Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer:
> Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off
Initially, C++20 and C++23 extended its use cases, and combined with concepts is a pretty sweet spot for compile time metaprogramming without SFINAE or tag dispatch tricks.
Much better than having yet another syntax for macros.
In the era of LLMs, it's difficult to think of an art form with a worse risk-to-reward ratio for pursuing--even if just as a hobby--than poetry. I know that sounds philistine to some, but even if the quality of LLM spam isn't up to par with what you can produce, how many people can tell the difference? I wish we lived in an alternate timeline where AI was automating drug discovery or protein folding faster than it was art, but sadly, that's not the case.
I guess I also "wish we lived in an alternate timeline where AI was automating drug discovery or protein folding faster than it was art"
At the same time, however, I feel like this kind of catastrophizing about the end art has happened so many times before (e.g., with the invention of photography, the rise of abstract art, or the emergence of digital art tools).
Each time, artists have adapted, found new ways to express themselves, and pushed the boundaries of creativity. AI might change the landscape of art (it certainly will), but it's unlikely to spell its end. Instead, it could (it certainly will) become a new tool for artists to explore and expand their creative horizons, much like how digital tools have been integrated into many artistic practices today.
I got that, and the reason why I said "even if just as a hobby" is that part of the satisfaction many (including myself) get from their art comes from sharing it with other people, even without profit, and right now, poetry is probably more devalued by AI (thanks to LLMs) than any other art form.
I get people are probably going to flag this like they did the other article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897871), probably more so out of concern for the trans optics (Ziz and many in her orbit are trans/non-binary) than how it reflects on the wider rationalist community. But we should be able to discuss why this group, which is influential in discussions of AI alignment, is producing these people. Zizians aren't the only ones. Luigi Mangione was also a rationalist (and cis), and I remember a thread on a certain website that documented some other oddball fellow travelers. How does a community dedicated to "rationalism," whose leader writes Harry Potter fanfics, produce people like this? Does it attract maladjusted people to begin with? One common thread seems to be psychedelics. Mangione, for example, experimented with psychedelics heavily (possibly to treat pain) not long before he assassinated the United CEO.
Okay, my first reaction was "I should check Wikipedia, because if this is true (and probably even if it is not), David Gerard will certainly make a huge subsection on Wikipedia about it".
Turns out, what Wikipedia says about Mangione and rationalist is only this:
> Journalist Robert Evans described Mangione as being associated with a loosely-defined online subculture called the "gray tribe" or the "rationalist movement", whose members he described as "self-consciously intellectual and open-minded, [and] preoccupied with learning how to overcome their own mental biases.
Ok, checking the journalist's article:
> ”Increasingly looks like we've got our first gray tribe shooter, and boy howdy is the media not ready for that,” wrote the journalist and extremism expert Robert Evans, who analysed Mangione’s online life earlier this week.
> There's no single accepted name for this loose, extremely online subculture of bloggers, philosophers, shitposters and Silicon Valley coders. "The gray tribe” is one term; ”the rationalist movement” is another.
Ok, checking another link:
> The term “Gray Tribe” was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descended from the online rationalist movement.
Ok, checking the Slate Star Codex:
> [Grey Tribe is defined by] libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk
So... to wrap it up, the reason for calling Mangione a rationalist is that he is "associated with" "libertarianism, Dawkins-style atheism, etc.", which have "descended from the rationalist movement".
Somehow I am not convinced. (Among other reasons, I am pretty sure that libertarianism and Dawkins-style atheism are older than the rationalist movement.)
> To this day I'm pretty sure that plan would have worked if we had actually executed it. It was a brilliant plan if I do say so myself. In fact, it was so brilliant that it convinced Richard Branson to acquire the company before we launched for $10M. We started the company as Smart Charter, but we launched as Virgin Charter.
It's noteworthy that he's portraying selling before launch as a failure, and while ultimately the acquirer didn't follow his vision and the business didn't pan out (and perhaps the author never even got to liquidate his shares), it's still arguably more of a success than Loopt (raised $39M, sold for $43.4M), which Sam Altman and his backers had no reservations about portraying as a huge success that springboarded him to YC president and later to AI kingmaker.
> 2. Doesn't make the mistake of 1-based indexing.
Why is this a mistake? I've used 0-based languages primarily, but ergonomically, 1-based languages like Awk and Smalltalk are fine too, making some code slightly harder to write and other code slightly easier. Overall, I've found it to be a wash. If anything, in a pointer-less language, pedagogically, 1-based is more intuitive for novices.
P.S. Classic VB and VBA had an odd feature where one could choose the base for themselves, using the Option Base feature.
It's interesting that merely asking someone to explain their justifications for something, without even outright criticizing it or Rust itself, is enough to net downvotes in Rust threads.
Iran could possibly still be predominantly Zoroastrian today, and perhaps much of central Asian still Nestorian Christian, had this war not taken place or gone differently.
It is also possible that Central Asia would be still Buddhist or Manichaean, as those were the major pre-Islamic world religions in the region alongside Nestorian Christianity.
I’m of the opinion that the climate changes precipitated the rise and migration of Turkic speaking tribes and the concomitant decline of settled agricultural society in the central and west asia. See the chapter “Big Chill” in Richard Bulliets “Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran”
Turkic tribes were always gone turn into an influential political force but they might have picked up another language along the way, as they did the religion.
Joel Spolsky was on the Excel team at MS, and was the lead on VBA. He prudently couches his doomsaying with this disclaimer:
> Microsoft has an incredible amount of cash money in the bank and is still incredibly profitable. It has a long way to fall. It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know… they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don’t be so quick to write them off
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