javajosh

I have 25 years of experience, including at prestigious places like Blizzard and JPL. However I've worked for a variety of startups, none of which succeeded.

What are some of the most impactful/eye-opening lessons you learned from biome?

They used to call this "peer pressure". Admittedly this is a narrower form of it where you harness the power of vanity and shame for purposes of good, not evil.

Yes. I'd be curious to know how resistance movements deal with this problem in other regimes. How do (did?) Navalny or İmamoğlu supporters organize, for example? Is it simply Telegram & Signal? How does one spread a message to the public under such a regime, via pamphlets? Does it work to share "anonymously" on a foreign-hosted platform? Asking for a friend.

I agree that anonymous speech is an important right in free societies. A novel attack on such a right in the Internet Age is to allow so much speech, anonymous or otherwise, ensure that most of it of is of very low quality, that thoughtful criticisms are ignored or, more accurately, overlooked. A related attack is to "flood the zone with shit", low-quality but emotionally resonant criticisms of speech, generated by hired humans and/or software. (Anecdotally most readers will see any coherent pushback as a signal about the OP's veracity.)

Yeah, I've been disappointed in a lot of code generation within my field of expertise. However, if I need to whip up some bash scripts, AI works very well. But if I want those bash scripts to be actually good, AI just can't get there. It certainly cannot "think outside the box" and deliver anything close to novel or even elegant (although it may give some tactical help writing boilerplate lightly adapted to your codebase). The analogy I use is that LLM AIs are like a new car mechanic tool that can generate any nut, bolt or gasket, for free and instantly (just add electricity!). It's great addition to the toolset for a seasoned mechanic, distracting for a junior, and is not even in the same universe required to fix an entire car, let alone design one.

What better way to "own the libs" than to openly transgress against sacrosanct values? There is a certain power when you demonstrate that shame, consistency, or principle has no hold on you. To avoid the internal backstabbing this would entail, you also need to convince the audience that it's all a kind of kayfabe, make-believe, and that you really ARE principled and trustworthy with your people, or for some short period of time to achieve a goal. It's foolish, but the world is full of foolish people believing simply because it feels good. Reality has no place in this calculus. This is NOT a partisan problem.

There are two big error modes that we need to look out for when reacting in anger. First is to not jump from the frying pan into the fire by adopting a browser that makes nice sounding claims but really has no way to back them up. Installing a blob from a random website is never a good idea, especially when it's a browser. Personally, I think Librewolf is worth the risk but time may proved me wrong. The second error is a bit more subtle in that we need to think more deeply about how to fund browser development such that protects user interest. Clearly there are very powerful and pervasive market forces that Will attempt to warp any browser project into selling user data. That's true for all ubiquitous platform software, but the browser is particularly vulnerable because it exists at a high level of abstraction and therefore high level of utility. So I will make a prediction that the next successful privacy focused browser is going to be something like Cursor, a fork of a well-known browser engine with built-in local AI in service of the user only. This project will have to be a loss leader for another money making entity that requires a truly secure and private platform.

That only captures your output, not your input. The best people to simulate in this world would be so-called terminally online people virtually all of whom's input is itself online. So for those who've read a lot of paper books or done a lot of traveling or had a lot of offline conversations or relationships, I think it would be difficult to truly simulate someone.

But the comment you're replying to doesn't say Java doesn't have any downsides. It just says that Java has a great story for doing shared types between client and server, which is true. It's also true that Java as a language has gotten a lot better over time. This is I think thanks to pressure from other languages written for the jvm like kotlin, And also developer feedback for those who work in other languages like JavaScript. Java is old and boring. Just like go is new and boring. Rust has plenty of downsides this idea that it's easy to use. Seems wrong to me. The borrow checker is famously difficult to work with despite being a central feature of the language. The really big upside to JavaScript is that it's the native language of browsers and so in a weird way. If you want to get closest to the metal so to speak, JavaScript is a better option for most deployed applications. It's interesting to note that the op's article mostly points to build tools that are written in rust rather than applications and I think that's telling.