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This applies to most fields. Far more people get advanced education now but just necessarily as you cater to a larger group of people you have to diminish the end goal and operate more by procedures and standardization. That reverberates and diminishes the skills of the more competent people who would have been able to learn all of the above a century ago, because now all the institutions cater to a larger body. I disagree about it being a mirror of the period as some absolute rule though. Insurance policies, building code/zoning, educational structures and the rest are all choices people make. The cost thing is always absurd to me as in medieval guild systems during the great plague people found resources to build great cathedrals. Acting like cathedrals were cheaper then compared to now is just absurd. We have the resources we just choose to use it to create trash and then burn it, and to punish anyone who tries to make anything that isn't trash.

You don't need to fret to play a chord properly on guitar just play the 3 highest strings together and that's an E minor chord. Just lightly hold the bottom highest string and the top two strings (to mute them) and you can play a G major. Or play them all open at once and you have a Em11

Something being a necessity doesn't mean it isn't a monstrosity

I don't care about "acceptability" personally however I have tried a bunch of different flows for AI generation of assets and will likely use them to some extent in the final product. The main issue comes to coherence. With code the coherence is strictly syntactic not semantic it's just about symbolic relationships and those are what LLMs are good at. An LLM implementing a piece of code with 0 preparation is likely to be indistinguishable from an engineer writing in manually. Coding itself is just the representation of syntactic relationships. The variables are true or false, that's it. Whether AI writes it or a person does if the variables end up in the right state at the right times it's insignificant especially if it's the same person structuring the code and just gets the AI to write it exactly as they would.

For AI generated assets getting coherence in terms of art assets not even just say like character art design, but artistic coherence is much broader and hard to make explicit. What is it that makes the colors, texture, models and animations work together well? What is the relationship between having an item with a specific color and texture in a specific context in relation to all those other items? That's essentially the question of what good art is and it's far more intuitive you could attempt to formalize it but someone can just disagree with your formalization and you can't really say anything.

Getting art that is coherent with the rest of your work depends upon having someone who is able to internalize it and express it. I personally don't think AI will ever be capable of that however I do think we will likely end up in a place where a good artist could leverage AI to produce far more assets then they could have individually. It will depend on them feeding it a bunch of structure and criteria and evaluating what it does though.

How can an AI understand enough about your character and his role in the story such that his personality is conveyed through his animation, his gait, his voice acting, the materials and clothing, etc. It's just not a strict syntactic relationship which is what AI is actually good at, there is no way to actually formally represent that.

The issue with AI generated assets for me is that they are just bad and ugly and being used by people with bad taste. I can see a future where you have technically competent artists having AI tools they can train or set up to reflect their vision and be closer to their work following principles they establish but we aren't there now. For coding because it lacks that a well written program by a human or AI (guided by a human) is basically identical. I could say an AI designed game would probably be awful for similar reasons that AI is or purely vibecoded things that are artistic like shaders, specific mechanical tuning, etc for the same reason AI art is bad. Those are also much easier to tune because they are at the end of the day symbolic formal representations that can be easily manipulated by AI.

Rule 1: be filled with Japanese people

Cities and any polity or group of people cannot be created by some abstract rules or enforced. You need it to be composed of individuals who are disposed to act harmoniously with each other and have a culture (which is basically a bunch of jigging to aid harmonious interactions, you cannot create top down the manners you don't want people to violate). Everyone acting in their own self-interest ends up creating a harmonious organization because all of their self-interest corresponds such that their self interest is reflected in the good of the whole.

Just as a feedback system, if there is something wrong in a city or organization if the person who encounters it sees it as contrary to their own self interest and is capable of dealing with it themselves they will.

If this internal principle does not exist you rely on top down surveillance and enforcement which is basically delusional if it works will only be through violent enforcement against the people. Again in terms of a feedback system, if the polity is constructed out of a bunch of individuals who have a self-interest that corresponds with the good of the whole, there is no need to propagate that information to some manager. The persons directly involved with it are capable of dealing with it mindful of it's impact on the good of the whole because it's good for them. If you do not have that you would need a system of management, evaluation, and enforcement which basically demands the disruption in question is something easy to communicate and form policies around. Anything that cannot be just cannot be dealt with and the system falls under it's own weight. That's why technocracy is a delusion that is always doomed to fail, if the individual units in a system are unable to deal with aberrations on their own it requires the whole mass of bureaucracy to evaluate, construct policies, enforce etc. That is only capable of handling anything which is understandable to that kind of system, which is a small fraction of actual disruptions.

I appreciate the efforts of people trying to emulate the positives of Japanese cities mimicking the externals of it and enforcing it on other people is the opposite of any actual organic system and itself prohibits the more dynamic system that is required for an actually stable polity. If someone sees a wallet on the street they have to see it as their own self-interest not to steal it. If people do not see themselves as having a shared self-interest with those around them there is no enforcement or rules or policies that can make that polity stable or harmonious.

bro just read the book Aristotle did not run a twitter account

I only recently switched to emacs, and my motivation was not that I like tinkering but that having a flexible gui thing I can create custom views for w/ LLMs have basically 0 cost of producing new tools/uis. It's much the same with the linux example, I have been a lifelong windows user but switched around a year ago. I've tried multiple times in the past but hated tinkering and the issues that came up so never stuck with it. Now with LLMs I'm using a tiling wm and can just have a suite of hotkeys that automate everything I need to do, and if I ever want a new thing I can create the new view in a minute and never think about it again. The niceness in openness in tools is being about to integrate with everything else I use effortlessly. I wouldn't say invisibility the goal, but even further the idea of an isolated tool is an abstraction of the general human-computer interface. Your window manager is just as much a part of your ide or text editor as anything else, it's just the mediating layers between you and the program. From a phenomenological perspective the distinction between the different tools or piece of software is essentially arbitrary. Having more open tools that allow you to integrate with your WM and other things allows you to create that effortless, thoughtless experience. I would say a good tool is frictionless, not invisible. What constitutes frictionless for different people will obviously vary based on say how many different computers do you need to work on, what is the breadth of different kind of software and environments you need to work on? How do you control going between those? A frictionless code editor for me is not a code editor that is simple like sublime which in order to integrate with what I do I assume I could figure out some way to do it with a ton of custom scripting, but what is frictionless for me is what is open enough to allow me to go between a variety of different contexts without thinking about it, and being able to have whatever I want at hand without thinking about it. In the past I hate tinkering so much I would have never wanted to deal with this, and on windows particular it's practically not possible.

Just as an example of a frictionless tool, along with programming I also make music (including for some games I work on). When I was on windows to set up practicing playing music I had a preset in my daw I could open quickly, it would need to load then I could begin playing. On linux I just have something built into my taskbar with a performant amp sim and other audio thing always running so at any particular moment I can simply click something in my taskbar and immediately start using my guitar, mic, or analog synth I have set up on my computer. There's another menu to manage the mixing between channels, and things to run midi backing tracks I can practice to play along with. I could do this all on windows but doing each specific thing would require running something, making sure all my devices are still set up properly, using some other program whose UI I don't control to do something for me and just doing a bunch of different steps that impedes my ability to do this. Now I can just the moment I want to click something and it is immediately working with 0 frustration, it's a frictionless tool. I'm not just programming I'm also making music, games, assets for those games, and being able to leverage my WM/text editor to keep track of those things so I can cognitively offload them, and switch between them painlessly is to me the benefit of tooling. If I'm doing stuff with a team I can still leverage most of it but obviously the rest of the team isn't able to see the stuff I use to interact with it. The cost of creating small bespoke script/tooling/uis is essentially 0 now, and using AI to create bespoke tooling to me is a much safer approach than using AI to create code as it's just not really an issue if there's a bug in some of my personal scripts. I use odin for the game I am working on and I love it for it's simplicity and clarity, rather than using functions or programming language abstractions like classes to hide and organize functionality I just have some custom tooling for organize a mostly flat giant main game function. To me that's by far the least friction in understanding it and working on it. My main issue is across the projects I am working on, programming or otherwise, keeping things straight and coherent and being able to access and work with the associated files without thinking. Cognitively offloading to the greatest extent possible, so that what I do actually want to do is always at hand. I would say it's the opposite of invisibility though. (The psychoanalysis of what draws people to different editors is fairly boring and low effort, I absolutely hate tinkering. I am writing a game in Odin rather than using Godot because having to learn some poorly designed UI and how to futz around with it instead of just being able to do what I want is impossibly frustrating to me, it's a friction that locks me into future friction while the friction of learning emacs removed friction to other things)

I have no issues w/ the zig language and I'm not saying that's the only reason why people talk about it. There is however a subset of very vocal people who will go out of there way to bring stuff up and push something if they do see that is a part of it. Not that it's the only reason why either, just additional motivation for people to go out and push it that otherwise you might not get. All you need is a couple people who view that as a kind of campaign and they can radically increase the visibility of something on the internet, and turning programming that has some broader social or moral thing related to it even just through the creator is a very easy way of doing that. Rust has a similar thing. I don't view the instinct that leads to language zealotry or zealotry related to social issues(or say religion) being that distinct and it's probably a similar personality trait that encourages both, and it's generally one I find unpleasant regardless of the particular content. FP can also lean in that direction. If you get some narrative you can say this language fixes stuff in a fundamental way + also can appeal to the social thing it just riles people up who will go around talking about it online non stop.

Andrew pushes lots of "social issues" so he has that crowd and they push zig as a way of pushing their social views.

It's foreign workers this is not an open question there is really any room for dispute about. 66% of silicone valley is foreign workers.

Scientists have always been generally self interested amoral cowards, just like every other person. They aren't a unique or higher form of human.

A diagnosis is literally just a heuristic category so they can do research on rough groupings of symptoms to evaluate how treatments impact them. That's it. To get a diagnosis is literally just a statement "my psychologist thinks my symptoms align with this group and that the treatments they found effective for those symptoms will be effective for mine." The idea these things are identities or real categories is completely absurd and disconnected from why they actually exist. There is 0 basis to assume because two people have the same diagnosis they have the same underlying causes for what leads them to end up with that rough grouping of symptoms. There may be some general similarities or correlations but again the whole point of these is literally just to establish heuristic groups so we can do research on how people respond to treatments. People allowing them or speaking in a way that makes them seem like more than that is extremely destructive.