I always thought that the "answer" to programming would be that one day everyone would use Lisp and with awesome tooling and libraries things would be wonderful. In fact, my plan for retirement was to build high-quality libraries for a Lisp language to accelerate this process.
Does the rise of AI bring an end to this dream? Is that, once again, we have solved the problem by adding more cruft? Rather than a superintelligent AI writing in the best programming language available, we're going to just spam lots of Python code until it works?
Does this matter? I don't know, I just wanted a world of elegance.
I actually think we're in a strange situation with AI compute.
Right now, we have models that are statistical models of language, with a world model and reasoning "falling out" of a lot of effort.
It's like we've made something that's a little bit intelligent, and now we're trying to amplify that trick to create something that's quite intelligent. And - don't get me wrong - it works.
But it's also super, super inefficient. We're having machines "think out loud" to compensate for the quality of their thought processes. We elongate the path to make up for the progress made on a given step.
I tink there's probably a much smarter way of doing things that will require qualitative architectural (and quite possibly hardware) innovations. Right now we're on the path to a Dyson sphere: that's probably not going to be necessary once we figure out a smarter way to think.
I've repeatedly bounced on and off 20VC by Harry Stebbings, but this year I'm finally hooked.
The main draw is the episode released towards the end of the week with Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) and Rory O'Driscoll (Scale Venture Partners). With the pace of AI announcements, it's been a good place to recap and analyse the week's events. In particular, Rory's insights are usually spot-on.
Are the trains located where the urban areas are, or are the urban areas built around the train network?
It's chicken and egg question, but in Manchester and London it's very clear that mass transit led to urban development, rather than the other way around.
It's very surprising that cities like Leeds have no mass transit at all, and sizeable cities like Liverpool and Birmingham don't have much.
It's a good question. We had a previous language, JDoc, based in JSON. It covered only part of the functionality of the XML-based language and was really only for machine-machine.
We researched a bunch of others: languages like LaTeX and Typst are obvious alternatives. We also considered a super-augmented version of Markdown. Even looked at YAML.
Last year we chose XML as the basis for our document language.
It's been a good choice for designing a new language, but we've been really surprised by the poor quality of the available parsers. We figured it would be a solved problem, but we'll be writing our own at some point.
> or automating abusive or spam comments on social media.
Actually, the biggest problem is the automation of inane comments on X. Which is admittedly quite surprising - I would have agreed with OpenAI at the time.
Marijn: just came here to say that I think ProseMirror is a brilliantly designed project - that you're intent on improving on it is amazing dedication to your craft.
> Rocket Lab has secured commitments for a $3.6 billion bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to fund the cash portion of the acquisition.
Given the timing, this seems like a risky move as they'll be issuing debt in mid-2027 to refinance the bridge, at a time the market could be saturated / corrected.