xbpx's comments

If I'm so brutal and don't give a damn why do I care if I use every library under the sun? Simple you say? Then I'm rewriting code some other poor sods have written 100 times, which sounds a lot like not-invented-here ornamentation to me.

They should rename this screed Arrogant Programming :P

Counter take:

This hot take is unnecessarily defeatist and smacks of the rote defense for maintaining the current power structure, namely "the world is too complicated maybe we shouldn't try".

I'd like to mention that we had significantly higher corporate, inheritance and income taxes in the 40s to 70s and it absolutely did moderate growth of billionaire wealth.

If such a thing is implemented in some form by all, or even most, major global national entities it could have a very positive impact on future global development. It won't be perfect but we only need to work to improve. And currently having billionaires control trillions leaves much to improve upon.

Plotly offers more power and flexibility than chart.js and provides a much simpler API than D3 (it has D3 and webgl renderers). The ecosystem is broad and includes React, Angular and other wrappers and language-interfaces for Python, Rust, Go, Scala and many others (incl Common Lisp).

If you start plotting a lot of data it can grow with you since it supports typed arrays and webgl rendering without undue boilerplate.

Disclaimer... I work for Plotly

Corporate Web is SEO Ad hell but it's got nothing on the future that awaits us.

Let me present AI Ad tech 2030

All commercial websites contain meta tags with vector embedding links. Vector embedding services are standard offerings in the big Cloud. Everyone selling something uses them.

All commercial LLM products consume meta data and RAG the global vector embedding index. LLM-SEO is big business as companies fight to game the LLMs with their content.

Generative AI Ad tech inserts Ads into relevant LLM output and is trained on the conversion success of successful Link follows and subsequent purchasing decisions.

May I present Alpha-Ad.

It's on the way folks.

Except you see many of the same people staffing the boards of major companies, donating to politicians and contributing funds to think tanks that supply politicians with policy options. Conceptually it's less helpful to keep politics and state institutions as distinct entities from the largest corporations as thinking of them as a single highly integrated system.

I know, my statement there is harsh. The early tech culture emerged from 60s counter cultural forces that had, to their credit, really impacted the world. So it probably wasn't as naive as it seems now.

For sure. But there will always be good times and bad. Main streets in towns were likewise vital communities until interest rate hikes and massive deregulation in the 80s.

If you want to keep quaint Norwegian looking towns pristine even through harder times you need fairly heavy regulation.

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle.

The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different.

Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and maximizing the bottom line". Capitalism is creative destruction driven by distributed profit seeking along the edges of relatively immobile statist and corporate oligopolistic structures.

This always involves cycles of enshitification that end in bottom feeding until extinguished by new techno-social revolutions.

GenXers were talking about the enshitification of main street with the spread of big box stores and malls in the 80s and 90s. Same system, same process, new generation.

Really? The situation isn't so simple. High income earners are paying historically low taxes. Not to mention cuts in inheritance taxes from the 80s onward. You'll need to explain your data more carefully than claiming it is all being stolen by taxes.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/whole-ball-...

Who knows, likely not many aside from some folks training in GCP on TPUs but any large funded corporation has a path laid out by Google. And Apple with its M-series. You can build hardware and dedicated ML chips and if you can do that the software ecosystem knows how to handle it. CUDA isn't the moat, it's the chips. NVIDIAs moat is still the chips. Building huge systems and ecosystems is a game for only the most capitalized entities but all of them can do so. The software part is already a solved problem, at the cost of a new compiler.

The CUDA lock-in is over played. Tensorflow, Pytorch and any large framework supports multiple hardware including Google TPUs. Any company making significant investment will steer some of that towards hardware support in the software they need.

Clearly the Radcliffe wave is leftover vibrational energy from a space-time knot formed when now long extinct aliens exited the galaxy in a dark energy fueled artificially generated wormhole. Clearly.

That's why white has a higher statistical win rate ya?

Arch sends distribution news every week or so, usually in one or two paragraphs.

https://archlinux.org/

I've followed the gitlab migration and every package and distribution change that warranted community notification for more than a decade.

It's such an empowering feeling to have tracked all the changes to the distribution over a decade. The Arch maintainer culture has managed to provide consistent high quality communication and documentation.

Most of the news doesn't require action on my part, being a subsystem or package I don't use. They use the news channel sparingly and the distribution is minimal and clean. News arrives only every other week or so and is succinctly written in one or two paragraphs.

It's a distribution for those who love precision and professionalism.

I bet there is huge potential in physical computation but it seems like we'll need post-silicon or massively-3D circuitry to scale it out sufficiently. Bio-electronics and organically grown components are possible but also in pure R&D stages.

Imagine growing a gigantic organic 3D circuit with trillions of electrically charged connections, capable of trillion dimension matrix operations needing a fraction of current silicon based power requirements.

We could give it a great name like Synaptic Architecture, or Neural Fibre or ...

Politics: Know Your Enemy, The Dig

About movies (and politics): Michael & Us, Unclear and Present Danger

Tech: Oxide and Friends, Twenty Thousand Hz

Science: Nature Podcast, Quanta Magazine Podcast

This has been tried and has both worked and failed. Failed in some cases where governments built large clusters of apartment towers without much heed to community or spaces for urban renewal and local business. And succeeded when there were more comprehensive plans than "just build housing". See for example many European countries and Singapore.

It needs be an intelligent holistic approach or it can lead to fractured failed communities.

Ridiculous. That list of tremendous people are some founders that found success. There are plenty of tremendous founders we don't hear about that didn't do as well. There are plenty of tremendous people in regular jobs that can't act like iconoclastic dickheads because they'd be rightfully fired. More importantly hugely successful organizations have found a way to reproduce their own success despite specific people not because of them.

You want to build lasting success on good process, good organization and responsible management. People come and go. Organizations stick around.

If you're feeding the specific nodes to scrape, iterating and bug fixing what is Chatgpt doing other than giving you someone to talk with while you code?

Call me when I can ask a LLM to pull structured data in CSV form from website X and deliver it to me each morning. And it does it.

Stallman was right and he provided an alternative. Go use it. Stick to GPLd software safely nested under the auspices of a foundation.

Don't expect Deno or any other corporate entity solely focused on profit seeking to give a single shit about anything other than profit.

It's all marketing, it's all spin, and it can't be any other way, that's how the system is structured.