AI companies would love that. Just as oil companies love it that climate change is still debated throughout society. Big tech would prefer nobody cared about privacy.
People are starting to notice and care about these things.
Maybe I’m just not cynical enough about the “average” non-HN population but I think there are quite a few people who care.
Lots of people from all walks of life play board games. There are a lot of people who refuse to buy games made with AI generated assets. They go as far as making forums and tracking these things so that other folks can avoid them.
If they did use AI and still charged as much as they do for a sprue of models people would definitely be upset.
AI generated anything is seen as cheap. It is cheap. It generates “similar” reproductions from its training set. It’s called, “slop,” for a reason: low effort, low quality.
There have been quality issues in some of GW’s recent product lines, but for the most part they still have fans because the bar is already high for what they make.
Cutting costs to make an extra bunch by making the product crappier would be a kick to the knee. Fans already pay a premium for their products.
Its exactly the opposite. Plants grow larger with higher CO2. And they also reduce in digestive quality significantly as more of the material is lignin.
> At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
> There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
There’s low confidence in the magnitude of this effect in that report.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
There is enough evidence to support claims that AI is a black hole where money gets evaporated.
It’s great that you can delegate some tasks to it now and not have to write all of the code yourself. There is some evidence showing that it doesn’t benefit junior developers nearly as much. If you didn’t generate the specification test that demonstrates the concurrency issue you were trying to solve in Redis but you read the code it generated and understood it then you didn’t need to learn anything. How is a junior developer who has never solved such problems supposed to learn so they can do the same thing?
But worse, UBI and such are the solutions of libertarian oligarchs that dream of a world without people, according to Doctorow and I think he’s right. It seems like the author also wants this? He doesn’t seem to know what will happen to the jobless but we should vote in some one who will start a government program to take care of them. How long until the author is replaced as well?
Lastly… who’s “hyping” anti-AI and what do they gain from making false claims?
I think the real problem for programming is when these companies all collapse and take the rest of the economy down with them… are there going to be enough programmers left to maintain everything? Or will we be sifting though the mountains of tech debt never to see the light of day again?
It’d be a shame if MS was compelled by the current US administration to shutdown EU users of CoPilot/365/whatever. Whole agencies within governments lose all of their data and can barely function.
A move to alternatives is an imperative! I hope it works for them and stimulates their tech sector.
As a Linux guy for many a year, I've often said that going all-in on Microsoft tech stacks is like painting yourself into a corner. It all looks like it's going fine until you decide that you want to leave the room.
It'd be a shame if an asteroid struck earth tomorrow as well.
But given limited resources, we tend not to devote a ton of resources to every possible tail risk since there's millions of them.
Europe should focus on building domestic tech capacity for other reasons (our own future prosperity being one), but being worried about Microsoft Word access over some silly news headlines is not one of them.
Every single productivity suite can open/modify word docs and powerpoints and excel formats. This is not a huge issue.
The US doesnt recognize many of the bodies you would use as enforcement against aggressive action on EU bought US products. Or for some it does, it gives itself immunity from them like the ICJ.
Also considering the US's unilateral and often violent and aggressive and illegal way of doing things, especially with this administration, I think we're a bit past hypothetical meteor-like hypotheticals.
At this point any usage of destructive leverage the USA has over Europe should be seen as a real possibility, if not a likely one, when it comes to negotiation with or the expansionist desires of the USA.
Again, pulling Microsoft Office from the EU would be an extremely minor nuisance (libre office can open the same formats) at the expense of the US's national champion ever being used by any country outside the US ever again.
This is never going to happen (killing Microsoft would not be seen favorably by anyone in the current or future administration) and even if this magically did happen, it would barely cause a blip in the (lack of) productivity in the EU's performative planning meetings about future meetings where nothing happens.
On the list of things to worry about I would put this dead last.
This performative, melodramatic nonsense you're spewing here is doing us no good when ultimately our biggest threat is in the east, which you will happily continue ignoring as they eat our private sector and tax base.
"Orange man bad" is not a delusion I want to see spread any further in Europe. Turn off the news and start thinking rationally again please.
Didn’t the International Criminal Court went through a test run of this which shows it’s at least feasible [0].
While MS didn’t cut off the whole organization and try to soften the language around what they did, it seems they could be compelled to do so under more strict executive sanctions.
I don’t think an entire institution would suddenly come crashing to its knees but it would certainly be a pressing problem to be facing if the US or some other state actor was also mounting some other form of pressure or attack.
The US Implemented sanctions on the ICJ and they have to emergency migrate out of their O365 tenant. The US also recently stationed the former EU commissioner who was the architect of the Digital Markets Act.
So while unlikely, it is not a huge jump for the Trump administration to try sanctioning EU institutions they don't like.
How many tech people deep into open source are also going to be able to build convincing cases for governments? More importantly, to be more convincing than the sales people of MS/Amazon/Google who also have financial incentives to give away?
I don't think you'll get a complete switch here, this is looking more like "let's cultivate a backup option in case they really do start turning stuff off"
In the same way Poetin accelerated the move from his own fossil fuels to renewable energy, Trump is accelerating the move to non-US based technology. At least in my surroundings, "non-US based company" is a big plus in the purchasing process.
I don't think anybody understand how bad it really is. Forget about Greenland. Trump can say "give me Germany or I'll shutdown Azure ID" and we will have to give him Germany. At this point we are just praying that neither him or any of his hawks realize this.
I agree that many countries are indeed very vulnerable to this, but you somehow managed to overstate the case by some orders of magnitude.
Silicon Valley flipping the switch on a country would sure cause short-term chaos and longer-term significant inconvenience. But when push comes to shove, bureaucracy gets moved aside, creative workarounds pop up, and people make do, somehow. We've seen that happen during COVID-19 lockdowns.
And after some time, the boycotted regions will find themselves with a healthy independent software industry. Silicon Valley's global impact would be greatly reduced, because any mildly sensible country would want to reduce its exposure and some serious competition will finally get traction.
I think the hawks realize all this. Though it's of course impossible to predict what the Chaos Monkey in Chief will do.
For the longest time MUDs were my standard "learn a new language" project. There's enough meat to expose strengths of the language but overall they're pretty simple.
I love how concise that Haskell code is! I've also started building a new MUD engine, but in Rust (previously I've written a partially complete one in Go), and this time around I'm working on implementing a MUD using an ECS (entity component system).
I'm also planning on an ECS system as well! Very cool. Are you publishing the code somewhere? There's also a Slack for MUD developers if you're interested in chilling with like-minded people: https://mudcoders.com/join-the-mud-coders-guild-6770301ddcbd...
I have 'Create a MUD server' on my side project todo list. I Want to do it with golang too. I have some experience with C and SMAUG codebase; just tinkering around. What were your biggest challenges and wins with a Go based MUD server?
When I wrote the Go one, the biggest challenge I had was synchronizing global state, since it was massively concurrent (there was a server goroutine to handle the main game tick, and two goroutines per connected client, one to read and the other to write).
I ran into a fair amount of deadlock situations during development of different features, and in retrospect I think I would have benefited a lot from the architectural/paradigm shift to an ECS or an actor model like https://github.com/anthdm/hollywood
As for the wins, Go always makes it very easy dealing with concurrency primitives, I really loved using channels, and pretty much everything I needed was in the standard library.
It satisfies the dream of a business with no people. As Doctorow illustrates it, like plugging the Fisher-Price steering wheel into the drive train of the business.
I’ve heard this analogy used to justify firing developers for not using GenAI: a cabinet maker who doesn’t use power tools shouldn’t be working as a cabinet maker.
If only programming languages (or GenAI) were tools like hammers and augers and drills.
Even then the cabinets you see that come out of shops that only use hand tools are some of the most sturdy, beautiful, and long lasting pieces that become the antiques. They use fewer cuts, less glue, avoid using nails and screws where a proper joint will do, etc.
Less glue and avoidance of nails and screws doesn't make it sturdier. Fastening things strongly makes your furniture sturdier than not doing so. Antiques suck as often as they don't, and moreover you are only seeing the ones that survived without a base rate to compare it to; they succeeded in spite of power tools, but power tools would have made the same object better.
Comparing it to AI makes no sense. Invoking it is supposed to bring to mind the fact that it's worse in well-known ways, but then the statement 'better in every way' no longer applies. Using Rust passively improves the engineering quality compared to using anything else, unlike AI which sacrifices engineering quality for iteration speed.
> Less glue and avoidance of nails and screws doesn't make it sturdier. Fastening things strongly makes your furniture sturdier than not doing so.
No disrespect intended, but your criticism of the analogy reveals that you are speaking from assumptions, but not knowledge, about furniture construction.
In fact, less glue, and fewer fasteners (i.e. design that leverages the strength of the materials), is exactly how quality furniture is made more sturdy.
There was an interesting video on YT where an engineer from a fastener company joined a carpenter to compare their products with traditional joints.
The traditional joints held up very well and even beat the engineered connectors in some cases. Additionally one must be careful with screws and fasteners: if they’re not used according to spec, they may be significantly weaker than expected. The presented screws had to be driven in diagonally from multiple positions to reach the specified strength; driving them straight in, as the average DIYer would, would have resulted in a weak joint.
Glue is typically used in traditional joinery, so less glue would actually have a negative effect.
> Glue is typically used in traditional joinery, so less glue would actually have a negative effect.
And a lot of traditional joinery is about keeping the carcase sufficiently together even after the hide glue completely breaks down so that it can be repaired.
Modern glues allow you to use a lot less complicated joinery.
I’m not sure that the distinction between “element-wise” and “group-wise” mindsets are mutually exclusive in the design space for a language.
The set of programs that can express problems as transformations on arrays is quite large.
But I think there’s a large overlap with programs that also need to manage resource lifetimes as well where a resource could be a region of foreign-allocated allocated memory, a database connection, etc; a process-scoped object that can only be acquired (or not) at runtime.
Even in Odin you’re going to need to think in terms of arrays and how individual element lifetimes at some point depending on how you classify and structure data. The trade off seems to be that how you specify and maintain contracts for the lifetime of objects like sockets and handles are up to you and Odin won’t help you with that. In return you get array oriented initialisation?
People are starting to notice and care about these things.
Maybe I’m just not cynical enough about the “average” non-HN population but I think there are quite a few people who care.
Lots of people from all walks of life play board games. There are a lot of people who refuse to buy games made with AI generated assets. They go as far as making forums and tracking these things so that other folks can avoid them.
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