My digestive tract also undergoes a “full blown movement” not long after eating too much Taco Bell

I also love that Walmart’s desperate rush to catch up in e-commerce has resulted in their website becoming just as much of a slop farm as Amazon. My friend who works there said this just piles even more on an already overstressed staff, as people come into the store not understanding that the website lists a whole lot of stuff that isn’t and never will be sold in the store. I doubt many people will come in asking for this piece of junk, tho.

Scal-Palin Skywalker, was that the guy 100 years in the future who kept smoking death sticks so Luke’s Force ghost would stop bothering him?

I figured it might be particularly irksome to fascists who have bought far enough into the aesthetic to fetishize black Mercedes

I’ll have to give the T-shirt cannon a deep-clean, it tends to start jamming up when we fire off too many of the XXLs covered in Dorito dust

Agreed on pricing, but something this low-volume is always unfortunately going to struggle. The RockChip stuff is a current darling in the FOSS-compatible hardware scene, but I’m not super enthusiastic about it yet. If there isn’t an OS image you like, you’ve got to cobble one together with U-Boot and the DDR support blobs, which is a circa-1999 level of “fun”

Look everyone, there goes the AMG Ban-Hammer

Isn’t that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing

(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)

Dissatisfyingly decontented, similar to the other Model Ys he’s selling

The underlying anxiety on exhibit here compels me to think that the rumors about the botched, ahem, enhancement surgery are substantially true

I’ve always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse

Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.

So in other words, they’re just cargo-culting “network effects” that they heard about in second-hand YCombinator propaganda and Zuckerberg biographies, and assuming that’s both a road to riches and a necessary part of a technical culture

I am often skeptical of tablet/keyboard hybrid designs (the PineTab 2 has not exactly been a roaring success for me) but that ShiftBook is straight-up a more visually appealing design than any Framework

Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it’s reverse apotheosis

I believe OG Scratch was on top of Squeak Smalltalk, current version is on top of JavaScript.

I am being a bit unfair, it’s good to see project principals getting out ahead of this. A lot of people glom onto Arch because of some perceived elitism, and it’s a hop skip and a jump from that to convincing yourself you’re part of the “master race”

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

Stop gooning for 5 minutes challenge, difficulty level: impossible

Come on, Elon, I still post on Something Awful constantly and even I can do it

Is it time yet to begin accepting that Arch is kind of ass anyway? I had a bad experience with updates crapping out on Manjaro, the original Arch-plus distro, and then somebody told me that Arch developers build all the packages on their local machines, not a secured build server??? Maybe that was just the AUR stuff, but still. And you need to update all packages in lock-step. I’ll take the flexibility of Gentoo every time, where I can easily keep a stable base system and experiment with less-stable upstream packages around the edge, and still have it all make sense.

Having a bunch of out-and-proud fascists and bigots maintaining one of your most popular frontends is the kind of shit that kills projects. It’s not just Framework, Arch needs to get out ahead of this if they don’t want to get passed up. Not too long before having Valve downstream is the only thing they’ve got going for them, and that’s not guaranteed to be a happy relationship forever.

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.