grumbel

I am curious why questions about AI itself haven't had a bigger impact in slowing this all down a little. AI is a whole new field for programming and there should be plenty of interesting questions surrounding AI that are worth discussing on SO.

My attempts at discussing AI related questions with AI itself have been pretty frustrating, especially in the early years, since they are either just uninformed about what's currently going on in the AI space or recite random blog posts of questionable value, often they couldn't even tell what they themselves are capable of.

On the stuff I have done (mostly Opus5.5) it came out at around 1/20 the cost, 95%. So a $20 subscription is around $1000 API. Somewhere in that ballpark.

Just in case anybody get's scared by those numbers: A $20 Claude Pro subscription is worth around $1000 API tokens.

> And what are those?

I'd start with the basics: A scanf() replacement would be nice, having a ostream/printf() alternative, but not something for input feels very unfinished.

Basic Unicode support is also still a mess.

Another thing I don't get: Why is uninitialized memory still the default? Why haven't they made the uninitialized state explicit in any of the numerous language updates?

Platforms naturally coalesce into near monopolies due to network effects. It's far easier to get rid of a government than it is to get rid of something like Youtube at this point.

LLMs are pretty good at writing calculators.

> Does Nostr address this? Even things like freenet, tor, i2p rely on third parties...

Yes, as Nostr and Freenet disconnect the storage location from the document identifier. Thus your link keeps working, even if the servers change.

The problem with the Web isn't a lack of cheap storage or people willing to mirror content, it's that none of that matters when the links keep breaking anyway and nobody can find the content anymore.

For how to do it right, see Usenet, the messages are held together by unique message-ids and the protocol was designed for distribution. Thus archives could be put together from random backup tapes and even 45 years later, you can browse and read the discussion threads.

Your average web forum just disappears when something goes wrong and even if somebody has mirrored the HTML, they'd have a rather bad time trying to recreate the original database, since the HTML is really more like screenshots of a GUI than the actual content.

> The web is just the library but on the web

Many countries have a legal requirement that every book published has to be send to the national library. We also have ISBNs that uniquely identify books. We have nothing like that in place for websites.

> they don't disappear quite so easily.

A local copy doesn't preserve it on the Web. Even if you wanted to preserve it on the Web, you can't, since the original domain belongs to somebody else.

> ??? emulators already had literally all of those things

Yes, but badly. Any old Amiga game that requires you to jump with Up or requires keyboard keys for certain functions becomes unplayable on a gamepad in an emulator. When you throw the game into the AI and do HLE emulation, you can fix it all with ease, and you can do it all context depend, e.g. a platformer level might need different controls from the spaceship levels or the menus. You can also add on-screen menus when needed.

For console games this isn't generally much of an issue, they controls map pretty well to modern gamepads and play well in emulation. But home computer games play absolutely terrible in emulation, as the controls are all over the place and each game has their own little quirks.

Neocities is just a repeat of Geocities, and like everything else on the Web, it depend s on a third party to keep the service running, and whenever they lose interesting, all the content is lost. Even when somebody archives it, all the links are broken and the content becomes nearly impossible to find.

One of the big problems with the Web is that it's all ephemeral, it not a question of if it breaks, but when and how badly. A book doesn't disappear from your shelves just because the author lost interesting or the publisher goes out of business, but websites disappear from your bookmarks like that all the time. That's what needs fixing.

The other part is HTML itself. You shouldn't need to write raw HTML to write a website. That's the job of the browser. The very first browser that Tim Berners-Lee wrote supported editing, but that got completely lost over the years. A little bit still exist in the form of the 'contentEditable' attribute, but you can't author websites with that all by yourself, as there is no means of saving or publishing the results. No modern browser supports WebDAV either.

> dozens of "no emulator recompilations" that are actually just embedding an emulator into a binary with the game

Even those, which take about 20min, are incredible useful, as you can add save state, level select, cheats and gamepad controls on top that most emulators would struggle with or at least make a hell of a lot more complicated.

> Now this garbage can be mass-produced and get the adoration of the AI hype crowd

Those games wouldn't exist without AI. Decompiles that ended in a fully playable state have been incredible rare before AI. Best you would get was often just an incomplete reverse engineering of the data formats involved.

From my experience Youtube simply recommends more of the type of videos that you actually watched. Watch history overpowers basically anything else you do, your subscriptions have little to no influence. A single click on a 'wrong' video, and you'll get tons of similar ones in your recommendations feed for weeks to come, especially when you end up clicking some of the newly recommend videos. It requires purging unwanted topics from the watch history to actually get rid of them, which so far worked very reliable for me.

That's one big issue, but I feel like the even bigger one is that neither of them fixes what's wrong with HTTP: Publishing is not a first-class citizen on the net.

As long as you need to rent servers and domain names all those alternatives are a waste of time, as they are just repeating all the missteps from HTTP. We need an alternative where you can type some text, hit publish and have it appear on the net with zero friction and in a way that isn't tied to a single third party. Publishing a site needs to be as easy as browsing one.

So far Nostr it's the only thing that gets close at the protocol level, but still lacks a good client.

While true to some degree, it's also an extremely loose connection.

When I see a picture on a computer screen, it evokes similar emotions as seeing the real thing, since the light that ends up on my retina is very similar, even so other aspects of the sensory input might be missing.

Music on the other side doesn't really have a natural analog. Nature is mostly just wind and water noises, with a bit of bird song and chirping crickets. The only thing they have in common with music is that they are all sounds, but the structure and complexity is quite different.

Music as an offshoot from pre-language communication seems more likely, it could explain the emotional component at least, since groups of animals might need to sync their emotional state. But even there you end up with quite a big leap between what sounds happen naturally and what we call music.

Darken the sky.

It's 80% after after a few hours for what might have taken years the old way. Any remaining issues can be fixed as fast as they can be found. Abandonment can and will of course happen, but anybody else can pick it up and continue with ease.

The hard part is really just the coordination, you don't want dozens of repos doing the same thing, but at the same time dealing with random vibe coded PRs is an easy way to overwhelm and burn out any maintainer.