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Instead of getting more dependant on Big Tech's AI products, I think the perfect use for AI is develop tools and workflows that decouple one from Big Tech.

Not specifically about your case, but some people are usually just more verbose than others and tend to say the same thing more than once, or perhaps haven't found a clear way of articulating their thoughts down to fewer words.

Reminded me of this thread between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey where Alan Kay thinks "data" is a bad idea.

My interpretation of his point of view is that what you need is a process/interpreter/live object that 'explains' the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722

EDIT: He writes more about it in Quora. In brief, he says it is 'meaning', not 'data' that is central to programming.

https://qr.ae/pCVB9m


Thanks for the pointer to this 2016 dialog!

One part of it has interesting new resonance in the era of agentic LLMs:

alankay on June 21, 2016 | root | parent | next [–]

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

Nowdays rather than the methods associated with data objects, we are dealing with "context" and "prompts".


Quite a nice insight there!

I should probably be thinking more in this direction.


Hm, not sure. Data on its own (say, a string of numbers) might be meaningless - but structured data? Sure, there may be ambiguity but well-structured data generally ought to have a clear/obvious interpretation. This is the whole idea of nailing your data structures.


Yeah, structured data implies some processing on raw data to improve its meaning. Alan Kay seems to want to push this idea to encapsulate data with rich behaviour.


I’m with Rich Hickey on this one, though I generally prefer my data be statically typed.


Sure, static typing adds some sort of process that provides a coarse interpretation of the data.


To beat to death a well-known quote:

You may be able to go fast with AI, but you can only go far with humans.


First time I'm hearing this quote and I like it a lot

We are definitely seeing a lot of anti-human behavior around AI adoption, because all anyone seems to care about is going fast


AI hits the sweet spot for the 'bring me a rock' management style.


Where is the quote from? A web search revealed only your comment


It is a play on that quote, isn't it?

> If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.


As a mostly Python programmer and partly TypeScript programmer, my subjective thought is that a bit more 'noise' with TypeScript than Python.

Just a little more to parse with my eyes and a little more to type with TypeScript.

But hey, with all these cool kids with their AI coding agents, reading and handwriting code may soon be obsolete!


Yup, since around 2016 HN and other tech spaces got infested with people who cannot separate their political ideology from technical discussions.

When it comes to FOSS they claim that FOSS has always been political to justify the politicization of everything they touch.

Things used to be much better when the people adhered to the age-old wisdom "Keep politics and religion out of the office" and carried this attitude to neutral spaces online.

In part, some of us got into tech because it was one of the places where meritocracy ruled and you could get away from those who thrive by overwhelming others with BS.

I apologize for the rant.


Being “apolitical” is a luxury of the privileged, especially in turbulent times.

True tests of courage, morals, and ethics are occurring more and more every day now, especially in the tech industry that is so closely intertwined with the regimes across the world who seek to cause great harm to those who do not look like, speak like, or believe in the same things as them.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" - there’s your quote for political apathy.


A good reason is that Lisp has almost no syntax. So it can act as a neutral language that is easy to learn for developers from other languages.


There is such a thing as a distinct LLM writing style that is not just good structure. Anyone who's read more than five books can tell that.

And the comment itself seems completely LLM generated.


That's not just false. It's the antithesis of true.

It's not just using rhetorical patterns humans also use which are in some contexts considered good writing. Its overusing them like a high schooler learning the pattern for the first time — and massively overdoing the em dashes and mixing the metaphors


LOL :-))


It's true that LLMs have a distinct style, but it does not preclude humans from writing in a similar style. That's where the LLMs got it from, people and training. There's certainly some emergent style that given enough text, you would likely never see from a human. But in a short comment like this, it's really not enough data to be making good judgements.


Is there such a thing as a modern Linux stack?

Isn't it by design that linux has many optional components and one can pick and choose as they desire to create their distribution?


Obviously, it is full of options. But building something resembling probably the most common desktop/workstation distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora would be what I call "modern Linux stack".


I guess it happens when engineers stop driving decisions and the finance people take over. Won't be too good for the company's valuation if people can access the content elsewhere.

I guess that's why Discord is also locked down as much. They have community content that is inaccessible anywhere else but Discord.


I don't like this engineers vs. finance people / MBA divide that I see parroted a lot on HN. And obviously, it's parroted by engineers.

Like, all engineers are saints and the other side are all sinners. What crap. Get real, guys. There are all kinds of multicolored and multidimensional people.

Having been on all 3 or 4 or 5 of these sides :) (dev, sysadm, manager, consultant, ...), I have seen that.

Grow up, folks, and enjoy life in all its richness.

.


Yeah but Zuck has always been a nasty piece of work. He wasn't "just young" and "grew up" when he wrote those IMs. See: (to list just one) the constant copying of Snapchat


He copied Snapchat and then Tiktok -- which have been most likely immensely positive for the bottom line.


Speaking personally, Reels are just annoying (not that I admire TikTok either, aligned as it probably is with the CCP)

Snapchat features are blood money, they also result in less people using Snapchat

Nobody says Zuck doesn't earn a lot of money but a lot of it is likely fraudulent and he's just not a very good person


Last phrase is understatement of the century.

He's a POS, that's also why POSSE is good. ;)


Last phrase highlights what investors care about. I personally hate reels and tiktok -- they should've stopped at stories.


To me it just validates the history of Facebook

Did he/didn't he steal? Dunno, though there's a fair few bits of evidence in the various lawsuits (Winklevoss, Greenspan)

But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)

I was willing to take his side on a few things because the political situation is genuinely unclear and the public has been misled but then right after he wrote the open letter to Jim Jordan about censorship coercion (which was a real problem, I want to see more tech companies talking about it) he does this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178

It's kind of like he has raw bits of intelligence but doesn't quite know how to piece it together and besides "his" inventions (even FB) are put together (largely?!) by other people


>But if you didn't know about any of that you could make some inferences. Like his neverending "ooh, shiny new thing, want" (and then lie to people along the way, trick Indians into signing up for your internet.org thing)

Yeah, that trying to trick Indians into that thing (IIRC, it was also called Free Basics or something like, to sound attractive, prolly) became a big issue in India at the time, I remember, although I didn't delve deep into the matter. I think a group of leading Indian freedom activists took on FB in the media and petitioned the government, and it resulted in the whole scheme collapsing.


Sarah Wynn Williams in her book talks about how it was her initiative to call it Free Basics because internet.org was false advertising


I meant last phrase, not last sentence, which is what you seem to have understood, going by your reply.

This is what I was referring to in my earlier comment: "he's just not a very good person".


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