Take Claude Code - after I've described my requirement it gives me a customised UI that asks me to make choices specific to what I have asked it to build (usually a series of dropdown lists of 3-4 options). How would a static UI do that in a way that was as seamless?

The example used in the article is a bit more specific but fair - if you want to calculate the financial implications of a house purchase in the 'old software paradigm' you probably have to start by learning excel and building a spreadsheet (or using a dodgy online calculator someone else built, which doesn't match your use case). The spreadsheet the average user writes might be a little simplified - are we positive that they included stamp duty and got the compounding interest right? Wouldn't it be great if Excel could just give you a perfectly personalised calculator, with toggle switches, without users needing to learn =P(1+(k/m))^(mn) but while still clearly showing how everything is calculated? Maybe Excel doesn't need to be a tool which is scary - it can be something everyone can use to help make better decisions regardless of skill level.

So yes, if you think of software only doing what it has done in the past, Gen UI does not make sense. If you think of software doing things it has never done before we need to think of new interaction modes (because hopefully we can do something better than just a text chat interface?).

That's Baudrillard's point, who popularized one sense of the term "simulacrum." Not quite real, but not quite fiction either - something that straddles the boundary between the two as "hyperreality."

Again, this is just asserting the premise that reasoning cannot include pattern matching, but this has never been justified. What is your definition for "reasoning"?

> This is clearly pattern matching and overfitting to the "doctor riddle" and a good demonstration of how there's no actual reasoning going on.

Not really, no. "Bad reasoning" does not entail "no reasoning". Your conclusion is simply too strong for the evidence available, which is why I'm asking for a rigourous definition of reasoning that doesn't leave room for disagreement about whether pattern matching counts.

It's hard to say whether this has been trained out (it's an old example) or if it's just another hurdle that general model progression has overcome.

In their, quality software can be written in any programming language.

In practice, folks who use Python or JavaScript as their application programming language start from a position of just not carrying very much about correctness or performance. Folks who use languages like Java or C#, do. And you can see the downstream effects of this in the difference in the production-grade developer experience and the quality of packages on offer in PIP and NPM versus Maven and NuGet.

Never gonna happen.

You have to have a pretty good reputation for discretion to get them to really talk, but I noticed a pattern in those who would.

You tend to hear their list of grievances in reverse chronological order. The last straw comes first, but if you keep them talking long enough the first straw eventually comes out.

Some of those first straws are often something pretty avoidable. The final straw can be harder to avoid but recency bias makes us focus on it in ways that don’t seem to line up with the experiences of the person who feels wronged.

I can’t say for sure if they accumulate linearly or not but it does seem like fixing the easy ones does result in longer times to last straw. But they seem so minor to the team that it can be difficult to get movement on them. And it sometimes only applies to new “customers”. Some will forgive you for things they had to deal with if nobody else has to, but that would take a lot more data points than I have to say for sure.

It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.

Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).

Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.

It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.

In the Classical Period, it was the citizen soldiers of Rome and Greece, at least in the west. These produced the ancient republics and proto-democracies.

Later replaced by professional standing armies under people like Alexander and the Ceasars. This allowed kings and emperors.

In the Early to Mid Medieaval time, they were replaced by knights, elites who allowed a few men to defeat commoners many times their number. This caused feudalism.

Near the end of the period, pikes and crossbows and improved logistic systems shifted power back to central governments, primarily kings/emperors.

Then, with rifles, this swung the pendulum all the way back to citizen soldiers between the 18th and early 20th century, which brought back democracies and republics.

Now the pendulum is going in the opposite direction. Technology and capital distribution has already effectively moved a lot of power back to an oligarchic elite.

And if full AGI combined with robots more physically capable than humans, it can swing all the way. In principle a single monarch could gain monopoly of violence over an entire country.

Do not take for granted that our current undertanding of what the government is, is going to stay the same.

Some kind of merger between capital and power seems likely, where democratic elections quickly become completely obsolete.

Once the police and military have been mostly automated, I don't think our current system is going to last very long.

It's just a physics book that happens to have pictures of the popstar in it.

Yes, and no. I think a problem is critique in the form of action. There are movements such as the indie web (e.g. Neocities, Nekoweb, Agoraroad) that long for the old web in their nostalgia and form a counter-movement to the current state of the web. The websites and communities that emerge from this are more or less an imitation of the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. My problem with this is that the indie web primarily defines itself by simply being the opposite of the web 2.0. It exists primarily as a counterculture, in which “counter” is more important part than "culture". This movement is cynical in that a better future for the internet and the web no longer seems possible, and the only way out is to escape into a nostalgically romanticized past. For me, this is more of a confirmation of the Dead Internet Theory than of the Alive Internet Theory.

"who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"

In my city there's court documents going 5 centuries back, and there was a tradition among scribes to fill the pages between separate cases with "obviously false cases" and other stories so nobody can add false details to the cases.

So there are stories about a sheep sueing a wolf and other classic jokes.

And in the actual court documents from 17th century there's a formally written letter signed "Pluton, lord of all hells" praising his protestant politicians for doing great job in the city :) At the time there was reformation and counterreformation going on.

And there were obviously legends based on that :)

It's a 15 minute train ride to Manchester. 30-40 min drive/bus trip to Manchester, 1 hour train ride to Leeds and slightly longer drive.

Generally Tameside is well serviced, you got all the amenities you would expect and location wise you have very good access for commuting. Manchester, Salford, Leeds university all easily accessible. Tamesides location makes it popular as a commuter location looking for lower costs of living.

It's always been a working class place. Despite the wealth of the industrial revolution, the grand factories mostly now demolished and buildings, the majority of people where/are working class low paid workers and didn't see that money although the money built grand markets and highstreets for workers to spend the wages.

Tameside is a low socioeconomic area which is generational.

I went to an at best, average school. The importance of school wasn't really seen, or taught at home or in school. Myself, I had a mixed schooling history. Troublesome/difficult, likely influenced through parents attitudes, being bullied at times, not academically smart but not dumb, dyslexic and can remember one specific teacher publicly shaming me for not being able to spell my surname instead of trying to teach me. My social worker partner is adamant i'm on the spectrum. I feel there was a nurturing missing generally at these average, low social economic schools and my time could of been better with the right support in school. Eck I got a C GCSE in maths but learnt a bit of category theory, Haskell and functional programming myself.

Those who had a reasonable fortunate home life seem to of done just ok in their adult life from the area.

Those who were disruptive, high level of truancy, poor parenting, some are dead, some are in prison, some look like they should be dead with addiction. Their kids will likely follow down the same path they did and they've had more kids than the people who turned out alright.

Growing up in low social economic environments is hard to break out of. It starts at home with the importance of education and it's hard to start at home when your parents and parents parents never seen the importance and then the schooling isn't prepared to deal with it.

I broke out of it leaving as fast as I could, hard work when younger and some luck.

The north can be raw, probably not so much these days but "southern pansy" or "posh", "gay" is used disparagingly for people trying to better themself. I grew up not in poverty and not well off, in a area that wasn't the worst but not great. My mum see's anyone who has done well for themselfs as "posh" looking down on her and that can be a common theme with the less fortunate people I know in the area. This is a generational attitude.

The story seems common over the world. People growing up less well off struggle to get out of being less well off and it often starts at home and education and it's hard to start at home in the environment you are in and education doesn't happen due to home environment apart from the few outliers who do overcome the odds stacked against them.

It's funny reading these articles from people who haven't grew up poor, in the north, never seen a council estate, or the way of life, talking about Universities in 1066 and Northern Conquests as a reason.

It is the best answer at the moment. You can keep an absolute basic phone with all the banking and such apps loaded and nothing else. You treat it like an appliance. Your daily driver will be separate and can be running PostmarketOS or LineageOS etc.

There are several benefits off the top of my head:

1. Since you only install banking/govt type apps on your "important" phone, it stays more secure vs. putting your random game app along with the banking app on the same phone.

2. When you upgrade your daily driver, you don't need to deal with tons of re-auth steps for banking/govt apps.

3. Your daily driver can be customized to the nth degree because the pesky banking app won't be on it to refuse login because, say, you turned on developer options or rooted the phone.

4. You can even leave the basic phone at home for extra safety, if you wish, without affecting your daily driver.

5. You can root your daily driver and put as much adblocking setup as you want to boost your privacy. Your basic phone won't have enough activity outside banking/govt. to build much of a profile.

Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives.

A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily driver for everyone it is certainly the route that needs to be taken.

I'm still unable to use it because is not easy to break away from Android, but is a platform that I think about almost every day, because I do not want to use Android anymore and I'm willing to sacrifice certain aspects to have an open and friendly platform on my hands. And if it is not PostmarketOS then let it be another project.

We need these kind of projects, not kneeling down to a company like Google and begging for Android to be open. Effort needs to be put elsewhere. That's how major projects like Linux, BSDs and open source projects have flourished and taken the world.

For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly)

We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized

Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything that supports their political alignment

People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with more garbage to support something they really want to believe

It's a weird time to be alive

This has been a slow 111 year project. See the opening of A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945:

> Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.

> All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

While you /can/ make a premium offering with competent support as a competitive advantage, the most short-term profit to be made is then to buy that company after it's established a brand reputation and burn that brand reputation as fuel to produce extra profit until it becomes worthless and anyone who held your stock previously is left holding the bag.

My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps: - Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".

- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).

Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.

Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.

Which is a weird thing that happened to me or that I became aware of a few years ago, late at night or when I lie down for a nap I can get into that state, it's like dreaming while being awake. Of course, as soon as I'm aware of that I snap out of it, it's like "hey I want to keep following that train of thought" but it doesn't work when it's active.

Of course, if I don't snap out of it like that I will invariably fall asleep, lol.

It should also be noted that while all sorts of breathing techniques have been repeatedly rediscovered for thousands of years it was the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof who prominently introduced Holotropic Breathwork to the West as a means of alternative to LSD after it had been banned in the US.

I understand that Apple did not make enough money to make it worth their while to continue the iphone mini line. However, it does seem like there is a profitable business for someone there given how beloved it was/is.

I only traded out my iphone 12 mini just recently for an iphone 16 pro (likely the last apple product I will ever buy but thats another story) and aside from the camera it is basically the same. Just heavier, awkward to hold and slightly worse designed.

No major player wants a smaller screen because it has downstream impacts on the pipeline of addictive material and ad pixels they can stuff into ocular nerves.