jes5199

we might end up switching to sodium batteries for the grid, they’re heavier so not great for cars, but otherwise they’re fine

yes, but now I’m also experiencing that for human-written text

I’m building a heavily parallel dataflow system. I thought Rust might be good for concurrency.

what’s the difference

this is the same thing we said about offices in the fluorescent era

I tried that, but the Rust build process was too painful, and agents seemed to burn a lot of tokens guessing how to get the code to compile. I rewrote my project in Elixir and it’s been going much more smoothly

a tmux session where every window is a claude code instance in a different checkout of the repo

and then an MCP+Channels system that let’s the claudes DM each other

plus the Telegram channel so one of the claudes can talk to me over text message

I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position

no, but they weren’t exactly churning out new features in the 2010s either

I could not agree less. People used to call Python “executable pseudocode” - in that spirit, Haskell is executable pseudo-math. If you’ve done enough higher math that a professor’s whiteboard notation feels natural to you, then Haskell might feel like a reasonable approximation of that style. Otherwise: it’s line noise.

(I write Haskell professionally)

it was kind of a miracle that it held together as well as it did pre-Microsoft. I think to some degree, they got lucky, and were able to coast on being in the right place at the right time. And then because they were so central they attracted some amazing talent who managed to keep the thing scaling up _despite_ the culture.

somewhat better leadership, I think

This is just CRDT merges and better diffs?? I think the future of version control is much, much weirder than this. Like if you have CRDTs why not have ephemeral branches with real-time collaborative editing and live CI as you type

one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?

and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined

but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads

it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off