I mean -- my (completely non-technical) mother, after a few hours of my guidance, has started vibe-coding apps and websites for her local community organizations. And, like -- it works.

Needs monads (not joking)

Consider: content-addressed headers.

Then you might as well embed the headers, since in that case you can't update the compiler and headers separately anyway.

I guess you've heard of https://www.unison-lang.org/

But suppose you have egalitarian nation N -- what stops the billionaire from non-egalitarian nation B from influencing your politicians? Especially if nation N is small and nation B is large.

Moreover -- why would low-level elites (think: entrepreneurs, small business owners, etc.) stay in nation N if it was more profitable to do business in nation B -- recall this is precisely the type of person that is often most mobile and internationalized.

Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.

Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.

Once the software is written, it is ~free to copy. People pay a lot of money to avoid the software getting copied... and it gets copied anyways.

The thing is that one software is easy to crack and copy, so it is cheap...but a lot of softwares to work together is not, so that's why we have SaaS and PaaS today.

My friend, don't scare quote freedom.

Sure, it may not have infinite value, but there are plenty of far less valuable things we endure significant harm to be able to enjoy.

And I say this as someone who absolutely hates social media.

Usually countries don't go to war over actual principles such as these but for self-interest. That's what I was getting at. Scare quotes indicate the position of the concept within public-facing rhetoric for an Opium War style operation (which would presumably be about profit, control and so on, the usual).

Idk - I really think this is a different brain thing.

I have synesthesia and so get syntax highlighting for free.

I like my highlighting to give me "synesthesia bootstrap speedup"; on the contrary it annoys me when it clashes.

It's an extreme case, but I presume as with most things there's a spectrum

If people like Rob Pike and Linus Torvalds are on the opposite end of that spectrum, you might be interested in why that is.

I strongly suspect the older and more experienced a developer is, the more likely they are to code without syntax coloring, including large numbers who previously didn’t.

It's interesting: on balance life increases entropy.

Yet it also produces pockets of ultra-low entropy; states which would be staggeringly, astronomically unlikely to be witnessed in nature.

So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...

> So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...

Life is a rounding error in the energy and entropy balance of the solar system. And even on earth we barely amount to much.

Nice username -- very fitting.

Yes, and yet if we instead look for low-entropy peaks, I'd be shocked if anything in the solar system is even nearly as low-entropy as a single bacterium, let alone a brain.

Then there's potential...

On one hand, yes: expanding bullet points to slop makes things strictly worse.

On the other hand, if one uses AI but keeps content density constant (e.g. grammar fixes for non-native speakers) or even negative (compress this repetitive paragraph), I think it can be a useful net productivity boost.

Current AI can't really add information, but a lot of editing is subtracting, and as long as you check the output for hallucinations (and prompt-engineer a lot since models like to add) imo LLMs can be a subtraction-force-multiplier.

Ironically: anti-slop; or perhaps, fighting slop with slop.

People are complaining about this article because of the lack of density