beders

I can always rely on hacker news to improve my English

This is magnificent!

Gave me roller-coaster ride across 40 years of gathering knowledge about computers and networks.

I'm very jealous of whoever created that. Well done!

Oh we know. That's why static types are a la carte in Clojure. You can have them if you really really want them.

It'll take a while but now other programming languages look alien to me. Once you've adopted s-expressions it is hard to go back.

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.

There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.

And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?

Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?

Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?

You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common? They thought their plants were safe.

So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.

Good thing you have a variety of those nowadays. Clojure runs in the browser, Node.js, cross-compiles to Dart, works stand-alone via babashka and has a brand new C++ interfacing implementation in Jank.

The ergonomics of using a proper REPL and interactive programming is hard to beat.

Nobody should take the Pope seriously or the Vatican.

An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.

I think you highlight one of the problems with users of LLMs: You can't tell anymore if it is BS or not.

I caught Claude the other day hallucinating code that was not only wrong, but dangerously wrong, leading to tasks being failed and never recover. But it certainly wasn't obvious.

Thank you for putting it so succinctly.

I keep explaining to my peers, friends and family that what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency and that the term AI is just completely overloaded right now.

My employer is trying to convince us to embrace spec-kit. But we are a Clojure shop: we iterate fast and produce results. We don't sit around and write specs and then hope working code plops out.

> Define the contract before writing a single line of implementation. Specs are the source of truth.

There is only one source of truth and that is the source code. To define and change contracts written in an ambiguous language and then hope the right code will magically appear, is completely delusional.

Iteration is the only game in town that is fast and produces results.

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.

The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.

The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.

As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.

In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

The reason they are on Bluesky is that it just works, its client just works and the barrier of entry is low. Oh, and others they want to follow are on there. That's it.

No regular user cares about - oh my data, it is stored centrally, how evil! That is just not a problem most people have. Like at all.

It's sad how many people are falling for the narrative that there's more at play here than predict-next-token and some kind of emergent intelligence is happening.

No, that is just your interpretation of what you see as something that can't possibly be just token prediction.

And yet it is. It's the same algorithm noodling over incredible amounts of tokens.

And that's exactly the explanation: People regularly underestimate how much training data is being used for LLMs. They contain everything about writing a compiler, toy examples, full examples, recommended structure yadda yadda yadda.

I love working with Claude and it regularly surprises me but that doesn't mean I think it is intelligent.

This never-ending whining about oooh but my data ... for a service that you can use for free is nauseating.

This is a for-profit company running this service. It ain't free to operate.

If you don't like that, go elsewhere.

If there is one thing that has been a resounding success on the internet it is this: free services that you pay for with your clicks. Just look at the plethora of free services you get.

In no other economy would that be even remotely possible.