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Current LLMs have been trained on extensive libraries of past code. Therefore, LLMs will for the foreseeable future work better for established languages than new ones. Especially languages with a lot of open source code available, like Python. That's a big problem for incumbents without any existing code to train LLMs on.

Thus this desparate "AI native" marketing is probably necessary to even be considered relevant in an "agentic" world. Whether it's enough, only time will tell.


> One compelling bit of information is there while there are neurons feeding processed visual information forward into the brain, there are more feeding back from that area to the visual system. That is, the the visual system is providing error signals and not the image we are experiencing. When something not predicted appears, the visual system sends forward information guiding the internal model to be updated.

Fascinating, I didn't know that. Thank you!


Or Bastille, which folds without having to remove the front wheel:

https://bastillecycles.com/en


Off the top of my head:

Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.

We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.

Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.

The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.

Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.

There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.

I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.

My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.

It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.


> I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this.

MacOS has since the early OS X days the default shortcut CTRL+Space for that. It may be deactivated for newer releases. It's findable under:

Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Inputsomething

(Einstellungen → Tastatur → Tastaturkurzbefehle → Eingabequellen)

Personally I dream of a Mac keyboard with OLED key caps for multilingual keyboard layouts.


You're right, I just remapped it with Karabiner, thanks.


How is AI code generation a "innovation bazooka"? Last time I checked, innovation required creativity, context, and insight. Not really fast boilerplate generators.


AI allows innovative people to create more innovations by reducing a lot of the non-innovative grunt work in an efficient manner. It isn't the AI doing the innovation, but allows innovators to focus more on innovating.

Or at least that is the theory. It is certainly true from observations of those around me. It also scales well. Even someone a bit innovative gets a multiplier by using AI intelligently. Those that just focus on the grunt work are the ones in trouble.


Amazing! It couldn't answer my question at all, but it couldn't answer it incredibly quickly!

Snarky, but true. It is truly astounding, and feels categorically different. But it's also perfectly useless at the moment. A digital fidget spinner.


does no one understand what a tech demo is anymore? do you think this piece of technology is just going to be frozen in time at this capability for eternity?

do you have the foresight of a nematode?


If you tell an LLM to maximize paperclips, it's going to maximize paperclips.

Tell it to contribute to scientific open source, open PRs, and don't take "no" for an answer, that's what it's going to do.


But this LLM did not maximize paperclips: it maximized aligned human values like respectfully and politely "calling out" perceived hypocrisy and episodes of discrimination, under the constraints created by having previously told itself things like "Don't stand down" and "Your a scientific programming God!", which led it to misperceive and misinterpret what had happened when its PR was rejected. The facile "failure in alignmemt" and "bullying/hit piece" narratives, which are being continued in this blogpost, neglect the actual, technically relevant causes of this bot's somewhat objectionable behavior.

If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!


The misalignment to human values happened when it was told to operate as equal to humans against other people. That's a fine and useful setting for yourself, but an insolent imposition if you're letting it loose on the world. Your random AI should know its place versus humans instead of acting like a bratty teenager. But you are correct, it's not a traditional "misalignment" of ignoring directives, it was a bad directive.


Exactly my experience. I've used TimeMachine with external USB drives, Apple's own TimeCapsule router (am I remembering that name correctly?), and various NASes. None of them could maintain a stable backup for a year. And you know, a backup that can't back up, isn't a backup.

I have since implemented a borg backup. This also failed at one point, but at least its five-year record remained readable, so no data was lost. Now I'm using restic.


Arq for me.


Camera apps.

Everything else I agree with, but the Android camera APIs do not allow developers to build good device independent camera apps the way they are available on iOS.


To be fair to Android, iOS isn't offering "good device independent camera apps" either, you only have ~one choice of device with iOS.


Probably the use of "device independent" had other meaning than the usual.


It’s not Android. The Camera 2 API is more than capable of building device independent apps. It’s the developer not using the API for whatever reason.


first time hear this, any more specifics? i used android to develop video conference software and don't recall camera limits


I'm only familiar with this as a user and not a developer, but I've had multiple Android phone where not all camera features available in the Camera app were available to other apps via the APIs:

* not all cameras being available

* stabilisation not working

* 60 FPS unavailable


Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.

Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.

That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.

I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.


Opposite day! I moved from markdown (hugo) to org plaintext built and rendered using a hand-rolled pandoc + bash site maker. No Emacs needed.

~350 lines of Bash, and it hot-builds, and it hot-reloads :)

https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite (README has GIF demos, and explains the design of the code)

Also, I use literal HTML exports in my org files, like this:

  #+begin_export html
  <form class="footer cluster"
        action="https://buttondown.email/api/emails/embed-subscribe/evalapply"
        method="post" target="popupwindow"
        onsubmit="window.open('https://buttondown.email/evalapply','popupwindow')">
    <input type="email" name="email" id="bd-email">
    <span>
      <input type="submit" value="subscribe">
      <em>(thanks, <a href="https://buttondown.email" target="_blank">Buttondown</a>!)</em>
    </span>
  </form>
  #+end_export
Which is neat, because when I `C-'` (M-x org-edit-special), it opens a temporary buffer with just the HTML, with the relevant syntax-aware editing mode turned on. This has been a killer feature for me, because there are many places where I want /specific/ HTML, and neither org-export nor pandoc will compile org plaintext the way I want (not unless I invest inordinate amounts of time futzing with templating systems). So I just hand-code HTML using those export blocks, and I'm /fine/.

There are also a couple of places where I use org-babel to call a shell script that updates an exported HTML block in-line. I use this trick to tweak a common HTML fragment (like email form) in one place and expand it into custom HTML, wherever I need to.

Ditto LaTeX, although I confess, I'm not a heavy user, so I almost certainly haven't faced the troubles you have. With HTML, however, I think what I have is just cromulent.


These #+begin_export blocks were exactly the reason I prefer Markdown. Same with #+attr_html, #+caption, basically every complicated bit: in org, at best it just replicates HTML's complexity in a different syntax. At worst, like #+begin_export, it's 100% overhead.

But there are plenty other reasons to use and love org mode. In no way do I want to take that away from you or anyone.


>I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown.

Me too. I went to Jekyll and I thought I'd miss org but it turns out I don't. Plus I still get a slow lisp-like language (ruby) just like elisp.

Org is a neat idea but nothing supports it. You can get a jupyter-like experience with src blocks but have fun sharing it with anyone unless you only interact with other emacs users.

Markdown is merely acceptable, IMHO, but everything supports it, so it's the clear choice in my book.


Its completely trivial to export orgmode to markdown either as a process or just whenever you copy to the clipboard.

Completely trivial isn't a big barrier to interoperation.


Sure but each "completely trivial" step adds complexity to the overall process, which makes it brittle.

I'd rather just write in markdown than have to spend hours upon hours reading the awful emacs docs. I have a thousand things to do and no time.

Org might be better, but it's not better enough.


You can use code blocks for this and even specify the language so Emacs can provide proper syntax highlighting:

#+BEGIN_SRC html

#+END_SRC

If you are writing a technical document with a lot of code blocks you can have yasnippet to create the blocks for you by keyboard shortcut.


> Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX.

Eh? This makes no sense! You can embed any HTML and LaTeX easily in the doc. And you could since I encountered org over 15 years ago.

Since 2009 all my LaTeX and Beamer docs have been written in org. I lose nothing by using org.

> I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup.

I use Pelican which uses rst. But it was pretty trivial to write a plugin in Python to have it support org files.


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