gbjcantab

Assuming you’re not arguing that all AI use is bad, then there’s a very clear difference between the two situations: one is forming you, over time, into a person who is habitually polite; one is forming you into a person who is cruel. We can quibble about the magnitude of this effect or whether it matters but surely they aren’t the same thing.

True! Not my point, but a worthwhile terminological correction.

This is good; not because Claude is a moral agent who is harmed by your cruelty but because you, the user, are a moral agent who is harmed by your cruelty. There is just no ethical argument that burning compute on responses in order to enable you to continue expressing cruelty is good.

That’s fair! I think what struck me, though, is that what we’re seeing is large numbers of “wizards” jump ship to and actively promote “sorcery” instead, in this sense. That is, it’s interesting to me to see Dan Abramov, whose blog primarily consists of painstaking explanations of React internals based on the deep knowledge he developed over years as the most visible member of the core team, switch over to “do a breakthrough.”

The same corollary occurred to me, as well!

For some reason, this approach makes me think of the difference between “wizardry” and “sorcery” in some fantasy magic systems. The magic of “wizards” is fundamentally based on a deep study and understanding of arcane things, perhaps assisted by some (necessary or helpful) tools of great power. “Sorcerers” summon supernatural beings and are able to control them, cajole them, and protect themselves and others against them (with more or less success)... but the actual desired magical effect is performed by those beings.

Computing has historically been a field of wizardry. It's... interesting (?) to see so many people pushing so hard in the direction of sorcery, and in fact applying that sorcery to other fields, in which they themselves aren't quite able to validate whether the spell worked or not.

This looks reasonably interesting, and Evan is extremely thoughtful about design; I know he’s put a huge amount of work into this.

Personally, I’d be very cautious about adopting closed-source software with such a restrictive license as part of an application, especially given the context of Elm’s trajectory. When Elm went through breaking changes or regressions, or was not worked on publicly for years, users had access to the source and the right to modify it. With Acadia’s licensing, you’d be stranded.

This is a nice idea (prettier Perseus) but it really falls down on the substance, which is the morphological tagging. At least in what I read this morning (the beginning of book 13 of the Odyssey) it had no answer or was wrong on maybe 40% of what I checked? I’m sure the overall rate is much better than that but you’re only checking the hard words, usually. Perseus had them all right, for what it’s worth.

So kind of the classic 2026 application: a nice-looking app that has 60% of the functionality of something that already exists, in a way that’s 30% broken.

What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal from the noise.

So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.

It’s especially grating in this case because Dominic Gannaway, the creator of Octane, is the real deal (creator of Inferno, former React core team member, former Svelte core team member); so the project landing page looks like generic 2026 slopcoded abandonware, but it is in fact a real project made by someone who’s one of the great minds of frontend framework development (with heavy Claude use apparently, to be clear).

I’m not quite who you asked; I’m a native English speaker but I’ve read much more Homer in Greek than in English. (Say, I’ve read a little more than half the Odyssey in Greek.) Honestly none of the English translations really capture the magic, at least for me. Skimming through a bit, I’d say Fagles is the closest.

But it’s like saying: “Any Texans who ate BBQ growing up, can you share your favorite fast food places? Prefer McDonald’s or BK as being closer to the original?”

(Emily Wilson’s version is great but doesn’t feel like Homer at all, when I read it.)

There are at least two possible meanings of “faithful,” which are “translates the literal meaning most accurately” and “evokes the same feeling most poetically.” Given that it’s Homer and not Aristotle, the vibes-based approach is probably the right criterion. It’s a bit hard to express but, having read a lot of Homer in Greek, I can say that some of these translations absolutely fail to translate Homer even if there’s nothing inaccurate per se.

This is one of my favorite phenomena: again in again, across various fields of study, breakthroughs in discovery allow us to go from relative ignorance to a level of knowledge and understanding that enables clear and clean conceptual models; then, as we learn even more, we realize how much more complex and weird and multifaceted reality really is.

It’s like a Dunning-Kruger effect on a field-wide scale, but in a good way. Rather than an example of hubris, it’s an opportunity for awe.

The link submitted is to the front page of their website, which reads: “Cross-platform - One spec renders natively to React, React Native, Vue, and more.”