notarobot123

It's a protest vote. Anti-fascist eco-fascism isn't a viable basis for the coherent governance of anything larger than an ecovilliage.

That said, it seems neither pragmatism nor ideological coherence is really necessary to hold power these days.

also in the UK

I am fully sympathetic with the struggle of universities but perhaps they shouldn't be spared the need to be more responsive to the political and economic climate.

Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game" describes a world in which the academy is entirely sheltered from the real world and develops a culture of dependence, detachment and indifference. Do we want that world?

If we throw money at universities to keep doing what they've always done, we'll create institutions that exist only for their own sake and without any real purpose or value outside of a hedonistic pursuit of knowledge.

We should fund universities to serve the people, like the free university places in Scotland. We should fund research and innovation. We should fund the moral and cultural development of citizens and those invested in the future of the country.

But we should be careful we don't accidentally create a system that can't survive in a competitive and changing world.

Universities get a significant portion of their income from international students. Perhaps making them pay a little more for the externalities they create is fair.

I don't know... LLMs, drones, culture wars, nostalgia for monarchical rule - we're only really missing the replicators and nano-engineering at this point.

you forgot to add "no mistakes"

...and they are not using LLMs to help speed up design and analysis?

I'm no booster but this is most of what I currently spend tokens on so it's maybe not as absurd as it sounds. Maybe those gains are possible and without having to sacrifice serious code reviews too.

it's proposer-optimal but the receivers gets the best of those who haven't already found a better match

I can't wait for the autotune remix of this.

Imagine if companies exposed access to their services via a discoverable uniform interface.

Each company would determine the range of actions a customer could perform in response to their request and current circumstances. A representation of state could be transferred between the company's server and whatever client the customer chooses to use. The customer would be free to interact with any of these services in a way that suited them via their chosen client.

Either that or we could kludge something together with MCP.

Similarly, programming is also a precise language of communication. Initially, we focused on direct machine behavior but every abstraction above the hardware (including assembly) has been to make that behavior legible to humans.

Developed notations and shared procedural abstractions have made thinking about computation more intentionally human and source control has established a protocol for conversing with other humans in the language of a program and changes to that program.

The moment just now feels like a neglecting of the idea of communication being central. If the program is a compile target but not sufficiently legible or if the conversation moves too quickly for us to keep up then we retain the effects of computation but loose its meaning as communication. We loose the understanding and the ability to develop and evolve further shared abstractions.

Open source programs could be more like motivated explanations of computation. For open source to survive, maybe we should start to make the distinction between free product distribution and programming as communication and community building.

...so lack of attention to detail as evidence of a focus on meaningful quality?

More generously: someone who resists new technologies due to their perceived harmful effects (economic but also social and environmental)