spartanatreyu

Also, you're going to get a different speed up depending on which page you have set as your starting page.

If you have steam configured so it shows the store page on startup, you have to add on the time it for that page to load.

The reality is that 90% of the features they ask for boils down to adding just a simple if statement, and as soon as a DSL has a practical if statement it becomes turing complete.

If the other 10% of features are implemented, then any further change makes the DSL turing complete.

It's not even really `if` by itself, conditionals are good enough. Templates with for loops that can check if an index is the first or last can implement if statements. Also templates that can nest other templates recursively with a max recursion depth can also implement if.

You have to go out of your way to avoid turing completeness if you want to avoid a complexity explosion.

No

It's a repeated observation that keeps coming true. DSLs have a tendency to become turing complete over time.

- It happened to wikipedia's templating language

- It happened to PHP

- It happened to mod_rewrite

- It happened to server-side includes

- etc...

It just keeps happening.

In fact it's such a problem with infrastructure teams that use yaml/json configs that you see a lack of turing-completeness being advertised as a feature (see Dhall configuration language).

> Suppose the obvious case, i have some resizing pipeline for images. Would i include support today in my resizing pipeline today and pay a few extra cycles and storage for someone that my clients can't read?

Yes, this is literally what the <picture> element is for.

Your hypothetical pipeline would be able to convert <img> elements into <picture> elements with multiple <source> elements for different user resolutions and format supports.

> I am not entirely convinced. Was not Hubble damaged and got an upgrade lateron?

It was made wrong (the mirror was shaped incorrectly).

Luckily the HST was designed to be serviced (it had components within it that would degrade over time, and some components could realistically be upgraded as technology became better), so they swapped out the optics so that it worked with the incorrectly shaped mirror.

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> I don't think the USA could keep mega-super-duper technology hidden from others in the long run.

The only things being hidden are basically trade secret stuff, e.g. better materials, better software, better sensors, etc...

The US had a geopolitical advantage keeping their sensor tech secret. Other nations didn't know how good they were and only hid their actions to the degree they thought shielded themselves. When the knowledge eventually came out, other nations knew if they wanted their sercets kept, they would have to invest in better obfuscation.

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> And NASA often wants more money - just take the whole search for life on planets. This is so pointless - life exists already here. What is the addiction to want to find life outside of the planet? Other than, of course, getting more money, which is understandable, but it doesn't answer the question.

Since you're not behind the rationale of curiosity, I'll present you with a utilitarian justification:

Ancient Rome had steam power (see: Aeolipile). But it was basically seen as a useless toy. It took almost 2 millennia until the Industrial Revolution happened and steam power took its rightful place in our history. Humanity got there, but it took a lot longer than it needed to.

Imagine what would have happened instead if Ancient Rome could have looked across an ocean and seen a civilisation harnessing steam power to its fullest. It would not have taken almost 2 millennia for them to catch up. They just needed a hint as to where to focus their attention.

History is littered with missed paths that could have accelerated our progress.

Newton was playing around with shaped glass and investigating optics. What if he heard of someone else seeing weird lines when they left their prism in the sun? He had everything he needed to stumble upon the ultraviolet catastrophe himself and we would have ended up with quantum mechanics centuries earlier.

Going back further, what if the Antikythera Mechanism's gearwork technology became widespread? What if the ancients had their own Babbage and created programming millennia before?

Penicillin could have been discovered even earlier.

All that's needed is a little observation of "Huh, that's weird" and everything spills out of that.

Investigating a line of inquiry doesn't guarantee that we're going to end up with something. So we have to investigate wide, rather than deep.

But imagine if we find an alien civilisation and make another "Huh, that's weird" observation. All of a sudden we have a higher confidence that an investigation down a specific path does lead to something new.

- An exoplanet not moving elliptically or hyperbolically? That'd focus a large amount of attention into overcoming previous assumptions about inertia.

- Lot of lensing effects and bursts of shifted light? That'd focus a large amount of attention into bending space.

- Seeing spectral lines that don't match known matter? That'd focus a large amount of attention into the strong nuclear force, exotic matter, magmatter, etc...

- An impossible star? That'd focus a large amount of attention into the processes powering that star.

- etc...

TL;DR: Finding another civilisation doing something basically changes the rate of return calculation for research.

> Basic counting isn't really math.

Counting most certainly is math.

Can you define or explain counting without also referencing/defining/explaining a mathematics concept?

> And it can count fine. It doesn't know how to spell.

It's the other way around, it could spell, it couldn't count the letters.

We shouldn't be surprised when this sort of thing happens in the age of LLMs.

All LLMs do is select the next word based on their training data then repeat.

When people rely on vibecoding, a non-zero fraction of users will inevitably end up with the same results.

Counting is literally a part of Mathematics.

I always did it as:

/**/

    Debug code to toggle on and off

/**/

    Other debug code to toggle on and off

/**/

And toggled by removing the last slash on one of the comment lines.

Having two `*` characters worked better for syntax highlighting at the time.

Then I learned about Ctrl/Cmd + / to toggle a line or region on and off.

But I still use the old technique when code editors can't handle where comments are supposed to start and stop and commenting out too much or breaking the indentation, typically breaking around modern CSS's newer features or languages embedded within other languages.

Yes, which is why you don't stop at rust.

You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).

Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...

As I said above: use better tools and processes.

LLMs don't fit that criteria.

Humans did do it before.

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It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.

Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.

Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.

Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.

Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.

> I'm looking forward to trying out Safaris new ability to vibe code extensions that will modify websites to remove annoyances.

Sounds like a great way for people to get hacked.