I feel like the deeper truth highlighted here is that being pro-nuclear, or anti-anti-nuclear, is very much a “reddit” style opinion.

Whatever the actual truth is, that is. It seems to fall neatly into the “I know something and can make a ‘well actyooally’ argument about it” category without having expertise like being on top of the historical financial performance and context of the technology, about which I personally know nothing.

I’m pretty sure a major problem with AI is that people don’t know how to talk about the actual problem.

It’s mega-corps replacing people while “stealing” their intellectual output. It’s a reshaping of the “social contract”. It’s those making bank quickly pushing the whole world in a direction that may just be a really bad idea (like we’re no longer in control of our own world/lives at all).

It poses the question: is all tech progress good or is it sometimes “bad” such that we actually want to design our own fate and sometimes just be comfortable with what we have and what we are?

Does this whole post-industrial revolution world need techno-hype to be happy? Or can we collectively just touch grass and settle a bit more.

At the risk of dogpiling on a well known thing …

I distinctly remember when I first heard the theme, watching Enterprise for the first time, and I seriously thought it was either a joke or a blatant rip off of Trek.

I really didn’t believe it was Star Trek by the same people who’d made 90s TNG era trek. It being a prequel was part of that (like how is Star Trek about looking backwards?!). But so obviously US hokey populism was just a major turn off … as a youngster then I “knew” that’s not what Trek was. And while I was somewhat wrong (US idealism is kinda what it’s about), I think I was right in the right way.

I must admit, I’m very behind on whatever drama is behind this.

Would anyone actually be down for “year one”?

I’m a broken record on this now, but I personally really dislike the idea of Trek doing the whole nostalgic reboot thing. And I’ve even found it kind of offensive that SNW has become such an obvious vehicle for it because for me the charm of the show was to reimagine what TOS quite literally could have been (as the continuation of the first pilot rather than the second pilot which is what we got with TOS).

I’m sure there’s a pitch to studios that could work, but in the grander scheme of Trek, I’m just not sure it’s at all a good idea.

positioned in 3D space using CSS transforms.

Wait … how does the gameplay work? There is t any JS?!

Ha yes … on the other hand, it was easy to forget how good damn expansive non-internet information is: the whole world ran on that shit for millennia.

Oh I hear you (and appreciate the response).

For me, I can’t help but think of another alternative, which I’m surprised I haven’t heard of yet …

stripping down one’s personal technological cognitive load to a stack of systems that can fit into one’s brain (like the Python mantra), focusing on learning that stack well building sustainable and stable systems, and then just detoxing from the increasingly polluted digital information stream (protected commons, traditional formats such as books and in person engagement … dunno).

Depends on what the end goal is, but AIs seem to be about using tech more or just opting out of sovereignty. Something like the above seems to me to be about using tech less (in the end) and pushing toward being a secondary tool rather than an end of its own.

Probably a shallow response …

But I always figured AI/LLMs are basically apocalyptic for all sorts of individualistic values in computing (including privacy but also independence and diversity).

Whether they’re good or useful etc, I just struggle to see how they will ever be justifiable against these sorts of values.

Sure, local models and our hardware will get better … but better than the state of the art from the big labs and providers? Given that data and training are the big bottlenecks on quality … I struggle to see how AI isn’t a complete feudal capturing of information computing and processing. Not to mention what happens to the pipeline that produces information content if everyone is only consuming it through the models that train on it.

So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape?

For me, I baulk at this.

Yea this vibes.

For me, it felt like coding was a more attractive term for people who weren’t “proper” computer science and “engineering” types who weren’t confident that they knew what “program” meant or even “algorithm”, as they were working things as they went.

I’d guess that as computing involved more and more people with this non-standard background, coding became preferred. I certainly encountered people uncomfortable with my casual use of “algorithm” because it triggered their imposter syndrome, and my pointing out that they write algorithms with the code the write all the time certainly didn’t help.

Techno feudalism … seems plain and simple to me.

Our independent value and sustainability is no longer a given.

In a monopolised AI world (and how can it be anything other than a big tech monopoly) … you give yourself over, as training data, in exchange for permission to survive … and rely on the AI trained on your data.

Let’s be real … big tech cornered us over the past couple of decades. And now they’re trying to grab us by the balls. It’s happening fast. And most don’t have the philosophical agility to keep up with the implications.

Most notable part for me in the article was not the AI stuff … but that Atlassian has never been profitable.

Not surprising for a tech company. But for one as big and kinda foundational in the service it provides … I found it surprising. Imagine if MS or Apple or Google were never profitable and companies were just entirely reliant on their services!

Couple that with how little love anyone has for Jira/confluence … and yea … good luck with that Atlassian.

I mean, it makes sense that it’s addictive, right?

I also suspect it’s one of those things that just naturally splits people. For some, the addictiveness and appeal just don’t make sense. For others it’s irresistible.

It’s part of the reason why I’m so doomer on the state of things, from a generally anti-AI/sceptical perspective. There’s just something compulsive that this kind of tool triggers in many people.

I tried to go through the tutorial a year or so ago.

I can’t recall when, but there’s a point at which doing something normal/trivial in an imperative language requires all sorts of weirdness in Uiua. But they try to sell it as especially logical while to me they came off as completely in a cult.

It’s this section, IIRC: https://www.uiua.org/tutorial/More Argument Manipulation#-planet-notation-

When they declare

And there you have it! A readable syntax juggling lots of values without any names!

For

×⊃(+⊙⋅⋅∘|-⊃⋅⋅∘(×⋅⊙⋅∘)) 1 2 3 4

Which, if you can’t tell, is equivalent to

f(a,b,c,x) = (a+x)(bx-c)

With arguments 1, 2, 3, 4.

I wanted to like this, and have always wanted to learn APL or J (clear influences). But I couldn’t take them seriously after that.

The lua escape hatch is interesting.

Are there other lisps like this? I’m guessing closure has some similar features re Java/JVM?

Surprising twists there about the tomb having been vacated by Egyptians due to flooding with the second tomb yet to be discovered.

Ah yes! Thanks! The enhanced image does day “close up” after all! A bit lazy of me!

Very cool though! A zoomed inset in the main image would have helped I think.

I’m confused about what exactly the ring is in the image or the main image at least. There seems to be an enhanced image in the article that highlights the ring more clearly as an outer edge, which makes sense (I suppose).

But I don’t understand what I’m to make of the top image. It’s the diffuse light part of the ring?

That works way too fucking well I’m in stitches!

Thanks for this! I wasn’t aware a good independent fork of all of this had been set up (I’d kinda forgotten about conda-forge).