Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That's it?! 🤮 ), doesn't look like they'll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning
This author touches on a point that dovetails with my thinking:
Dijkstra, in “On the foolishness of ‘natural language programming’,” wrote, rather poignantly: “We have to challenge the assumptions that natural languages would simplify work.” And: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulation, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”
I think it likely that these tools will not be judged, in the long term, by the ambitions and hopes of the AGI cultists and hype-men, but by comparison to the many other attempts at natural-language programming in English. Smalltalk, Visual Basic, I even want to throw in AppleScript, as simple and threadbare as it was. How are all of these doing now?
AppleScript has been complemented or perhaps superseded by at least two more graphically-oriented attempts at system automation targeted at non-technical users. One could argue that its falloff came from an imperfect marriage with the message-passing/service-oriented architecture based on Objective-C and inherited from NeXT in Mac OS X, a system design which is itself now vestigial. The comparison with LLM coding assistants is imperfect, as they seem to be typically targeted at the more granular level of the class or the method, rather than explicit high-level hooks in an application. A better comparison here would be the last year or so worth of "AI agents," but, uhm, ahh...
Smalltalk seemed to have a pretty big boom in the late 80s/early 90s, but tapered off rapidly after that. I like the more modern implementation of Pharo well enough, but it strives to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, with a downright balk-worthy amount of packages listed when you open up the class browser. On top of that, a few weeks ago I noticed someone in their Discord telling a newbie that current good practice is to file out your code every once in a while and then start over with a fresh image, as various background processes in stock images typically become unstable over time. This is orthogonal to the natural-language-like design, but it is a stumbling block to the sense of "liveness" and interactivity that is similarly a big hook for LLM assistance. Furthermore, as far as I know, they still don't have a stable answer for system-level parallelism in the VM. All I've seen is a rather awkward technique for spinning off tree-shaken child VMs if there's some method you want to run in parallel. You've got to really love Smalltalk to want to work past that shortcoming!
VB.NET I can't really speak to, except that it seems Microsoft now considers it a stable language with little if any new feature development. The original implementation never seemed to have a good rep for maintainability, and the very idea of native Forms seems out of fashion compared to JavaScript web-app frontends. And the land of JavaScript, of course, seems to be the most fertile and uncontested kingdom of LLM coding assistance. I'm genuinely interested to hear more experiences with modern VB, as it strikes me as the last great corporate-sanctioned push for non-technical users to build their own apps, and thus the most worthy comparison.
All this is to say that each of these previous attempts at natural-language programming haven't bit-rotted too hard, implementations are still available and you can probably salvage a legacy project with some effort. But each of them have been sidelined by industry over time. Not necessarily because of Dijkstra's objection to the ambition of approaching natural language, although I don't think we can totally discount that as a factor. But other technical or platform restrictions certainly hamstrung each of them. And LLM tools are still mostly API-based SaaS, which always has the glaring technical vulnerability of the provider running out of money. Yes, people will still pursue local models, but the bubble bursting could do a lot more harm to this approach than proponents anticipate.
We're perhaps underrating the distribution of t-shirts with appropriately subversive messaging as a tactic in psychological operations. The sudden appearance of a zamboni, and distribution of assets via novel ballistic means, is also likely to drive enthusiasm among the target population.
Anybody want to pitch in to get him a basic e-bike and a solar charge setup? He could probably fund his egress the rest of the way by posting a travelogue, that might turn into some choice content around the time he hits El Paso
What if the stage play is a more tightly-scripted pro-wrestling show? Whether consciously or not, that would probably accurately capture the mindset of most of the original participants
No, it will not harm the anarchist—it will make his day, his year, and maybe his life. All the money and power in the world will be at his defense. He will not even need to lift a finger to organize his own lawyers, much less pay them. In the end, as with many of the BLM rioters, he will probably be well compensated, with taxpayer funds, for his trouble. Not to mention all the pussy and/or dick s/he will, as a martyr, be entitled to! For the Islamist, this reward is only in
heaven. But for the leftist it comes on earth.
ah dammit, anarchist HQ did an anarchy to my martyr's genital preference form again. now I'm getting dicked down harder than I've ever been - straight thru the mantle to the core of the earth. It's like a porn parody of The Core over here, and I'm not even anywhere near Portland
Yeah, I can't see that they're doing anything besides burning runway. It's probably shortly going to become cliche to say, "glad I never made an account there," but, welp, glad I never made an account there
This doesn't include her blurb about, "are you paying us? where???"
But weren't there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
These days, I often find myself saying that I would be further along as a programmer if I had taken Squeak Smalltalk more seriously when I first encountered it.
On the other hand, I do not think I would be very happy working in the modern software industry. Better remunerated, perhaps, but not any more satisfied with life.
other worldbuilding conceits I won’t get into here
My invite-only internal prediction market is offering good odds that this is referring to either math pets or tentacles, and a solid parlay opportunity on it being both combined
I grew up nearby the hometown of one of the Rick and Morty creators, I think the one that got fired for excessive drunkenness and harassment. And when I found that out, my immediate reaction was, "yup, of course a guy from Manteca would make a cartoon about having an alcoholic grandpa"
Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That's it?! 🤮 ), doesn't look like they'll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning