ideamotor

I think this is very well stated. I’m gonna say something that’s far more trite, but what I’ve noticed is that in an effort to get a better result while assisting AI coding, I have to throw away any concept I previously held about good code hygiene and style. I want it to be incredibly verbose. I want to have everything explicitly asserted. I want to have tests and hooks for every single thing. I want it to be incredibly hard for the human to work directly on it …

Ah, that'll be the end of that then!

It sounds like a lot of these big companies are being managed by LLMs and vibes at this point.

Awesome. Has anyone solved the issue where google websites (google search, gmail, google calendar, and so on) start running incredibly slow using Safari?

I really can’t help but think of the simulation hypothesis. What are the chances this copy-cat technology was developed when I was alive, given that it keeps going.

Commas are commonly used in text, too.

The same effect applies to political parties. The people that care about X focus their complaints to the party that is trying to address issues with X.

Agree that this discourse about “extending R’s useful life” by adding a compiler is mostly just silly. It’s equally valid to say the reason for building any of the (numerous) libraries for R is to “prolong R’s usefulness”.

I think you’ve proposed a real reason a language’s popularity changes. But let’s add a few more: First, as languages grow in use that in itself leads to more use (and vice versa). Second, users of languages use said languages as protection of their jobs, livelihoods, culture, and so on by simply not learning less popular languages or allowing the use of less commonly used languages. There is power in numbers.

IMO R’s problem has nothing to do with R’s limitations (which when limited are easily expanded). To the contrary, if anything, R’s ability to enable users to do so much is more of a problem than its limitations. The norms (culture) of a company say using many different languages for different organizational roles can clash with an R user who can succinctly work cross-functionally. Employees could be interested in preserving siloed roles and employers could prefer limited scope for employees. Instead of one person building something and presenting to users, you could have many employees serving in many roles using standard languages for each role. R is basically a wrapper language, and the ease at which third-party libraries can be built and installed for R, and R’s flexibility is inherently “useful” but less dogmatic. Less dogmatic but also less standard and less common.

… So I just don’t think the problem for R is that “it’s not deemed useful” and I actually think such an argument is disingenuous on the part of people who want to limit the power of R users. Granted, I think, particularly in large organizations, using the most popular languages in itself has valid justification. But the reason is to attract employees and to build siloed expertise; not to enhance “usefulness”.

This basically already exists and the companies that sell this are constantly improving it. For better or worse.

I biked through Amsterdam as a commuter along with everyone else for a week, and it just blew me away. Everyone was absolutely predictable and part of the “school of fish”. No hesitation or ill-conceived politeness.

It was only a week but it was so refreshing. I think about this experience daily when driving because I think of how much time would be saved if people just knew absolutely when to take their turn and took it; instead of processing each decision and deciding based on their current mood. People knew the damn rules and norms.

So, I think it’s a function of having a critical mass, being necessary, and being embedded already as a norm. I don’t believe a city could make riding without a helmet legal and expect any sort of increase in safety …

Well said

They won’t really be going with on-device AI, the models require way too much RAM, but maybe they claim on-device AI “pre-processes” and removes personal information before requests are sent to Apple. Apple has a marketing team to spin this better than my description.

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Some workers want to be baby fed information and don't want to go out of the way to learn something beyond their narrow scope. These employees can write a simple to-do checklist and as they go through their list of narrowly scoped tasks, they can cross each item out perfectly and nothing changes from what was expected. Why would they search for anything? Some managers love this too. Their employees will never deviate from the omniscient plan. Just feed them what they need to know, and secure your position (and time) by limiting access to information. Win win. Too much information and communication are time killers. How many organizations are really structured where employees can "miss something important that has real money implications"?

P.S. I agree with you