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> Abundance and growing the pie for everyone is also an outcome if this is done right.

Do you genuinely believe there's any chance that's going to happen?


I do, because the alternative is unthinkable.

I would argue that "abundance and growing the pie for everyone" is even more unfathomable given how things are structured currently. The wealth gap will continue to widen until something gives.

Can’t believe your comment is being downvoted.

Covid clearly showed how crisis can only benefit the rich and powerful.

AI being used to cut the headcount can somehow be, good? It will just fill the pockets of the powerful.


Why do you think that the fact that the alternative is unthinkable is a reason it won't happen?

Are you also sure that it is unthinkable to those running these companies? I wouldn't be surprised if these models end up being used for internal security-- that people would try to keep an extremely unequal society stable by surveillance and massive analysis capabilities. I think it's apparent that some use of this sort already occurs and that these companies are already participating.


Well then given that one side is "the situation remains neutral or very slightly improves" and the other side is "unthinkable atrocities", I think it's only rational to focus on the "unthinkable atrocities" part. Ideally, we should be focusing all our energy into making sure that doesn't happen.

Closing your eyes doesn't make the danger go away.

What? This makes no sense. You don't like the alternative so you choose to believe in the best outcome?

Looking at the last few hundred years of our civilization, absolutely!

[flagged]


Substantive.

Try this, I'm genuinely curious: if you were going to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, what year would you prefer that to happen?


If I can choose the US specifically, then sometime in the 1950s. I think Baby Boomers in the US will go down as the single luckiest generation on earth in terms of socioeconomic opportunity.

Yeah, I don't disagree, but if we're talking about how our species (which I took "civilization" to mean) as a whole has fared, I think you shouldn't get to pick the where, just the when. If we care about all humans everywhere, and whether fewer of them are starving or dying of preventable diseases or whatever, then I think you have to consider being born as just a random human, not just a random American.

oh god are we really doing this? just ignore the accelerated decline of virtually the entire world because we have medicine and Netflix?

So what's your answer?

1700s Okinawa

You don't get to choose where

> This makes it possible to write simple code that’s both concurrent and safe.

Yeah, great, my hello world program is deterministic.

What happens when you introduce I/O? Is every network call deterministic? Can you depend on reading a file taking the same amount of time and being woken up by the scheduler in the same order every time?


This is about durable execution -- being able to resume execution "from the middle", which is often done by executing from the beginning but skipping external calls. Second time around, the I/O is exactly replayed from stored values, and the "deterministic" part only refers to the async scheduler which behaves the same as long as the results are the same.

Coincidentally I have been experimenting with something very similar in JavaScript in the past and there the scheduler also has the same property.


No, but determinism reduces the number of stones you need to turn over when debugging hairy problems such as your program occasionally returning different results for the same inputs. You may not have control over the timing of I/O operations or order of external events (including OS scheduler), but at least you know that your side of the innovation/response is, in isoaltion, behaving predictably.

I go the opposite approach for this sort of thing, since I would much rather flip and remove the stones: I explicitly randomize order of containers during development and testing, and always in my unit tests, so depending on order can't be a problem. No luck required!

You want both. More specifically, you want to be in control of which one you're actually doing.

Randomization is great at avoiding erroneous dependencies on spurious cause-and-effect chains. Determinism is needed to ensure the cause-and-effect chains that are core to the problem actually work.


I don't understand.

Determinism isn't required unless it's required.

If it's not required, then you must plan for it NOT being deterministic, with any accidental determinism being ignored (to be safe, forcefully so with an intentional randomization/delays within the library). If it is required, then my random input should always (from the tests perspective) come out the same as I put it in.

If possible, force the corner case if the corner case is a concern. That's the purpose of testing. If there's a concern with timing, force bad timing with random delays. The alternative is relying on luck. I try to make my code as unlucky as possible, during development/testing.


That's the cool thing about this behavior--it doesn't matter how complex your program is, your async functions start in the same order they're called (though after that, they may interleave and finish in any order).

Only for tasks that are created in synchronous code. If you start two tasks that each make a web request and then start a new task with the result of that request you will immediately lose ordering.

Yes, this only applies for tasks created from the same (sync or async) function. If tasks are creating other tasks, anything is possible.

Orbital mechanics and "next to" don't go together particularly well, so it's not quite as easy as popping something up there.

The Chinese have put Queqiao-1 in the earth-moon L2 point which seems to be working out for them, but I guess the Americans aren't likely to be asking permission to use it.


that's an imported PR, presumably from github. Note how the copilot comments come from the same user as the author, with an `imported` tag.

I stand corrected. GitHub team confirmed it's their Copilot ad.

Were those three games the best results you got? Only the bike one appeared to have an actual ... game to it.

The "Racing game" appeared to be a car following a set path with a freecam and there didn't seem to be any gameplay mechanics in the snowboarding one, just a physics entity wildly crashing down a hill with no consequences or score.


The year is 2050 and those are all AAA games.


they're already all available on the Nintendo E-Shop


the comment you are replying to says the results were not cherry picked nor iterated over


Just enable DLSS 5.


> Let’s revisit the doomsday scenario. Say programming is fully automated and nobody writes code anymore. Does Emacs die?

Commercial programming will be fully automated. That will not stop people doing it by hand. For all intents and purposes clothing manufacturing is fully automated but some people still do it themselves.

One example near to my heart is my mother. She collects her dog's shed winter coat in the spring, cards it, spins it and ultimately knits it into a coat she puts back on the dog the next autumn - all by hand. She could just buy a cheap dog coat from Amazon, but she thinks it's funny to see the dog wearing a coat made of its own fur so she bought the equipment and learned the functionally useless skills required to do it.

No matter what level of automation is available, a small number of people will still do things the hard way as a hobby or out of perverseness. We might be living in the matrix in 100 years but I'm certain someone will still be trying to work out how to exit vim in their holopod


>functionally useless skills

The dog would disagree! :-)

I admire your mother. She is a real hacker.


Kind of a rough outlook on the future but I also felt the same.


I'm always confused by this kind of comment about AI accessing people's chrome history because it seems to imply that the kind of person who uses this tool is both too stupid to know what private browsing is and also is into absolutely heinous stuff.

I feel like the average person is going to be like "oh no it'd be terrible if everyone found out I really like the 'big boobs' category on pornhub"


Oh, you have nothing to hide? Kindly paste all your payment and login credentials that your browser stores. Later we'll need to see all your DMs on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, etc.

Finally we'll want to know about disputes you've had with intimate partners, employers and other service providers, especially powerful ones like healthcare, insurance and financial organisations.


We should also have full published salary and benefits (etc) details right now, whatever their contract says about disclosing those, and 24x7 streamed video of their entire life with no censoring, including toilet breaks and sex and bars and parties.

And, along with all the credentials as you suggest, including private parts of PGP keys etc, accurate impressions/clones of any and all physical security/privacy devices they use such as keys to house and car and safe and gun safe and relatives' crypt, etc, etc...


Privacy and security and whatever this could trample all over are not the same thing.

You may be legally entirely above board (though Cardinal Richelieu wouldn't let that get in the way) but you still might not want your S&M kink to be known or to be outed to conservative friends and family or have your bank account details spread around or have a $$$$$ bill run up in your AWS or LLM logins...


That's an argument against references isn't it? Rather than shadowing.


I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.


"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.


I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.


I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)


For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.


I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.


I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?


The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern


Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press?

I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/trump-admin-says...

This is the only thing that comes to mind, and Ars covered it.


Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.


Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?


Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?


That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"


I have said that they have a strong negative bias. Whether the underlying news is positive or negative is completely irrelevant. Relevant is that they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are.


But how does that bias manifest? The only thing you said was that they "ignore neutral or positive stories", and that doesn't seem to be true.


No, I didn't say that at all. I said they are biased, that "they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are", which is a very different thing. Basically, I'm saying they report x-10 rather than x (that's bias), and you are replying with "so the value of x they report is always negative or 0." No. Wrong.


Oh that was the person earlier in the conversation, okay.

So you haven't really been specific at all. I don't know how I could even try to check if a vague claim like that is right or wrong. But since they apparently have positive spacex reporting and only say other things are negative then I'm skeptical of significant bias.


Again, their SpaceX reporting might be "positive", but that doesn't mean it has positive bias. Apart from that, I previously said the non-SpaceX reporters are strongly biased. Anything about the SpaceX reporting isn't relevant for that.


Gitlin, at least, also slants the negative news. The story on sales about Tesla losing market share to VW, but other outlets reported it as VW gaining the top spot.


They've always had more coverage of Tesla than other automakers, or at least I've always noticed it more. When Tesla was leading EV sales they dutifully reported that, when they're dropping they report it just as well. If anything slanted coverage would be reporting less on Tesla because they are doing badly, which seems to be what you want.


Nothing Trump or his administration has done warrants good press.


And is that supposed to be bad in any way?


_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.


They were rightfully been calling out the grift at Tesla. On the SpaceX front they've been his biggest cheerleader (even dismissing other stories like the sexual harrassment)


Slightly confused as to why - surely homebrew adds itself to the PATH ahead of the system utilities?

Also - surely vim auto-reads your vimrc?


I learned to deliberately declare paths pretty early on in my adventures at the CLI. I don't leave room for accidental alternative execution. It might be overkill, but it gives me a sense of security and that's why it's there. Don't worry, I probably made a terrible mistake somewhere else that completely negates my attempts at a correct shell environment.


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