In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.
Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware product, but without it, and the mistakes made and addressed while tinkering with it, the sleek consumer-grade PCB won't be possible to design.
> "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.
Perl lets every developer write Perl in their own idiosyncratic way.
And every developer does.
It makes for very un-fun times when I'm having to read a file that's been authored by ten developers over ten years, each of whom with varying opinions and skill levels.
I guess in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it over 11 years. My sincere apologies to those who come after me, and my sincere fuck-you to those who came before me. :)
Something I only figured out in the ‘10s is that the main tax of code smells is during debugging. Debugging when taken to the level of art is less about sorting all of the possible causes for a problem by likelihood but by ease of validation.
Things that are cheap to check should be checked first unless they are really unlikely. You change the numbers game from trying to make the biggest cleaving lines possible, to smaller bites that can be done rapidly (and perhaps more importantly, mentally cheaply).
Code smells chum the waters. Because where there is smoke sometimes there is fire, and code smells often hide bugs. You get into Tony Hoare’s Turing award speech; either no bugs are obvious, or there are no obvious bugs.
So I end up making the change easy and then making the easy change because we have more code each week so the existing code needs to be simpler if someone is going to continue to understand the entire thing.
Perl doesn’t seem to have figured this out at all.
Exactly. Perl is about experimenting, trying things your way, and discovering new and good ways to write programs. Which is a wonderful capability for research and discovery, and for art or recreation, but not that great for industrial production.
This is why Perl was quite fit for the job at the dawn, or, rather, the detonation phase of the Internet explosion in late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Lisp and Smalltalk that promote similar DIY wizardry values. But once the industry actually appeared and started to mature, more teamwork-friendly languages like Java, PHP, and Python started to take over.
I wouldn't say "wildly". I would say that it's critical enough to the company's workings that they devote enough resources to it to keep it going, but not enough resources to consider re-writing it or re-factoring it to be easier to work on.
In a similar vein, as the industry matured, we went from having teams of wizards building products, to teams of "good-enough" developers, interchangeable, easy to onboard. Perl culture was too much about craft-mastery which ended up being at odds with most corporate cultures.
Unfortunately, as a former Perl dev, it makes a lot of other environments feel bland. Often more productive yes, but bland nonetheless. Of the newer languages, Nim does have that non-bland feel. Whether it ends up with significant adoption when Rust and Golang are well established is a different story.
Check out "Perl Best Practices" by Damien Conway, and the more recent "Modern Perl" by Chromatic. Both can be had as paperbacks, and I think both are also available free on online.
I'll go further. Ignore the Perl specific bits and Conway's "Perl Best Practices" is one of the best general programming books ever written.
It has so many great pieces of advice that apply to any programming task, everything from naming variables, to testing, error handling, code organization, documentation, etc, etc. Ultimately, for timeless advice on programming as a profession the language is immaterial.
The big pearl of wisdom I took from Larry Wall seemed to be counter to the culture I experienced looking in from the outside. That always confused me a bit about Perl.
And that was, paraphrased: make the way you want something to be used be the most concise way to use it and make the more obscure features be wordy.
This could have been the backbone of an entire community but they diminished it to code golf.
Couldn't they have figured out one decent way to do things before releasing features to all users? I tried Scala for a bit then decided it was complicated for no good reason.
Idk about Haskell, but I used Erlang which is also purely functional. No matter how long I used it and tried to appreciate its elegance, it became clear this isn't a convenient way to do things generally. But it was designed well, unlike Scala.
Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes. Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", but it is not a functional language in the modern sense.
If you go to learn Haskell, you will find that it has a lot to say about functional programming that Erlang did not teach you. You will also find that you've already gotten over one of the major hurdles to writing Haskell, which is writing with immutable values, which significantly reduces the difficult of swallowing the entire language at once and makes it relatively easier. I know it's a relatively easy path because it's the one I took.
> Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all.
How do you figure?
The essence of FP is functions of the shape `data -> data` rather than `data -> void`, deemphasizing object-based identity, and treating functions as first-class tools for abstraction. There's enough dynamic FP languages at this point to establish that these traits are held in common with the static FP languages. Is Clojure not an FP language?
> It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes.
All data in Elixir is immutable. Bindings can be rebound but the data the bindings point to remains immutable, identical to Erlang.
Elixir just rewrites `x = 1; x = x + 1` to `x1 = 1; x2 = x1 + 1`. The immutable value semantics remain, and anything that sees `x` in between expressions never has its `x` mutated.
> Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", but it is not a functional language in the modern sense.
I did a large amount of Scala prior to doing Erlang/Elixir and while I had a lot of fun with Applicative and Monoid I'm not sure they're the essence of FP. Certainly an important piece of the puzzle but not the totality.
If you wanted to write a quick on off script then using magic variables,etc made sense. Writing something you’ll keep? Don’t use those. When Perl 5 introduced references they could have simplified the syntax though.
Not really. It wasn’t audacious in service of anything innovative. Haskell takes functional programming to the nth degree, scala tried to be an advanced Java for example better at concurrency.
Perl was an early dynamic (garbage collected) “scripting language” but no more advanced than its contemporary python in this regard.
It had the weird sigils due to a poor design choice.
It had the many global cryptic variables and implicit variables due to a poor design choice.
It has the weird use of explicit references because of the bad design choice to flatten lists within lists to one giant list.
It actually was the one thing you said it wasn’t - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds. At least until better competitors came along and built up library ecosystems.
I think what's most likely to happen here is that:
* a developer that knew how it worked used it in code where he *wanted* to get the first line
* someone just starting up copied it over and assumed that's the way to get the content of command into a variable
It's essentially complaining about using feature wrong on purpose, because the person that made mistake never learned the language.
my($var1, $var2...) is a way to multi-assign variables from an array.
and that makes perfect sense when you look at it. Perl have no multiple returns, but if you need a function that returns 2 variables it is very easy to make it work with:
my ($bandwidth, $latency) = speedtest($host)
Perl's feature for returning different type depending on caller is definitely a confusing part but
my @lines = `fortune`
returning lines makes perfect sense for the use case (you call external commands to parse its output, and if you do that you generally want it in lines, because then you can just do
foreach my $line (`fortune`) {}
and it "just works".
Now you might ask "why make such shortcuts?". Well, one of big mistakes when making Perl is that it was also aimed as replacement for sed/awk for the oneliners, so language is peppered with "clever short ways to do stuff", and it's a pleasure to use in quick ad-hoc oneliners for CLI.... but then people try to use same cleverness in the actual code and it ends up with the unreadable mess people know Perl for.
the fact you can do
my ($first_line, $second_line, ...) = `fortune`
is just the feature being.... consistent in its use "when you give it array, it will fill it with lines from the executed command"
you gave it array, and it just did what it does with arrays.
Then don't use the low level interfaces. In Perl, language features are plug and play. Everything's in a module. Use the core module List::Util instead.
That's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.
This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*
There's is no fair comparison to be made here with how + and * work is most languages, precisely because + and * work the same in most languages, while whatever perl is doing here is just idiosyncratic.
Even C gets it's fair share of flack for how it overloads * to mean three different things! (multiplication, pointer declaration, and dereference)
It's just very non-obvious what the code does when you're skimming it.
Especially in a dynamic language like Perl, you wouldn't know that you're passing down an integer instead of a function until the code blows up in a completely unrelated function.
You can't do that if you gave up at the very first sigil puzzle.
I'm fine with that: to program in Perl you need to be able to follow manuals, man pages, expert answers, - and even perl cookbooks, or CPAN or web searches. It's a technical tool. The swiss army chainsaw. It's worth it.
Seems like you and a few other posters are making the article's point – that Perl's culture is hermetic and that new programmers would rather learn Python, Ruby or Javascript rather than figure out which sigil means what.
I wouldn't call it hermetic in that the many forms of documentation are insanely thorough and accessible - if not well advertised. There is no gate-keeping (from my point of view). New users are welcome. It's easy to learn (for the people for whom reading is not an obstacle).
But yes, no contest that the world has been on a simplicity binge. Python won by pushing simplicity and by having giant software corporations choosing it (and not complaining about the line noise nonsense). If you want to go into programming professionally, for now many years, you need python.
I don't know that I would put Javascript in the same bag. I mean, it's the other way: it looks simple and it isn't.
But python, yes, python won because it looks simple and google pushed it.
Many other languages now have to reckon with the python supremacy. This is not specific to perl / raku. It will take work for anything to replace python.
> it was just not a good language compared to others
I think this was one of those things people just repeated, rather than having concrete examples from experience. It's like people saying a Toyota Corolla is better than a Honda Civic. Is it really? Or are they really just two different forms of the same thing? They both get you to the grocery store, they're both very reliable, small cheap. Having a preference is not the same thing as one actually being superior to the other.
His point about references is no small thing. Other dynamic languages don’t make users think much about the distinction between references and values at the syntax level. With Perl you needed to use “->” arrow operator frequently if and only if you were using references. So getting at a map inside an array or vice versa had its own syntax vs reading a string in a map or array.
Also it had bolted on, awkward OO on top of the bolted on, awkward params passing. You literally had to shift “self” (or “this”) off a magical array variable (@_).
By default it wouldn’t warn if you tried to read from an undeclared variable or tried to use one in a conditional or assign from one. You had to declare “use strict;” for that. Which wasn’t hard! But these awkward things piled up, a bunch of small cuts. Don’t forget “use warnings;” also, another thing to put at the top of every Perl file.
To the extent its awkward syntax came out of aping of shell and common Unix cli tools, you could maybe see it as cultural issue if you squint.
But any language in the mid 90s was infected with the “rtfm” priesthood vibe the author writes about, because the internet then was disproportionately populated by those sysop types, especially the part that can answer programming language questions on usenet, which is basically where you had to ask back then.
So for example Rails won for technical reasons, it is much more concise with fewer footguns than its Perl equivalents. I was actively coding web stuff in Perl when it came along and early switched. It wasn’t a cultural thing, having choice in Perl was fine (and ruby has sadly never grown much culture outside Rails - it could really use some). It probably did help that it came along in the mid aughts by which time you could ask questions on the web instead of Usenet. And it used YouTube for that first rails demo. So ruby did end up with a less sysopy culture but that had more to do with the timing of its success than the success itself.
Shell had to do this because of shell reasons, like how you need spaces where you shouldn't. Perl post-dated C by over a decade, so there was no reason for goofy argument unpacking.
Yes there was a reason as Perl took inspiration from Lisp - everything is a list- and everyone knows how quick C's variadic arguments get nasty.
So @_ was a response to that issue, given Perl was about being dynamic and not typed and there were no IDEs or linters that would type-check and refactor code based on function signatures.
JS had the same issue forever and finally implemented a rest/spread operator in ES6. Python had variadic from the start but no rest operator until Python3. Perl had spread/rest for vargs in the late 80s already. For familiarity, Perl chose the @ operator that meant vargs in bourne shell in the 70s.
Not only normal arguments like we get in C or Pascal, but there's keyword arguments, you can have optional arguments, and a rest argument, which is most like Perl's @_. And that's not even getting into destructuring lambda lists which are available for macros or typed lambda lists for methods.
Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language.
But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn, both in terms of reading and writing. In other words, it encourages broadly maintainable code. Ruby is quite similar (although I think people massively overstate how much the language itself generally encourages understandable semantics)
> Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language.
GvR explicitly describes the motivation behind Python in similar terms (I can probably find a timestamp in that recent documentary for this). But the goal there was to be fully "general purpose" (and readable and pragmatic, more than artistic) while trying to capture what he saw as the good things about shell languages.
And it's changed quite a bit since then, and there are many things I would say with the benefit of hindsight were clear missteps.
We all joke about the hard problems of computer science, but it seems to me that the hard problems of programming language design, specifically (and perhaps software engineering more generally?) include having good taste and figuring out what to do about reverse compatibility.
> I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn
The use cases have also changed over time. Quite a lot of developers ended up on Windows (although that pendulum is perhaps shifting again) where the rules and expectations of "shell" are very different. To say nothing of e.g. web development; long gone are the days of "cgi-bin" everywhere.
Shell is a crappy scripting language because it has primitive data structures and data flow control making it hard to manage and manipulate data as you process it between applications. The fact that newlines are such a problem is a case in point.
Python is a crappy shell scripting language because the syntax around pipe and subprocess is really clunky.
Perl managed to have decent data structures and also have decent syntax around subprocess calls.
But I feel like the Python invoke module gives me everything I need wrt subprocess calls. I basically write any nontrivial "shell script" these days as a Python invoke command.
When I learned perl, I encountered a way to express myself more easily than any other language. For example, being able to say not only "if foo" but "unless bar" gave me a more fluid vocabulary to get things out of my head and into code.
Thing is, it worked great for ME but when I started interacting with other people's perl code, it all broke down.
One person would write it all on one line. Another would be extra verbose. Some would use all the idioms, others would be 10 levels of nested braces.
Every person's brain expressed itself differently and it was much harder to find common ground.
Eventually I left perl for python, which seemed to be more sane. It seemed pythonic was more of a thing and the code was more readable. Also, it had a large standard library and you didn't have to leave the language to solve just about any problem. It did require extra effort to write code, but the benefits were pretty obvious.
A couple other sort of random points - perl 6 was delayed and that might have hurt the language. Just the same python 3 did come out, but the 2 to 3 changeover was a huge negative to the language.
At this point, is the most "effective ethical" career path for a software developer to work on LLMs to flood social media and ad-clicks to speedrun the collapse of digital marketing? And thus freeing competent but money-driven software engineers to work on something else?
By collapse of digital marketing you mean collapse of social networks?
I cannot say I would miss them, but I doubt it will solve the problem.
Because yes, software engineers would love to work on many interesting things. But they also love being able to buy food and pay rent.
If the ad companies don't pay money anymore, who will replace them?
(I still dream of a world with donation for free services as default, but I am usually not taken serious with this.)
And .. about ad companies and LLMs - I think the madness just started. Once the marketing companies get their product placements directly into the models and the agents sophisticated enough, that you cannot trust anything posted online anymore, it will just destroy anonymous communication, as you cannot trust any anonymous account anymore at all. And will have a hard time finding out who is, who they say they are.
Check out the guy's social media (links in the original article). The shit is downright hilarious. He's very self-conscious about how horrible his business is.
Click farms effectively function as janitors, mopping up spam someone else paid to throw so that no real user stumbles upon it, so they are beneficial.
It's ultimately spammers and scammers fighting against each other, so you could say the trash is taking itself out. Every dollar they spend fighting is one less dollar spent spamming actual users, so it's a win.
Is it possible to permanently disable Gemini on Android? I keep getting it inserted into my messages and other places, and it's horrible to think that I'm one misclick away from turning it on.
You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?
I might not like a certain feature, but I'd dislike the government preventing companies from adding features a whole lot more. The thought of that terrifies me.
(To be clear, legitimate regulations around privacy, user data, anti-fraud, etc. are fine. But just because you find AI features to be something you don't... like? That's not a legitimate reason for government intervention.)
That doesn't change anything. If there aren't any harms except that certain people don't "like" a feature, it's not the government's role to force companies to allow users to opt out of features. If you don't like a feature, don't buy the product. The government should not be micromanaging product design.
Take it up with your city council, if they're the ones require a smartphone to pay for parking.
But also, you're going to have to be more specific about what tracking you're worried about. Cell towers need to track you to give you service. But the parking app only gets the data you enable with permissions, and the data the city requires you to give the app (e.g. a payment method). So I'm not super clear what tracking you're concerned about?
If you don't use your smartphone for anything but paying for parking, I genuinely don't know what tracking you're concerned about.
Because it's ultimately a form of censorship. Governments shouldn't be in the business of shutting down speech some people don't like, and in the same way shouldn't be in the business of shutting down software features some people don't like. As long as nobody is being harmed, censorship is bad and anti-democratic. (And we make exceptions for cases of actual harm, like libelous or threatening speech, or a product that injures or defrauds its users.) Freedom is a fundamental aspect of democracy, which is why freedoms are written into constitutions so simple majority vote can't remove them.
1) Integration or removal of features isn't speech. And has been subject to government compulsion for a long time (e.g. seat belts and catalytic converters in automobiles).
2) Business speech is limited in many, many ways. There is even compelled speech in business (e.g. black box warnings, mandatory sonograms prior to abortions).
I said, "As long as nobody is being harmed". Seatbelts and catalytic converters are about keeping people safe from harm. As are black box warnings and mandatory sonograms.
And legally, code and software are considered a form of speech in many contexts.
Do you really want the government to start telling you what software you can and cannot build? You think the government should be able to outlaw Python and require you to do your work in Java, and outlaw JSON and require your API's to return XML? Because that's the type of interference you're talking about here.
Mandatory sonograms aren't about harm prevention. (Though yes, I would agree with you if you said the government should not be able to compel them.)
In the US, commercial activities do not have constitutionally protected speech rights, with the sole exception of "the press". This is covered under the commerce clause and the first amendment, respectively.
I assemble DNA, I am not a programmer. And yes, due to biosecurity concerns there are constraints. Again, this might be covered under your "does no harm" standard. Though my making smallpox, for example, would not be causing harm any more than someone building a nuclear weapon would cause harm. The harm would come from releasing it.
But I think, given that AI has encouraged people to suicide, and would allow minors the ability to circumvent parental controls, as examples, that regulations pertaining to AI integration in software, including mandates that allow users to disable it (NOTE, THIS DOESN'T FORCE USERS TO DISABLE IT!!), would also fall under your harm standard. Outside of that, the leaking of personally identifiable information does cause material harm every day. So there needs to be proactive control available to the end user regarding what AI does on their computer, and how easy it is to accidentally enable information-gathering AI when that was not intended.
I can come up with more examples of harm beyond mere annoyance. Hopefully these examples are enough.
The topic of suicide and LLMs is a nuanced and complex one, but LLMs aren't suggesting it out of nowhere when summarizing your inbox or calendar. Those are conversations users actively start.
As for leaking PII, that's definitely something for to be aware of, but it's not a major practical concern for any end users so far. We'll see if prompt injection turns into a significant real-world threat and what can be done to mitigate it.
But people here aren't arguing against LLM features based on substantial harms. They're doing it because they don't like it in their UX. That's not a good enough reason for the government to get involved.
(Also, regarding sonograms, I typed without thinking -- yes of course the ones that are medically unnecessary have no justification in law, which is precisely why US federal courts have struck them down in North Carolina, Indiana, and Kentucky. And even when they're medically necessary, that's a decision for doctors not lawmakers.)
I emphatically disagree. See you at the ballot box.
> but it's not a major practical concern for any end users so far.
My wife came across a post or comment by a person considering preemptive suicide in fear that their ChatGPT logs will ever get leaked. Yes, fear of leaks is a major practical concern for at least that user.
Fear of leaks, or the other harms you mention, have nothing to do with the question at hand, which is whether these features are enabled by default.
If someone is using ChatGPT, they're using ChatGPT. They're not inputting sensitive personal secrets by accident. Turning Gemini off by default in Gmail isn't going to change whether someone is using ChatGPT as a therapist or something.
You seem to simply be arguing that you don't like LLM's. To which I'll reply: if they do turn out to present substantial harms that need to be regulated, then so be it, and regulate them appropriately.
But that applies to all of them, and has nothing to do with the question at hand, which is whether they can be enabled by default in consumer products. As long as chatgpt.com and gemini.google.com exist, there's no basis for asking the government to turn off LLM features by default in Gmail or Calendar, while making them freely available as standalone products. Does that make sense?
Yes. I think laws should be used to shut down things that are universally disliked but for which there is no other mechanism for accountability. That seems like obviously the point of laws.
not the LLM features. The undisable-able intrusions to advertise them, which rely on controlling platforms and so being able to use them to anticompetitively promote their own products.
Yes, the LLM features. There's nothing anticompetitive in a popup or button for your own feature in your own product. People like me find many of them useful. Maybe you find that inconvenient for the narrative you're pushing, but it's true.
What do you mean narrative? The narrative is that I hate them. If almost everyone else also does, we should ban them. Simple as that.
It is no different from passing legislation to ban spam or mandate that newsletters have one-click unsubscribe buttons. I hate living a world where corporations are unaccountably disrespectful to their users. Laws are how you hold them accountable. I don't care if the justification for the laws is competition or spam or what. It's simply the point of laws: to give society power over things that individuals can't easily have power over, so that they may improve their lives. To argue that we shouldn't improve our lives is absurd. The only justification for not doing it would be that it is immoral to do so, which it is not. Otherwise the only remaining question is whether we can rally the political will to do it. Not likely in the short term, but, the way things are going I expect it will happen eventually.
> If almost everyone else also does, we should ban them.
But not "almost everyone" hates them. Plenty of people like them and use them. You're ignoring that.
And think about applying your argument to free speech. If most people don't like an opinion, should we ban it?
You shouldn't be able to ban things you merely don't like. There needs to be some kind of legitimate harm. Having Gemini in your Gmail isn't creating any harm.
But you could ask, what is so terrifying about exerting democratic control over people's free speech, over the political opinions they're allowed to express?
The answer is, because it infringes on freedom. As long as these AI features aren't harming anyone -- if your only complaint is you find their presence annoying, in a product you have a free choice in using or not using -- then there's no democratic justification for passing laws against them. Democratic rights take precedence.
If you can show it's harming privacy, then regulate the privacy. That's legitimate. But I assume you're talking about AI training, not feature usage.
Trying to regulate whether an end-user feature is available just because you don't "like" AI creep is no different from trying to regulate that user interfaces ought to use flat design rather than 3D effects like buttons with shadows. It would be an illegitimate use of government power.
When I buy a book, I don't want the government deciding in advance which paragraphs should be included, and which paragraphs people "shouldn't have to listen to". So I don't want it doing that with software either. It's the same thing.
You don't have to buy that book in the first place. The same way you don't have to use a piece of software.
You're trying to make it sound like a corporation's right to force AI on us is equivalent to an individual's right to speech, which is idiotic in its face. But I'd also point out that speech is regulated in the US, so you're still not making the point you think you're making.
And as far as I'm concerned, as long as Google and Apple have a monopoly on smartphone software, they should be regulated into the ground. Consumers have no alternatives, especially if they have a job.
Code and software are very much forms of speech in a legal sense.
And free speech is regulated in cases of harm, like violent threats or libel. But there's no harm here in any legal sense. People are just unhappy with the product UX -- that there are buttons and areas dedicated to AI features.
Companies should absolutely have the freedom to build the products they want as long as there's no actual harm. If you merely don't like a UX, use a competing product. If you don't like the UX of any product, then tough. Products aren't usually perfectly what you want, and that's OK.
You're completely ignoring the most important point I raised, which is that I can't use a competing product. I can't stop using Microsoft, Google, Meta, or Apple products and still be a part of my industry or US society.
You're not being forced to use the AI features. If you don't want to use them, don't use them. There's zero antitrust or anticompetitive issue here.
Your argument that Google and Apple should be "regulated into the ground" isn't an argument. It's a vengeful emotion or part of a vague ideology or something.
If I want blenders to be sold in bright orange, but the three brands at my local store are all black or silver, I really don't think it's right for the government should pass a law requiring stores to carry blenders in bright orange. But that's what you're asking for, for the government to determine which features software products have.
> You're not being forced to use the AI features. If you don't want to use them, don't use them
You can't turn them off in many products, and Microsoft's and Google's roadmaps both say that they're going to disable turning them off, starting with using existing telemetry for AI training.
> Your argument that Google and Apple should be "regulated into the ground" isn't an argument. It's a vengeful emotion or part of a vague ideology or something.
You're just continuing to ignore that all of this is based on their market dominance. There are literally two options for smartphone operating systems. For something that's vital to modern life, that's unacceptable and gives users no choice.
If a company gets to enjoy a near-monopoly status, it has to be regulated to prevent abuse of its power. There's a huge amount of precedent for this in industries like telecom.
> If I want blenders to be sold in bright orange, but the three brands at my local store are all black or silver, I really don't think it's right for the government should pass a law requiring stores to carry blenders in bright orange
Do you really not see the difference between "color of blender" and "unable to turn off LLMs on a device that didn't have any on it when I bought it"?
> Do you really not see the difference between "color of blender" and "unable to turn off LLMs on a device that didn't have any on it when I bought it"?
Do you really not see that there is no difference?
Either the government starts dictating product design or it doesn't.
I don't want a world where the government decides which features software makers include or turn on or off by default. Whether there are 20 companies competing in a space or mainly 2.
Don't you see where that leads? Suddenly it's dictating encryption and inserting backdoors. Suddenly it starts allowing Truth Social to build new features and removing features on Twitter.
This is a bigger issue than you seem to be acknowledging. The freedom to create the software you want, provided it's not causing actual harm, is as important to preserve as the freedom to write the books or blog posts you want.
If this had something to do with antitrust then the fact that there are only two major phone platforms would be relevant. But the fact that both platforms are implementing LLM features is not anticompetitive. To the contrary, it's competitive even if you personally don't like it. It's literally no different from them both supporting 1,000 other features in common.
> But you could ask, what is so terrifying about exerting democratic control over people's free speech, over the political opinions they're allowed to express?
"Newsflash", the entire point of constitutions that enumerate rights is that fundamental rights and freedoms may not be abridged even by majority decision.
If a Supreme Court strikes down a majority-passed law limiting free speech guaranteed by the Constitution, that's democracy at work.
It takes more than majority vote to add a new amendment.
Go ahead and try, but I don't think you'll find that an amendment to restrict people's freedoms is going to be very popular. Because it will be seen as anti-democratic.
I'm not following you. I didn't say 60%? And 60% is a supermajority, not a majority. Which is a huge distinction. And US constitutional amendments require much stricter thresholds than that -- two thirds of Congress and three quarters of states. That's a gigantic bar.
Yes voters try to restrict their own freedoms all the time. We have constitutions with rights to block them from doing that in fundamental ways. That's what protection from tyranny of the majority is all about. Just because you have a majority doesn't mean you're allowed to take away rights. That's a fundamental principle of democracy. Democracy isn't just majority rule -- it's the protection of rights as well.
>You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?
Correct, especially when the features break copyright law, use as much electricity as Belgium, and don't actually work at all. Just a simple button that says "Enabled", and it's off by default. Shouldn't be too hard, yeah? You can continue to use the slop machine, that's fine. Don't force the rest of us to get down in the trough with you.
I have no problem with a company voluntarily choosing to make it a toggle.
I have a big problem with a government forcing companies to enable toggles on features because users complain about the UX.
If there are problems with copyright, that's an issue for the courts -- not a user toggle. If you have problems with the electricity, then that's an issue for electricity infrastructure regulations. If you think it doens't work, then don't use it.
Passing a law forcing a company to turn off a legal feature by default is absurd. It's no different from asking a publisher to censor pages of a book that some people don't like, and make them available only by a second mail-order purchase to the publisher. That's censorship.
>I have a big problem with a government forcing companies to enable toggles on features because users complain about the UX.
I have a big problem with companies forcing me to use garbage I don't want to use.
>If there are problems with copyright, that's an issue for the courts -- not a user toggle.
But in the meantime, companies can just get away with breaking the law.
>If you have problems with the electricity, then that's an issue for electricity infrastructure regulations.
But in the meantime, companies can drive up the cost of electricity with reckless abandon.
>If you think it doens't work, then don't use it.
I wish I lived in your world where I can opt out of all of this AI garbage.
>Passing a law forcing a company to turn off a legal feature by default is absurd.
"Legal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You know the court system is slow, and companies running roughshod over the law until the litigation works itself out "because they're all already doing it anyway" is par for the course. AirBnB should've been illegal, but by the time we went to litigate it, it was too big. Spotify sold pirated music until it was too big to litigate. How convenient that this keeps happening. To the casual observer, it would almost seem intentional, but no, it's probably just some crazy coincidence.
>It's no different from asking a publisher to censor pages of a book that some people don't like, and make them available only by a second mail-order purchase to the publisher. That's censorship.
Forcing companies to stop being deleterious to society is not censorship, and it isn't Handmaid's Tale to enforce a semblance of consumer rights.
> I have a big problem with companies forcing me to use garbage I don't want to use.
That pretty much sums it up. And the answer is: too bad. Deal with it, like the rest of us.
I have a big problem with companies not sending me a check for a million dollars. But companies don't obey my whims. And I'm not going to complain that the government should do something about it, because that would be silly and immature.
In reality, companies try their best to build products that make money, and they compete with each other to do so. These principles have led to amazing products. And as long as no consumers are being harmed (e.g. fraud, safety, etc.), asking the government to interfere in product decisions is a terrible idea. The free market exists because it does a better job than any other system at giving consumers what they want. Just because you or a group of people personally don't like a particular product isn't a reason to overturn the free market and start asking the government to interfere with product design. Because if you start down that path, pretty soon they're going to be interfering with the things you like.
> The free market exists because it does a better job than any other system at giving consumers what they want.
Bull. Free markets are subject to a lot of pressures, both from the consumers, but also from the corporate ownership and supply chains. The average consumer cannot afford a bespoke alternative for everything they want, or need, so are subject to a market. Within the constraints of that market it is, indeed, best for them if they are free to choose what they want.
But from personal experience I know damn sure that what I really really want is often not available, so I'm left signalling with my money that a barely tolerable alternative is acceptable. And then, over a long enough period of time, I don't even get that barely tolerable alternative anymore as the company has phased it out. Free markets, in an age of mass production and lower margins, universally mean that a fraction of the market will be unable to buy what they want, and the alternatives available may mean they have to go without entirely. Because we have lost the ability to make it ourselves (assuming we ever had that ability).
> But from personal experience I know damn sure that what I really really want is often not available
But that's just life. I genuinely don't understand how you can complain that not every product is exactly the product you want. Companies are designing their products to meet the needs of millions of people at the price point they can pay for it. Not for you personally.
We have more consumer choice than we've ever had in modern history, and you're still complaining it's not enough?
Even when we lived in tribes and made everything ourselves, we were extremely limited in our options to the raw materials available locally, and the extremely limited ability to transform things. We've never had more choice than we have today. I cannot fathom how you are still able to complain about it.
I'm just formulating an argument that a free market is not the be all and end all. If you have the money, bespoke is better. And if you don't have the money, making it yourself is better, if you have the skills (which most don't for most purposes).
Issues that do plague the current market in the US, that impact my household enough to notice, are:
1) Product trends. When a market leader decides to go all in on something, a lot of the other companies follow along. We've seen this in internet connectivity, touchscreens in new cars, ingredients in hair care products, among others. This greatly limits the ability of consumers to find alternatives that do not have these trends. In personal care products this is a significant issue when it comes to allergies or other kinds of sensitivities.
But in general just look at the number of people who complain about things such as a lack of discrete buttons for touchpads. Not even Framework offers buttoned touchpads as an option, despite there being a market for them.
It's obvious that it's the vocal, heavy spenders who determine what's on the market. Or it's a race to the bottom in terms of price that determines this. It's not the average consumer.
2) Perfume cross-contamination as an extension of chemical odors in general[0,1]. In recent years many companies with perfumed products such as cleaning agents have increased the perfume or increased its duration with fixatives. This amplified after so many people had their sense of smell damage during early COVID (lots of complaints about scented candles and the like not having an odor anymore, et cetera).
This wouldn't be a problem from a consumer point of view except that the perfumes transfer to non-perfumed products - basically anything that has plastic or paper absorbs second-hand fragrances pretty well. I live in as close as we can get to a perfume-free household, for medical reasons. It's effectively impossible to buy certain classes of products, or anything at all from certain retailers, that doesn't come perfumed. There are major stores such as Amazon and Target that we rarely buy from as we have to spend a lot of money, time, and effort to desmell products (basically everything purchased from Amazon or Target now has a second-hand perfume).
It's possible to have stores that have both perfumed products and non-perfumed products such that perfume cross-contamination doesn't occur. But this requires the appropriate ventilation, and isn't something that's going to happen unless one of the principals of the store has a sensitivity.
And then there are perfumes picked up in transit from the wholesaler, trucking company, or shipping company.
I hope someday to win Powerball or Mega Millions so that I can start a company dedicated to perfume-free household basics. That are guaranteed to still be perfume-free on delivery.
On the one hand, I'm annoyed by some of the same things that annoy you.
On the other hand, it's never been easier to buy fragrance-free versions of detergents, cleaning products, personal care products, etc. When I was growing up, they didn't exist at all -- everything was horribly scented. Now "free" or "free and clear" is a whole product category. Literally everything I buy is fragrance-free, and it's wonderful. Little of it's available at my local CVS, but it's all available on Target.com or Amazon. Thanks to the free market.
And when you say "it's the vocal, heavy spenders who determine what's on the market" that's not true at all. It's the race to the bottom in terms of price, which you say, but that is the average consumer. The average consumer wants to spend less. You can spend more to get better products, usually.
Trends really are cost-driven and consumer-driven. If companies make things people really don't like, people stop buying them and the companies change. There are a million examples, from New Coke to the Apple touchbar. You're arguing the free market is failing, but it really does work. You're demanding something better, but when you add government intervention to dictate how products are made, that's generally going to make things worse, because why would the government be better than free competition for consumers' wallets?
>That pretty much sums it up. And the answer is: too bad. Deal with it, like the rest of us.
I am dealing with it, thanks, by fighting against it.
>I have a big problem with companies not sending me a check for a million dollars. But companies don't obey my whims. And I'm not going to complain that the government should do something about it, because that would be silly and immature.
Because as we all know, forcing you to use the abusive copyright laundering slop machine is exactly morally equivalent to not getting arbitrary cheques in the mail.
>In reality, companies try their best to build products that make money, and they compete with each other to do so.
In the Atlas Shrugged cinematic universe, maybe. Now, companies try to extract as much as they can by doing as little as possible. Who was Google competing with for their AI summmary, when it's so laughably bad, and the only people who want it are the people whose paycheques depend on it, or people who want engagement on LinkedIn?
>The free market exists because it does a better job than any other system at giving consumers what they want.
Nobody wants this!
>Because if you start down that path, pretty soon they're going to be interfering with the things you like.
I mean, they're doing that, too, and people like you look down your nose and tell me to take that abuse as well. So no, I'm not going to sit idly by and watch these parasites ruin what shreds of humanity I have left.
>> The free market exists because it does a better job than any other system at giving consumers what they want.
> Nobody wants this!
OK, well if you don't believe in the free market then sure.
Good luck seeing how well state ownership manages the economy and if it does a better job at delivering the software features you want, or even of putting food on your table. Because the entire history of the twentieth century says you're not going to like it.
"regulating corporate overreach = state ownership"
Huh.
Your argument boils down to "it is wrong for people to defend themselves from corporations", but the cases you're making are incoherent. It seems like you believe this but don't know why you believe it and you're making up gibberish to defend it. I'd suggest you stop and analyze why you believe this--like what you really think will happen, and why you really think people do not have a right to defend themselves. Personally I can think of no situation where it is moral to say: people should not defend themselves. The concept seems absurd. To me all of human history is evidence that people do, always, have a right to defend themselves, and much evil has been perpetrated by the notion that they should sit down endure abuses instead.
No, you seem to not be reading what I'm saying. Please don't call it "incoherent" or "gibberish" just because you don't agree. That's completely inappropriate.
We're talking about a UX choice and you're talking about people "defending themselves" as opposed to "enduring abuses" coming from "much evil"?
The justification you're proposing is the same one that censors free speech, because people want to defend themselves from certain ideas, or things they just don't "like".
There's no harm here. Nobody's attacking you. You're not being abused. We're talking about a software feature you think is inconvenient that it takes up space on your screen.
I think companies should have the freedom to design products the they want, as long as it's not causing harm. Which in this case, it's not. You just don't like it. But that's not harm. If you don't like it, don't use it. Same as if you don't like a book, don't read it.
Rights and freedoms exist for a good reason. They're not absolute because they can conflict with each other, but in this case there's zero conflict. There's no justification for the government to start dictating Google's UX in this case.
I uninstall the gemini app and disable the google app. It seems they are heavily linked so remmoving it may do the trick. As a practice I don't use any google apps if I can find a good replacement so I am not sure if messages is impacted.
Recently I've seen some articles that they've figured out at least partly how the immune system learns to ignore antigens. And have made progress with inverse vaccines.
Cross fingers perhaps that'll make transplants work without having to bludgeon peoples immune system to keep them from rejecting.
It's a bit of an awkward syntax to get a reliable assembler. Does it at least allow you to prove the behaviour of a larger block of assembly? For example, could I use it to prove that a block of assembly is equivalent to a given set of operations?
Either it would generate a more robust (and likely more recognizable) solution, or it would fail to converge, really.
You may need to train on a smaller number of FPGAs and gradually increase the set. Genetic algorithms have been finicky to get right, and you might find that more devices would massively increase the iteration count
Publishing private correspondence with single board member(s) is super distasteful because the opinion of one member is not the opinion of the whole board. Sure, he got tacit agreement from one, but that's not agreement with the organization as a whole.
That's putting aside how gross it is for your personal comms to leak in public when you might be a little more candid about what's going on.
How can you trust someone who's willing to violate your privacy like that?
The whole drama is interesting as an outsider, but I can't be left without feeling that newPebble is trying to jump start a commercial venture via shortcuts.
Rebble was never going to change the world but they seemed to be very good at maintaining status quo + many small benefits and just reliably serving that.
The board falsely accused someone of a crime. The board members must take responsibility of that decision, which involves their interactions being evidence in claims of said crime. That responsibility is part of what it means to lead something.
It's a little gross it had come to that, but ugh. Sure rebble did good for the community, but that past tense is important. Now they're trying to do bad, and that cannot be justified. Accusations require a defense, so here we are.
The Pebble community is not and never was Rebble. I briefly used Cobble as an open source project, and used their app store mirror that they decided to host to download the same old apps and watch faces I used while Pebble lived, but I was not using a Rebble watch. The open source apps I want were never Rebble apps. No one expected Rebble to be anything than infrastructure life-support, but as no one thought the dream of new life in Pebble was never going to happen, it was the light we swarmed.
Now the life support task has ended with an appreciation for their efforts, and Rebble starts acting like a company running a smearing campaign trying and make up IP ownership and justification for royalties.
Rebble no longer represents any of the community, just a misguided and greedy board. What the community wanted now exists, so that is where we have gone.
I think the attitude here was "you've publicly accused me of impropriety, so here come the receipts". Specifically the accusations that he's not communicating with them (the messages prove he is).
You could argue the extent to which this was necessary but he's got to publicly defend himself against accusations ("Core Devices Keeps Stealing Our Work") that appear to be false.
> How can you trust someone who's willing to violate your privacy like that?
Who's to say he didn't have permission to post from his conversation partner? He doesn't need permission from the people he's talking about (just like we don't need his permission to post about him here).
wow, that puts a pretty different light on Eric's blogpost, at least for me. putting screenshots of private messages in a public blogpost without asking the person is SUCH a HUGE dickmove.
still happily waiting for my Core-Pebble to arrive, but i am getting so sick of people in general.
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