Kevin_Flynn

As a software engineer who is working on retiring to a small farm somewhere, I have no problem with the prospect of living on 10% of my former income, assuming, the other 90% of my income used to be spent on obtaining resources that I now can obtain for myself or no longer need.

In other words, if I can do more for myself, I require less interaction with commercial and governmental institutions.

Since money is a form of communication, if I am conducting fewer financial transactions because I am solving problems on my own, my standard of living doesn't necessarily decline with reduced income.

You don't need to do anything to retrain someone.

You let them retrain themselves.

People in "coal country" who can't get a job in a mine, do something other than mining. Hunger is a powerful motivator.

A $10 a month cell phone plan is all it takes to get 24/7 access to all the worlds information, and AI's intelligent queries into it.

And yes, you will have millions who never learn how to use said information to their own benefit, but we've known for awhile that poverty is a behaviorial problem as much as it is a resource problem.

> This is better than policies that create stupid incentives like in your example.

I wasn't aware that I promoted a policy. Can you point it out for me ?

> I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once.

The only events that happen "all at once" are in our heads as hypotheticals.

In the real world, every change takes time to propagate.

It stands to reason, all of the "experts" of the world are going to be in less demand than they were before, because some percentage of people, will replace them with AI, for some percentage of tasks.

Stated another way, each of us will be consulting with AI more, and assigning some number of tasks to a non-expert, with the help of expertise from AI, and talking to human experts less frequently.

Interactions will decrease in frequency. In the commercial space, this means transactions will decrease in number and amount. This is "bad" for everyone, in the financial sense. Corporations lose revenues, governments lose revenues, employees get pay cuts, etc.

But downward trajectories on financial charts have been a problem for every fiat based economy we know of, long before AI came into the picture.

Maybe AI will teach the world what to do when the charts turn down instead of up.

Infinite growth doesn't exist in a closed ecosystem, and we arent expanding into space yet.

For decades magazines and other media have promoted the idea that some day, technology will relieve us of the base burden of existence, and free us to do all those wonderful leisure activities we enjoy.

Now that AI seems to be able to deliver on the promise, the thing we seem to fear the most is the deflation of our own egos.

Ironically, as a software engineer, my perceived value of marketing, sales, management, and maintenance have all declined significantly.

With an AI client app running on my trucks android stereo, I can hire day laborers from the home depot parking lot to replace them.

And now that I read my own words, I think both positions are flawed. :|

I was thinking that everyone would suddenly become a "truck driver" overnight, just so they can sign up for the free money.

We need to keep in mind the scope and scale of the environments in which this UBI experiment is being tried in.

The temporary success or failure of the UBI experiment seems entirely dependent on whether the country is a major currency, a manufacturing base, a service oriented economy, etc, etc, etc. and it doesn't seem likely to work for everyone, or for any individual small nation for an indefinite period of time.

> there is realistically no way to retrain this cohort. [truck drivers]

I disagree. They had to attend class and pass a test to get a CDL. They were trained to drive a truck, they can be trained to perform another task. Truck drivers are not lobotomized.

Yeah, they all have one quirk or another which seems to make the app your trying to work on impossible. For me, it was always the integration of async event loops w/ the widget framework.

As for the decade old roast, theres a few things I disagree with.

...

Using Qt, one would write:

auto widget = new QWidget{parent}; widget->show();

2 lines, all obvious, all working as expected.

...

No. It's 2 lines, which makes it "not at all obvious." Those 2 lines have so much baked in functionality, I have no idea what its doing until I read 100 pages of documentation and become an "expert" on the internals of that specific UI toolkit.

...

But let’s go into some details. Remember the quote about types? EFL takes that philosophy seriously. Everything is a pointer to something called Evas_Object, which translates to void *. Those knowledgeable in the horrible language of C know it’s a pointer to anything. And so it is.

...

Okay, now we see where the motivation to roast comes from. This guy hates the C language itself, so he's going to hate any GUI toolkit coded in C.

Theres no argument from me that C's syntax makes coding GUIs based on object hierarchies more difficult than languages with proper OO support, but the alternatives have their own problems as well.

At the end of the day, its good to have choices.

You got me there.

I forgot about GNOME/gtk+

Which is odd, because I've written a bit of gtk 3 code.

I don't know, I don't want to say anything negative, only that I'm looking forward to using enlightenment again. :|

Much like physicists who spend their careers searching for a "grand unified theory of everything," I'm a software engineer searching for the UI toolkit that runs on everything.

I wanted it to be enlightenment, way back in the day,

Before becomming enthralled with the widgets of gtk,

Gave both IUP and Agar a try, but much to my dismay,

There were quirks to be found, so I tossed them away.

:|

Nice to see this project moving forward.

Enlightment is the most complete ( although not complete ) UI ecosystem in C that I've seen.

I have an abundance of clarity that I'd like to sell.

Please add this feature.

I searched around, but couldn't find source code. :(

All cloud services have this risk ( using your personal info against you, leaking your personal info by getting hacked, etc. )

Local services are the solution to this.

You know the day destroys the night,

And night divides the day,

So we'll have more fun on Halloween,

After the grumpy words from the UK.

Happy Halloween