Again, Codeberg isn’t obscure. Worrying about front page HN links “confusing” others because you haven’t heard of something is about the silliest thing I have read on this site.
> When considering the reasons for a language, look at the negation. Nobody writes a language to be "unapproachable"… Nobody really wants to stick "non-extensible" on their language…
And yet, unapproachable languages and non-extensible languages exist. More specifically, there are languages where approachability and extensibility formed no part of the design goals and it shows.
This seems like a good set of ideas if you can guarantee that you'll never have false alarms. I've had too many birds in warehouses and employees forgetting their codes to feel comfortable going full-hell-interior on alarm.
I'm also on the $100 max plan. I let Fable rip on a complicated issue involving hot-reloading modules in a GUI app built with Racket, it's fixed a couple issues over the last hour, and I've used about 17% of my session (not weekly) limit.
But it doesn't, because none of those systems are presenting SQLite to the user as something they should be using; they don't even make SQLite available to the user at all. Those systems all use SQLite internally to manage data.
> My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.
> Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.
So he's saying there is a split between those who believe the state and the rule of law are essential tools of freedom, and those who believe technology can provide its own law and guarantees without any need for the state. None of that is incompatible with the EFF being a libertarian project.
And your confusion derives from…what? When he explains this, you feel the correct response is basically "nuh-uh"?
David Gelernter describes a theory of consciousness and creativity that explains why this works in his book “The Muse in the Machine”. I recommend it to everyone.
This sounds like you don’t have much exposure to actual professional engineering disciplines. I’m sure civil, electrical, structural and mechanical PEs would be quite surprised to hear there are no guardrails on their professions.
OK, but we're talking about people who are "against AI". Are you saying that opposition to AI might help people lose interest in it? I'm not aware of an example of opposition to a useful application of math that caused people to lose interest. It didn't happen with public key encryption, for example. Can you explain further how you see "hating AI" (in the sense of TFA) will cause a loss of interest?
> Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days.
Was computing the mandlebrot set ever shown to be broadly and commercially useful in some way?
This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.
It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.
I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)
To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?
I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.
I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them