dave1010uk

I hope this doesn't come to BCI.

I'm surprised there's not more discussion about potential inflection points here. When technology gets faster, it opens up whole new classes of UX that were hard to predict

For example, faster internet didn't mean being able to view 100x as many HTML4 web pages. It brought SaaS, streaming media and interactivity.

I'm not good at predicting, but some ideas:

1. All information gets augmented in real time with personalised context.

2. AI interaction seems more like find-as-you-type than a back and forth.

3. AI produces many outputs to pick from. Either the human, AI, or another system can do the deciding.

Even if it's last year's model, speeding up LLM inference could open up all sorts of opportunities.

> Explores what AI cannot

In other words, gradient descent isn't good at combinatorial optimisation. I'm sure the research is better but the hype in the blog post leaves a bad taste.

There must be a version of Rich Sutton’s Bitter Lesson that applies to alternative computing like this, along with all the other exciting specialised hardware we've seen come and go over the years, like expert systems, optical computing, neuromorphic computing, etc.

Something like:

    General purpose commodity silicon with rapidly evolving software generally beats specialised hardware.

Software is just so much faster to iterate and improve than hardware. AI is also improving it too (eg AlphaEvolve).

Specialized hardware may give a single, significant improvement that grabs headlines but in the long term, compounding small improvements win.

1. Solve reinforcement learning.

2. solve unsupervised learning.

3. gradually tackle more complicated things.

> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.

It looks a lot like a CvRDT (i.e. a state-based CRDT).

They describe it as a commutative monoid, which means it has associativity and commutativity. CvRDTs also need idempotence, so they can handle duplicate data. Either they are idempotent too (which would make it semilattice-like), or the network protocol handles the deduplication outside of the data itself.

Letting the payload/application define the merge operation is clever. I assume it would mean contracts could opt in to idempotency if it doesn't already exist.

The other bit Freenet has added is doing all this with DHT routing and subscriptions, rather than a more basic peer mesh. This is very different to a blockchain and means it probably isn't suited for anything transactional.

You could also parse prompts into an AST, run inference, run evals, then optimise the prompts with something like a genetic algorithm.

> Heck, there's others who were wealthy in scripture, even kings are they all doomed?

This is a great question. In the next verses, the disciples ask pretty much the same thing: "Who then can be saved?" and then Jesus explains to them:

    With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

Whether it's a camel or a rope (and whether it's a literal needle or a small city gate, as some people argue), I think is less important (though still interesting). Either way, after the rich young ruler walks away, Jesus turns to his disciples and paints a picture something that's completely impossible without God, no matter how hard we might try by ourselves.

Genesis is a theological narrative, which is very different to most things we read these days, especially as a software engineer.

1. The general consensus is that there were more people. This is assumed in Genesis and it (annoyingly!) doesn't bother to explain it, as the audience at the time already assumed it. Also, the authors weren't interested in all the logistics and technicalities that we are today.

2. Cities referenced in Genesis were likely fortified settlements, rather than like modern cities.

The idea that people in Africa could only build simple huts is a myth that came from the colonial era. Africa had large cities, architecture and metallurgy while parts of Europe were still tribal.

If you're keen to learn more, there are some good books that explain this much better than a comment can, such as "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth" by Fee & Stuart and "Genesis for Normal People" by Pete Enns. I haven't read it but "African Civilizations" by Graham Connah is probably the go-to book on how African cities and technologies were so much further ahead than traditional European/US narratives place them.

The best resource for these kinds of questions is probably "The Bible Project". They have a load of YouTube videos and podcasts that cover these kinds of questions.

tl;dr: like Starship's PS1 combined with Claude Code's skills.