Cloning isn't even sci-fi or imaginary, just morally questionable and... variably legal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning#Legal_status_of_...). Same goes for gene editing / designer babies / eugenics, which overlaps strongly with the subjects in this discussion.

Let's not conflate eugenics with gene editing or "designer babies." On the contrary, there is little overlap between eugenics and any of the three other topics, but for the vaguest vernacular sense.

The described enterprise sales process sounds a bit odd to me. I come from the perspective of existing codebase that is tailored to the specific customer processes/org structure etc. so maybe it's different for a completely blue ocean type of product.

It's usually initial contact + demo or feature talk of sorts. The next step is some small project with customer specific data which is billed. They get a quote and either do it or don't. Scale up, SLA etc. follow after that (basic outline of what's possible is usually given in the initial contact). Alternatively this small project can be some consulting package but it's always billed.

The type of sales at your company is the top down approach where you already have a solution. There's a lot of enterprise sales where the solution doesn't fully exist or requires extensive customization that it's the blue ocean demo that sells the product, the product doesn't exist until the deal is signed.

Swift is at least in the TIOBE Top 20 (#20) and Scratch is at #12 but more educational. I'd also add Kotlin and Dart as contenders which sit just outside the top 20.

My favorite part of BeOS is the file system. The book can be found freely here: https://www.nobius.org/dbg/

Am I too naive in thinking the answer is rather simple? Cryptographic proofs (digital signatures). For text this should be trivial and for streaming video/audio you can probably hash and sign packets or maybe at least keyframes or something?

I think this is naive, is it just kicks the can. How do you trust that the signer is human?

True, I can only know that the owner of the private key signed but not how the document was created. But I suppose there is some trust involved that a person I know who signs doesn't sign some AI generated stuff. To establish the initial link, I suppose we need something more mainstream/scalable than the old key signing parties I remember from CCC etc.

But at least for friends and family it should be possible to create some flow where every member has a key-combo and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote etc. and have local mini-keysign parties.

>and you trust them to only sign stuff they wrote

You have far too much faith in humanity. The majority of my extended family members are not smart enough to resist continuous attacks and would eventually not only sign, but give away the key in question.

Simply put I think we are stretching humanity farther than intellectual ability allows in a lot of people.

Do we need new key signing for friends/family? I can trust that all messages coming from a friend/family’s account originated from them, or else their account was compromised. I don’t see how a ‘non-ai’ key adds enough more trust to be worth it.

I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for. So my understanding is that most useful thing is probably the .fla importer. Wouldn't it make sense to focus on authoring-tooling (animator+developer coop) and the importer but "export" to standard web tech?

"I never developed with Flash but my understanding is that "modern web" can do everything Flash was used for."

True, it can, BUT what's lacking in the total arena is actual authoring and development toolchains, which is what Flash packaged all in one single bundle.

I'm not trying to install 4 or 5 different things, along with all of their dependencies, just to make some 200MB thing that could have been done in 20MB and one program with Flash.

Often in these threads people say that thing does exist (Adobe Animate) and it's all fine, prblmslvd. Rarely are those people who themselves used Flash extensively (although some probably exist). There's something missing though, something went wrong in the transition from Flash to Animate.

Part of the beauty of working with Flash, at least as a newcomer or someone who leaned more towards graphics/animation than code, came down to a couple of main points:

- Code was *inside* MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames. When the playhead entered the frame, the script would run. Some of us who started as designers later leaned heavily into the code, but even those who were more comfortable sticking to the visual side of things would end up with a little grab bag full of scripts/snippets that they could just copy/paste into a frame and tweak without getting too bogged down with code. Even at a very simple level (if somethingsomething jump to frame 20, else loop back to frame one) this added a dimension of control and interactivity. Crucially, it was implemented well and very simple to understand.

- Everything was nested. MovieClips within MovieClips. Timelines within timelines. Simple behaviours could be stacked up and lead to natural-feeling complexity just due to this nesting.

Of course these things can be implemented today too, and other tools have and do implement versions of them. But there are often just 1 or 2 levels of abstraction too much, enough to put off some kinds of minds, or people at certain levels of experience. The thing about the Flash experience was that it all felt so fluid and intuitive. Direct. Learning it was fun.

Animate (as far as I remember) did keep those paradigms I mentioned. The timelines were still there, the drawing/animation tools too. But something somehow goes wrong in the translation to modern web tech. If it didn't, people would have just carried on using Flash, outputting JS/HTML instead of SWFs and nobody would have noticed.

A lot of the above is testament to Macromedia and linked to their other software, Director (similar to Flash but aimed more at desktop and 'interactive CDs'). They made software that was a joy to use. To give them their dues, Adobe pushed it further. Also their market dominance meant if you wanted to get into this web stuff and make cool things, Flash was *the* (only, really) way to do it. Which makes me think it may have been a time and place thing, which we won't get back. The modern web and range of options maybe makes it too diffuse, harder for something new to catch on. I hope I'm wrong.

As others have said here though, maybe stuff like MineCraft and Roblox are filling a similar conceptual gap for different generations and I'm just old and nostalgic.

Flash was an onramp to UX engineering in a way that no current tool compares to.

You would start out drawing, get tired of the repetitive parts, and learn to automate them. Eventually, you end up with an FLA file that's just an asset library and a reference to a script.

Plus, it had the most intuitive vector editor I've ever used.

> Code was inside MovieClips (in Flash [almost] everything was a MovieClip, basically a timeline of frames). Code was attached to frames.

It will be interesting to see if this project ends up working more like AS2 or AS3. AS2 gamedev was a real mess, but it sure was great for the simplest things.

Loved his CISCO talks. RIP.

One of my favorite DEF CON talks https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2017/DEF%20CON%2017%20vid...

I basically use a spec driven approach except I only let Github Spec Kit create the initial md file templates and then fill them myself instead of letting the agent do it. Saves a ton of tokens and is reasonably quick and I actually know I wrote the specs myself and it contains what I want. After I'm happy with the md file "harness" I let the agents loose.

The most frustrating issues that pop up are usually library/API conflicts. I work with Gymnasium or PettingZoo and Rlib or stablebaselines3. The APIs are constantly out of sync so it helps to have a working environment were libraries and APIs are in sync beforehand.

XFCE is also my go to. But I have moved on from caring too much about desktop environments as long as they don't get in the way. I went through a phase of trying pure openbox and all kinds of things and settled on XFCE. It doesn't do everything like I want but that's fine. I mostly open a terminal, a browser, thunderbird, some programming environment and a latex editor these days.

I'd personally bet on Google and Meta in the long run since they have access to the most interesting datasets from their other operations.

Agree. Anyone with access to large proprietary data has an edge in their space (not necessarily for foundation models): Salesforce, adobe, AutoCAD, caterpillar