wwweston

This style is often how I want to write my view layer. In fact, when I get my model layer, app logic layer, and view layer done well, it's usually how my view templates will look more or less, whether the remaining data anchors, transformation functions, and control flow are out-of-band script or in-band tags.

And then there's stuff like XSLT...

The most desirable outcome with iPhones is to be able to run an up to date fully-patched iOS on them with up to date apps for as long as the device will function.

The next most desirable outcome is to be able to run another solid/secure/up-to-date mobile OS on them, and it gets more relatively desirable once iOS stops supporting the device.

"Better than them" is just barely in the realm where it's not incredible to discuss, and still quite debatable.

Cheaper than them? That's dramatically unproven and unlikely just on power efficiency alone, even if we accept the suspect assumption the only efficiency anyone should care about is currency marked per line of code or theorem proved.

We're not just going to have to become better existential philosophers, we're going to have to become better examiners of assumptions and claims.

As a lifelong student of religious cultures like Utah's (and often in particular Utah's), this isn't bad at a first approximation but could be elaborated better.

There is absolutely a class of Utah politicians that has little sincere personal investment in purity culture and associated culture war issues, but knows that they can be used for ingroup/virtue signaling. They also know that the dominant religious culture in Utah prepares the most significant statewide voting block to respond to such culture issues far more powerfully than any kind of attempt to engage on policy or detailed dialogue. This isn't that different from a common general strategy of running on symbolic issues and then devoting your time in office to favor trading/personal gain plus occasional personal pet policy issues, but the particular flavor is regional with a strong religious emphasis.

But there's also significant portion of regional religious leadership and membership with sincerely held purity culture beliefs. Some of this is rooted in psychological traits amplified via theology where adherents achieve a perceived state of purity/redemption by cleansing rituals and avoiding contaminants. Some of this is rooted in credences: the tradition makes moral claims about sexual contaminants and you have to sign on to be part of the ingroup (and also the tradition's leaders speak for God and are therefore wrong and if you challenge them you're not just outgroup, you're actually challenging the authority of the tradition which makes you opposed to God himself, so from this perspective there's little legitimate discourse about sexuality topics leaders have spoken about, there's mostly authority of religious leaders and individuals declaring of which side of the spiritual war they're on).

So, some people shaped under this culture over time do believe they are fighting crucial battles for the children, to the point where they have no problem with the erosion or even destruction of any secular treaties like those the 1st amendment supports (the fact that Latter-day Saints are quite vulnerable should secular treaties fall in a nation of much larger religious organizations that see LDS as blasphemous heretics is largely lost on most of the porn crusaders, there are some peculiar delusions that come with being a local majority with some national clout yet a national minority nonetheless).

And others know this sincere belief is a convenient lever for other power plays, and all you have to do is flatter the prejudices and signals of the ingroup in order to get broad permission for corruption and other antisocial advances.

The real divide isn’t separation of concerns or implicit vs explicit structure. It’s whether you have staff that wants to think about markup as a data format expressing domain entities and/or generalization of presentation concerns.

Most developers and organizations don’t want to and they don’t want to think why or what doing so would buy them. They will probably find the tailwind local maxima enabling that reasonably comfortable and may even repeat the familiar mantra as has been done here. It especially pairs well with unreflective product management, which is the most popular kind of product management.

This is why there are moral panics about things people feel in their guts: most people are reasonably easily unsettled and distracted by queer people, people who look different, people their people don’t trust being in charge.

It works. Most people are happier focusing and holding forth on that and repeating familiar statements than they are talking to congressional staff about policy.

Your car that you paid a lot for and you like and have positive useful experiences with every day? That’s going to be way farther down the list of things to worry about.

Which mostly seem to stem from the fundamental misalignment of OpenAI and Anthropic leaders/owners, aka the evil of the companies.

Arguably, though, their evil is well within the normal distribution of the usual evil of humanity magnified via the social technology of capitalism. The further tech is mostly raising that exponentiation to its own exponent. The unchecked singularity was embraced centuries ago.

Worth noting this dynamic when people overgeneralize “local government good, federal government bad”, a tendency that has been present and growing for at least 50 years.

The theory that local government is more accountable and responsive seems to be pretty deeply broken, what actually seems to happen is that localities lack a critical mass of attention and focus for real responsiveness and accountability.

Or the American character in general does.

For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.

There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.

I thought the recommended honeymoon reading was Knuth’s _Surreal Numbers_

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system.

And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.

with the advantage that you can discover this by reading citations.

A fascinating everyday arms race I had no idea was playing out around me.

The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work.

Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal.

Models trained on that work will reflect that approach.