river of fake and negative opinion, which, in my view, only serves to hasten the West's demise by blinding them to what they could learn, and giving them the fake pay off of feeling good by (doing that old colonial thing) of putting other people down and pretending they're better.

But to bring it back to you finally... if you want to make it about identity, then sure, I'm just more cosmopolitan than you are. In your future jaunts, I hope you're able to see beyond the veil and check those implanted biases with other stuff you don't need. So you can finally see clearly. Best of luck! :P ;) xx

Triggered sounds like irrational and unhinged so...if it's what you need to say about other people's views to (in your mind) censor them and protect your own views, I get it, but I'm afraid it makes you a less trustworthy assessor!

It sounds like you've confused "identity" with opinion. I wasn't saying, "you are bullshit", and I'm sorry that you seem to have taken it like that. I was saying "I think that (view you write) is bullshit". I wasn't trying to offend you.

But also, to assume that had I had the experiences you list, I would arrive at your conclusion is incredibly narrow minded (and, to be honest, arrogant), and makes me trust even less that you would be able to see beyond the nose of your existing biases and consider others with different views... Because it's a big world out there, plenty of room for differences of opinion and experience.

The false dichotomy between "the Chinese state/government and the Chinese people" is a common Western propaganda tactic I've noticed to, exactly as I said, seem like you're not being racist when you are. And, unfortunately for you, god bless you, you've done exactly as I predicted, "I'm not racist because look at all the connections I have"

You didn't go on to criticize anything beside saying you don't "trust" the government, but I'm great at reading between the lines, and reading people and I know the type of argument you're hinting at and where it goes.

It reminds me that people don't hold these anti-China views from ignorance, simply because they've carried a Western-propaganda mindset into their own affairs. It seems like in your jaunts you forgot to check your pre-existing biases at the door/luggage-check counter.

Which, so far, has meant, not that you don't have enough experiences to think about and understand China, but only that you've so far failed to properly think about them, being blinded by your biases. So far, you've wasted those experiences you have by not yet thinking clearly about them. I'm not sure where you're from (and I don't care here because it doesn't matter, like it doesn't matter where I'm from or who I am, what matters is the quality of my thought and my ability to think clearly, critically and for myself, as I hope you can too), but here's a video of a white dude saying something that is mostly correct. I don't know him nor anything else about him but this is about right:

https://twitter.com/chinascio/status/1299172383027200001

Sorry actually it's not an extension, it's a "controller". It attaches to the debugging port of your Chrome instance.

I tried implementing it as an extension but there's a lot of (undocumented) differences to using CRDP [0] over websocket and over chrome.debugger extension API, so for now I gave up on the extension part of it.

[0]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/debugger

Only ~5% of Earth speaks English natively. Another 15% speak it as an nth language.

I think English based programming is an anomaly that came out of the post-WWII US/UK cultural world order, and from that sustained economic boom came modern computers, languages and the internet to a mass market.

20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.

HN, and programming, shouldn't get carried away with the myopic, "fish in the fishbowel" view of English primacy. It's really not. Not globally. Just like "white people" are not a majority. Only in a very narrow, very opinionated and specific corner of the globe are those things true. It's a big world out there, much bigger, it seems than many of you imagine from your keyboards.

Even tho HN is in English, many HNers are not native English speakers. I see people associating programming languages with English and thinking it's simply natural (if just by convention), but for most of the world, this simply isn't true, and it could have been another way. In the future it might be another way.

So I really feel it's not accurate to say there's some "problem" with people on Earth creating languages that are founded in Chinese, or Japanese, or Italian, or Russian, or Hindi, or any of the many other languages people speak. For a large corner (or even a small corner) of the world, it would not be a "problem", it would be perfectly natural.

I just don't think it's that accurate, or that useful, to think of programming and English as being somehow a natural match.

When people speak about "representation" in the "tech industry" they ought to consider this factor as well. I'm not just talking about SV, I mean "global representation in engineering". Of course, if Japanese people decide to embrace a language that somehow uses Japanese letters or characters then, there's probably not much you can do about it.

I'm just saying, don't assume it's a bad thing and don't think somehow English and programming has to go together. Certainly at the level of logic, and CS, programming is completely independent of English (tho interesting to think about how the grammar of English maybe constrained and drove initial language structures, concepts and flow control and do a comparative study of differences to languages that emerged from cultures and used other human languages.)

THat's probably the best fucking explanation in a HN comment I have ever read. Mind expanded. I actually feel like I get this stuff, which I didn't study at college, a little bit. I took chem... physics always seemed impossibly strange.

Yes, but it's not "the singularity".

Saying AGI will be like iPhone and therefore underwhelming, is not to demean iPhone. But to place in correct perspective the overinflated ( I think ) sense of self importance and impact of so-called AGI.

It's not underwhelming wrt an average week in Techcrunch, but it's underwhelming wrt to the mythos and delusion that surrounds AGI.

Underwhelming does depend on perspective. But my perspective is not to demean iPhone, just to bring AGI big heads back down to earth.

Ghost in the shell reference? Motoko Kusanagi

I think it's possible. Certainly when they draw the timeline in history textbooks in future, GPT-3 could be somewhere at the start, like one of the "ape men" to human transition species. :)

I think there will be some limit that means it's not about speed. I think we can't just scale up the speed factor (even if we reach speeds that are fast enough for this in the first place).

Maybe it's related to experience/embodiment. What's a 100 years of thought if you don't have the experience, OODA feedback loop to inform it?

But maybe that's not it, and it's related to something else. I just think the simplistic idea that "once we have it, we only need to make it faster" will not work for some reason. I don't think creating ASI will be that easy. It's basically creating a god. I think if you sped up how an average human thinks, they don't become a god.

Consider psychological trauma and issues. Something that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago, people are still obsessed with and scarred by today. That's not adaptive, and in many ways, that's highly stupid. But it's so common in intelligent humans. If we could have compressed that 40 years of thought (and even experience) to 1 second, they still have made no progress wrt that factor. It's not just about speed, it's about the quality or nature of thought.

But I'm not saying that analogy explains it. I just think there will be some reason why simply adding speed will not some spectacular revolution make.

Another, but still too glib way of saying it is, say we create an AI equivalent to a human. Still humans are pretty dumb, all things considered. Say we speed it up. Now we just have a AI that's more quick to be dumb than a regular human. Do you know what I'm saying?

iPhone is revolutionary, but it's productized revolution, which feels smoother. It's not "the singularity"

I think this is wrong (not to say you are wrong but this idea which is very common).

The idea that we develop AGI and it is this program that is what we run on a regular device, and then we can make it 10x smarter effectively by running it on 10 devices or 10x as fast. I think more likely will be AGI will be achieved first on the biggest teraflop supercomputers that we have, and it will for a long time be the app that takes a lot to run. And probably the first AGI will not be quite as smart as a human, but basically we will have no other reference point for what it is as smart as so we will call it that.

Also, I think there will be some sort of non-linearity effects that mean that you can't just "scale up" intelligence by adding more processors. It will work to a point, but then the curve flattens. Consider that the global total IQ is already approx 800 billion, but our planet is still pretty dumb. I mean this to also apply to scaling a "single" AGI up in speed. Linear speed gains will have diminishing returns I think.

Also, I speak about the productization and allocation of it. It will not be this "come one come all" "gather round" everyone can partake sort of thing. It will be a product, like night vision or GPS, and the secret government military uses will get the best quality, and the rest of us will get smarter shopping.

Further, if it really is linearly scalable, then it certainly will be controlled. It will be more controlled than enriched uranium in that case, and even if not so scalable is still going to be very controlled if it is at all transformative.

I think the various technological, political and commercial realities will distinctly flatten/soften/smooth the predicted "singularity" discontinuity blast wave into a humdrum speed bump that appears to most of humanity as a better iPhone (basically).

This is pure speculation. We shall see.

That's what I'm questioning. I don't think it means that.

I think it 's part of controlling the narrative. What if the big corps were actually behind the fetishization of and obsession with privacy and data collection? What if it acts as a distraction or cover for whatever other negative initiatives they might take? If they can control the opposition to focus on "privacy and my data versus big corp" it's a win. I think controlled opposition is an essential part of narrative management and PR strategy for entities that are large or sophisticated enough.

I think one of the issues of nolocode is it doesn't actually help people think like programmers, but the tools are often created with the implicit need to do that, a need which the creators don't see because they are coders.

People get spreadsheets and word documents. I don't really know why. But they get them. But while it might seem like the step from doc/xls to nolocode is small or even non-existent, I think it actually is really big for most people who are supposed to be the audience for that (complete non developers).

I think one reason is because people don't want the responsibility to make a system that can break. I'm not too sure if this is the only or the biggest reason, but I think non-coders don't have the sense that they can build things, and even if you show them they can using some hot tool, it seems they're still scared it's going to break and it will be on them.

Maybe one reason is because if you break an Excel doc, there's usually someone around in your org who knows how to fix it. But the same can't be said for some random new hot nocode tool.

I think for specific use cases, yes. But for general, web and mobile apps, I just think it is too much complexity you can't simplify away, or at least none of the box-dragging UIs seem to have achieved that.

I agree this can be a big market, but a shift is needed to make it actually easy, not "look how easy it is" easy. Taking a different tac, maybe there's just not a market for it. The browser/HTML/JS is everywhere. It's not that hard to build a simple tool or app, but people in orgs use Excel, they don't build a simple page, even. It's not because they couldn't learn how, but somehow that just now what people in orgs do. I don't know why.

This can't be true. YC clearly prefers multiple founders, and YC is the leading early stage investor.

I like this, but not things I wrote instead of using existing lib took weeks, not an afternoon. And I didn't think they would take an afternoon.

If it's trivial, probably use existing lib.

I don't know what my rule for deciding this is....I don't think I have one. I just make decisions. If I don't like a library I won't use it.

the thing I like about " old School " Unix systems is you can have a bunch of users on there and they can chat to each other with message.... and it's so easy to set up