BjoernKW

Intelligent UI for everyone is Bret Victor's vision for computing UX finally coming to fruition.

I've always found his work impressive, but for the most part it was all prototypes and proofs of concept.

Having such interactivity available to everyone now is nothing short of groundbreaking and another indication AI works as the great equalizer by democratising capabilities previously available only to a select few.

Mathematically speaking, because compilation is a surjective function. Context, organizational, as well as personal knowledge - that information simply is lost in the process of compilation.

It can be restored to some extent by making educated guesses, but it'll never be exactly as readable as the original, which in some cases probably isn't that bad, because the original source code might not have been particularly readable to begin with.

Anyone who has watched Interstellar should know this.

Well, there are very few things you truly _need_ an app for, but quite a few where an app comes in handy.

> “I have to now use an app to operate my washing machine. Why?!”

Frankly, that's asinine. However, I'd very much like my washing machine or tumble dryer to notify me when they're done (with those appliances sitting in the basement of my house).

I even remember a dorm at uni (TU Dortmund, back in the late 90s) having a website for their washers that'd retrieve and display a status via TCP/IP. IIRC, some guys at the local computer science department jerry-rigged some custom board into standard washing machines available at that time.

> The end of interest-based 3rd places

Whatever happened to pubs and the shared interest of drinking beer (and getting drunk in the process ...)? ;-)

> the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)

This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.

As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.

> GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.

> In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.

Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?

> In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.

Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.

> An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).

I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.

> We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

Engineers are prone to overcomplicating matters.

Pieter Levels famously runs Nomad List as vanilla PHP application on a single Linux server, while people keeps insisting you need a fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud setup and the modern stack-du-jour to provide such an application.