While I understand where the author is coming from, and I get his sentiment(s), I don't think what he proposes is actually possible: his vision relies on faux open tools and protocols and having access to walled gardens. The means of computation for these kinds of things are owned by a tiny minority. Nearly everything is a SaaS or is based, one way or the other, on rent extraction. We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice.
>There is a chance, though, that younger developers, and those who weren't around to build back during that last era a generation ago, are going to get inspired by MCP to push for the web to go back towards its natural architecture. It was never meant to be proprietary.
Alas, the reason APIs started closing and being metered is because, after all, there's someone owning and paying for the hardware upon which you are making calls and requests.
As long as there's no way to agree upon how to have a bunch of servers providing computation for anyone and at the same time ensuring their upkeep without the need for a central authority, I don't think such vision is sustainable long term. The current state of the Internet is proof of it.
> We're essentially subject to the whims of someone who is letting us do something for as long as we play nice.
Isn't that so the spirit of the times when working with LLMs? If one asks for a Prisma schema or something else out of GipPTy meant to be fed into a traditional parser, we're up the the whims of the attention blocks and layers to write out something that doesn't become a parse error. One can turn the temperature down, fine-tune, or self-host a model but does that guarantee the syntax will be correct (much less the semantics)?
High IQ (top 4%), with extremely high verbal skills (top 0.1%).
Late twenties, veering on thirties. Depression, anxiety, dissociation, numbness, trying to regain vitality.
Parents separated when I was 7. I was bullied and almost completely alone at school. As a teenager I changed schools and that got considerably better; lost the only friend I made there when we both were 14. Escaped my father's house at 17. Almost commited suicide at 19, which led me to therapy, and some years later, medication. Got out of both after 3 and 5 years, respectively. After that I met my now ex girlfriend, who -I dare say- I allowed to cheat on me. I moved out of my mother's house upon finding a somewhat decent paying job -but not enough in and by itself- and with the compromise of both my parents to financially support me. That changed over time on my father's side, when he noticed that it was not going to give him my affection as a token of appreciation, and I believe I am trapped of sorts: I live by myself in a little flat in the city center, paying a rent that takes 50% of my take-home pay (yet is _way_ cheaper than current average). The whole ordeal (breaking up, moving out, new job), got me on the verge of suicide for a second time. Got back into therapy and medication. Got out of medication; still in therapy.
The main problem I can voice is/was my father. Mentally ill but functional. Gone through his fair share of bad things -lived under a dictatorial regime in which his family was not part of the 'good' side; was sexually abused; had no running water or electricity until he was 16; possibly autistic as well as high IQ-. He used me as his therapist, his close friend, his personal confessor, his fan, his shadow, his emotional companion. He would constantly talk trash about my mother and stepfather, and leave me to my own devices in order to work on his thesis, which took him like 15 years to complete as an adult.
I was bullied at school, so I had no friends nor social life to speak of. I was barely out of the house... As a teen, I had few acquaintances and lived in considerabe isolation too. I left uni halfway through because I panicked, since I didn't pass clean the second year and I felt guilty for it. Summer jobs helped immensely with social skills, so I was able to mask my depression and general negativity way more effectively.
Ended up with two associate degrees, one in Marketing and one in Web Development. Currently working in the government, doing nothing (well, I'm self-studying _How To Design Programs_, by Felleisen et al., in the ample time I have at my disposal), but I'm mediocre as a coder. Considering going into a role of Functional Analyst or Technical Sales because of my verbal and logical skills, and raw processing power, as well as an analytical and obssesive personality.
I can't shake off the feeling that I'm worthless, utter trash, irrelevant, insignificant, with no real world skills, late to the party in terms of love and job prospects. Sometimes I get so out of center that I put myself to bed through sheer catastrophizing.
Now, good things and findings.
My mother is fully supportive, even helps economically (that's so much luck) and we love each other. I love my little brother. Albeit I feel like a free floating particle socially speaking, that I don't belong anywhere, I can have quite meaningful relationships with my friends. I'm attractive, and it shows. I'm fit. I'm disciplined, and stick to a very virtuous -if surely isolating- daily routine. I take care of myself by going to therapy, training powerlifting, eating and sleep well, trying to level up my coding skills, reading and learning. I live in a beautiful city, full of services, and everything is at walking distance. No addictions.
Learning about trauma and complex PTSD has been a discrete improvement in both my vocabulary and my ability to relate to my past and current lived experience. I'm going to try an underground MDMA assisted therapy session -that I will have to pay with part of my emergency funds-, to see if I can get back in touch with my body and my emotions. I've gone from 0 to 1 in this sense (I went from feeling nothing to feeling something as my general way of living), I can tear up but can't really cry cathartically. I can explain what has been done to me, but I don't feel it out of deep seated, ancient, shame and fear.
I'm definitely not educated enough to answer with nuance and certainty to some of the questions you posit. Nevertheless, I'd be interested, actually, in your opinion of what constitutes 1) evidence and 2) consensus. I, personally, have an intuition for it, but it's not very reasoned out. I'd love to develop it more in the future.
You argue that consensus is not really required in "hard science judgements". While I haven't studied proper philosophy of science, I'd say "measure things or do an experiment and be done with it" is, precisely, among the best ways to produce/allow consensus; or rather, the capacity of 'hard' science(s) to reason about a series of phenomena in such a way that consensus is 'easy'. One could argue that precisely the phenomena that 'hard' science inspects lends itself more to be inspected under a strict scientific method, too.
I'd say that any 'fact' is dependent on consciousness and intersubjectivity; yet at the same time, some things are more factual than others. Gravity as a phenomenon is more factual than, say, the Stendhal Effect. One can be more and better reproduced under more stringent conditions, thus having more predicting power and being more likely to be 'true' regardless of who interacts with the phenomenon, or reasons about it and its implications.
>I'd say that any 'fact' is dependent on consciousness and intersubjectivity; yet at the same time, some things are more factual than others. Gravity as a phenomenon is more factual than, say, the Stendhal Effect. One can be more and better reproduced under more stringent conditions, thus having more predicting power and being more likely to be 'true' regardless of who interacts with the phenomenon, or reasons about it and its implications.
Yes, this is my point. The question of, for example, measurements of gravity (at the basic Newtonian level for non-relativistic speeds) is more factual and less nuanced than the question of "climate change" or the question of "quantum explanations of gravity".
Reducing these more nuanced (or "less factual") issues to "people who don't think those are clear and settled are mentally affected" is a psychologization of dissagreement, turning it into a pathology.
It's worse when the proposed solutions / policies are also bundled with the facts (so you need to accept both to be "within the consensus").
While I understand the idea (there are nuances) I wonder if we treat things fairly. I have never measured gravity directly. I can notice effects which I know are attributed to gravity (things falling), but then again I can see effects attributed to human CO2 emissions (weather getting warmer and crazier).
The scientific concept of gravity (as I remember it from high school) involves two bodies and the distance between them. I can't measure that at all, so someone could claim gravity does not exist, but things fall because of some other reason.
What I think it's more important is the system's complexity. Describing gravity as "two objects, bigger one attracts smaller one" is simple. Climate system is very complex and even if you describe "CO2 (a transparent and 0.04% part of the atmosphere) causes a warming of couple of degrees" sounds harder to picture.
Yes, the complexity of verifying/checking is a major factor of that "nuance".
In the end, Newtonian gravity's complexity can be boiled down to a few formulas, and those describe the phenomenon (and are quite simple). Something like climate change causes, progress, rate, and so on, even with many basic assumptions taken for granted, is still a huge and multivariate issue.
One can see that "weather's getting warmer", but it could be a process repeating every N centuries or millenial, and we're just at that point, others might argue the effects are not as dire as argued, or the rate not as fast (e.g. many public climate doomsday predictions have failed to arrive when the dates came and went). Or one might totally disagree about the proposed solutions (or with who and how gets to implement and impose those solutions, another can of worms).
That's more like string theory level nuance (which theoritical physicists still debate variants off, and some hardcore scientists even believe is speculative crap, and which in any case is nowhere near settled), than Newtonian gravity level nuance.
It's incredibly useful to me. I love it. I find it nicely curated and true to the word 'starter' (kit). If I knew more about Emacs, this is definitely what I would have created, and in a similar manner.
It's that lil' layer of configuration that's missing that makes the first clash with emacs sane. I like the structure. I also like the fact that there's a 'researcher' mixin. Would absolutely love to see your opinionated inclusion of org-roam, and general.el.
I recently dabbled into System Crafters' 'Emacs from Sratch' series [0], which is incredibly well thought-out. After 5 hours of following it, you kinda get feature parity between his config and this; but in Berock's case it's done more natively which is really, really neat. I only miss some basic config with general.el.
I feel super lucky to have started in Emacs when they finally added LSP and Treesitter support, and with System Crafters' help and yours!
Hi, I've been skimming over your book. There might be a typo under [1], where you write: "An HTTP response to this htmx-driven request might look something like this", but then the next figure's header is "JSON"
I can't wait to see other hackers' responses! Aside from HN, I have curated multireddits (yeah, I'll be pretty mainstream in this thread). In order to create them according to my needs, I browsed r/DepthHub; investigated the most popular and the least ones; subscribed to the ones I found the most interesting (either because of topic, or how the topic is framed) and then trimmed these copied multis to keep only the the subs that I liked.
