BrenBarn

How about antimatter?

> Editor’s note: This ruling was translated in DeepL from its original Portuguese to American English.

That adds an interesting meta-twist to this.

I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).

It's not correct that Basque is the only non-Indo-European language in Europe; this is also true of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and some other minority languages in the far north of Scandinavia. However, it has been hypothesized that Basque is the only language in Europe that is pre-Indo-European, having existed there before Indo-European languages spread to that area (although it's hard to know this for sure). Either way, you're right that it's a fascinating language!

I think there is a meaningful difference between an Intel 486 and a portable device like a tablet, especially if the former is not connected to the internet (or is connected to the internet as it was circa 1995). I think it could be fine and even beneficial to give a kid a desktop computer to write games using QuickBasic, and at the same time very harmful to give them a tablet.

Total time of what? Like what is the end goal that people are trying to achieve? All of the examples I can see in the post are similarly about development-internal stuff like tests and performance (or games). What I mean by true ambition would be stuff that is actually aimed at helping people in the world at large, not just helping developers develop.

Ambition doesn't scale with the number of small things you get done. Ambition is the size of the big thing you are trying to do. It's true that improving small things can help you do that big thing, but that's not the same as the ambition itself. Wanting to build a better mousetrap is just a modest technical ambition. The kind of ambition I'm talking about is wanting to eradicate the plague, and then maybe building a better mousetrap as a means to that end.

> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.

In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.

Amen to that. I was surprised to see yours seems to be the only comment with this sentiment. This post was kind of depressing to read. Like if AI is so amazing and can one-shot so much astounding stuff, why is anyone wasting their time on pointless "projects" like making ripgrep faster?

"Small" as in tens of thousands of users on a site that has existed for 10 years. I don't think most people in their lives wind up making a decision that has as broad an impact as that.

Another lo-fi site trying to create friendly community without corporate greed bites the dust, in this case apparently due to burnout on the part of the main person running it. I hadn't used Pillowfort much but did browse and explore some blogs on there and it seemed like a positive community. Always sad to see stuff like this happen.

We'll never get past this as long "well you didn't update" is considered an acceptable rebuttal. The problem is created when vulnerable software is released. We would be better off slowing things down by a factor of a hundred or more rather than continuing the current approach of "update every day to fix the new vulnerabilities introduced by the last update that fixed the old vulnerabilities".

Just more self-serving hokum. If they really wanted to serve the public benefit they would just shut themselves down.

> fair point. it depends on how fast you want to get it done.

I want it yesterday. :-)

> going to fast will produce to much resistance. instead of attacking the rich, let this generation die out, and make things harder for the next generation.

But this generation will just pass their wealth, and their determination to protect it, to their heirs. There has to be some point at which the flow reverses and the accumulated wealth of the super-rich actually begins to decrease, not just increase at a slower rate.

Well we could start by destroying Facebook.