rspeele

> 2 to 3 was the worst possible way a language has ever been upgraded bar none

Perl 6?

I'm wondering how long till we see the first exploit that goes like this:

* A bad actor finds a real, theoretically severe but not easy-to-actually-exploit vulnerability in some popular software. E.g. it's an exploit that can get you pwned 100% with RCE, but only if you are using it in configuration X on platform Y with kernel version Z on a Tuesday.

* They design a patch that closes that vulnerability but subtly opens a more dangerous one known only to them. They privately test their patch against LLM reviewers, tuning the approach until the introduced vulnerability typically escapes detection by automated review.

* They "responsibly disclose" the original exploit and helpfully share the patch. In the hurry to fix the original exploit, the patch itself gets only cursory (claudy, codexy) review. By now this has happened so many times that just applying whatever code changes ClodSed were GTG is the status quo.

* When the new vulnerability is eventually discovered, they can plausibly say "oh my agent didn't catch that", which is true. In the meantime, they use the new exploit that only they know about.

Lysanderoth, no!

The "web stack" is a bunch of markdown files. It's more of a wish list than a framework.

Also: "No line of the framework was typed by hand."

So it's not even your wish list.

I could prompt Claude "write down best practices for building web apps in rust, then build <my idea> as a web app in rust following those practices." How would that differ?

I can't tell if this is a satire of "markdown engineering" or not. Poe's law in action.

Poor mathematicians. First a robot scoops them on hundreds of open problems. Then they get criticized for reacting to it like a human!

Shame on them for such weaknesses as:

* Desire to make memorable achievements in their field

* Missing the social elements of sharing and discussing problems with their colleagues

* Sense of self worth linked to ability to make a unique contribution to society

* Fear of losing status and income in a ruthlessly competitive economic system

* Anxiety over debts already accrued during years of studying

* Regret over choice of career path and roads not taken

Astra would never.

"Rent-Seeking" is trying to capture eternally recurring payment for something you did or acquired one time.

Mathematicians acquired their skills over long hours of study, but weren't asking to be paid just to sit around passively being smart, but to keep working on new results. It is the lost opportunity to do work they are lamenting, not the lost opportunity to sit on their laurels. So no, it doesn't sound like rent-seeking.

> It sucks if you’re a rent seeker, but I’m enjoying this post-IP world

Oh yes, this new world is terrible for rent seekers. It's like the kum-bah-yah free software world Stallman might have imagined. Information wants to be free and all. Can't stop the signal. Very counterculture. Like the Adobe clone apps.

Except for the closed SOTA model weights, out of reach hardware, and the resulting $200 subscription rent now paid readily both by anybody trying to create something new, and anybody who wants to rip it off. That particular flavor of rent seeking is booming.

I myself am a "rent-seeker" in an alternative sense of "I seek a way to pay for my own continued shelter via my creative output" and it definitely seems like it's gonna suck for me.

The sensitivity of my bank password is much lower than a seed phrase because most bank transactions can be reversed as long as I notice them in time and prove my identity to my bank.

With bitcoin nothing is reversible so every step of the process is a huge security risk where you can fall off a cliff and experience financial permadeath of "your" crypto, assuming a sufficiently motivated attacker.

Thanks for your work on Solvespace. I have been using it for years. When I no longer had access to commercial CAD programs I tried all the open source stuff. My conclusions were:

* OpenSCAD -- cool idea, good for a few types of highly procedural parts, but most of the time I'd rather a parametric sketch-based interface over pure code.

* FreeCAD -- the most features of any open source CAD, but poor UI, tendency to crash, and the advanced features like loft kind of fall flat compared to commercial equivalents. You think you'll be able to model a part, but it becomes extremely frustrating if you actually need the advanced tools.

* SolveSpace -- pretty stable and reliable. Fast, compact, great sketching interface, good discoverable UI. You can predict what types of parts you can model with it and what types you can't. Doesn't try to do everything but is good at what it does.

You can tell which one is my favorite! N features done to a good level of polish and with somebody making sure it all "makes sense together" beats 10xN features all 80% done and haphazardly mashed together in different menus/workbenches, for any tools I want to rely on.

I am noodling around with a slopcoded CAD tool of my own these days, just out of curiosity to see how far Opus5.5/GPT6 can get doing it in F# and to experiment with some workflow concepts that match the way I like to design parts. But like you said, progress is slow. For stuff I actually want to get done, SolveSpace remains my go-to, and I greatly admire its coherent design.

what

Keep clicking the menus on the screen rather than clicking on the tray itself. When you click “load cartridge” on screen it materializes and closes.

I also initially looked around the desk for a physical cartridge, such was the effectiveness of the rest of the “game”.

Strong agree. School had me writing stuff myself on the order of a few KLOC at most, and maybe collaborating with a "group" in which at most 2 people actually did anything. What little exposure I got to reading a large codebase I didn't write, was all in personal projects trying to mod open source video games. I'm sure some people had more extensive experiences but that was my bachelor's.

First job had me using a programming language I wasn't super familiar with and trying to add a feature to a codebase 100s of KLOC, all written by other people. Definitely a sink-or-swim moment. My skills of reading and navigating the dreaded Other People's Code were all honed over the next dozen years.

That being said AI is a lot better at reading code than I am, as demonstrated by its ability to find incredibly subtle bugs in huge codebases. So I'm not even sure those code reading skills are all that useful now. When I have to review somebody else's code I get more mileage from pointing an AI at it and asking targeted questions like "how does this handle when a Foo's approval is revoked" than reading it myself line-by-line. I'm not saying I never use those reading skills but the ability to get the big picture, chase down deep callback chains, know where to look... those skills are likely to atrophy.

It's like using GPS vs. knowing the roads as well as a cabbie. GPS gets you pretty damn far for zero effort.