I think people like nuclear because, over the last half century, CO2 emissions per capita have been drastically lower in the places nuclear has a larger energy share, like France.
Nuclear made a lot more sense back when solar panels and batteries were less mature.
With how insanely cheap solar and batteries are getting, it doesn't make much financial sense to build new nuclear plants anymore (for grid generation, they're still great for things like military ships).
I agree with your sentiment, but at some point backwards compatibility has to break. Rust handles it better than basically anything out there. If it bothers you, you should never try any other language except maybe plain, no-framework JS.
Plus, LLMs have really made upgrading a codebase for a compiler or dependency update into a trivial chore, at least for the most part.
I don’t really understand the benefit vs. Kubernetes? Like, with modern agents and a generic Kubernetes cluster (and there are SO MANY providers), a good LLM harness can do basically anything you’d want to do, if you structure your work properly.
And heck, harnesses like Claude Code have a phone friendly UI too.
Agents have been huge for me. In addition to the Elm app, I used them to:
- build out ffmpeg/imagemagick image/video resizing
- unify all my servers behind one Traefik ingress
- build proper cross-site auth with a public/private key pair generated in the browser
- create Homebrew/macOS and Linux tarball distros of my service
- build an iCal calendar sync feature (if you browse the sites, you’ll see many of the events are synced from locally-oriented ICS feeds)
I also set it up to run my band’s new website at https://ato.band.
I agree with you about “thoroughness” being key here, but I’d additionally advocate that we need to leave room for people to make some slop learn it.
Part of the learning process, whether you’re a “skilled” or “unskilled” engineer (or not an engineer at all, and noting that going from one to the other is just a matter of learning), is being able to “vibe and not care.” Yes, it’s also helpful to identify things that might not work out theoretically in advance, using the things we learn in our CS programs. But coding with LLMs is a brand new modality, and we are all indeed just learning to work with them.
I think alternating vibe coding with vibe-assisted DRYing/cleaning is ultimately a workflow enhancer that can make better software faster. But engineers have to be allowed to make some slop to learn it.
I’ve been using Elm professionally at a very profitable, lean company the last two years. (Didn’t know it coming in, but had enough React, Redux, and other experience to learn quickly.)
The Elm community would call this a feature. How much React code you wrote 6-8 years ago will work perfectly and identically with today’s React toolchain?
It’s a whole different set of values. Good React code in 2026 looks like any compiling Elm code since 2016.
I don’t like being disagreeable, but just no. On both of these.
First, the comparison is perfectly fair. Elm 0.19.1, 6 years ago/0.19.2 today, React 16.1 6 years ago/19.2 today. Literally identical conditions. What is unfair? Which required app developers to do more work? Which saw more security issues among its releases?
Second, not needing updates for 6 years, and having zero security holes in that time, is the definition of stability. This isn’t really a matter of opinion or preference.
I do see the appeal in other frameworks (ecosystem size, easier to find devs), but the appeal of Elm truly is stability. And it really is that much better than nearly everything else that runs in the browser, in that regard.
No framework that allow you to use actual JS (or “transpiles” but gives you the full JS API, like Coffee/TypeScript), will ever offer the level of stability Elm offers (aside from maybe the web standard APIs on which Elm is narrowly built).
Oh yeah, no shade against the language itself. I had fun learning it and using it for some toy development years ago - and the TEA still exists in multiple library implementations. Just wild to see the creator of the language emerge from the fog like that.
I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for. Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democracies. Kings were the ultimate rent-seekers: every citizen was the product.
It’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc. And it’s a major reason many understand we should favor local (or local-capable/open-weight) AI/LLMs. I think “for any product whose support is discontinued, with more than X users, either open source all relevant software and hardware schematics, or provide a binary that will work on the hardware in perpetuity without DRM checks, based on industry” is a miniscule request in the face of any of these industries. I’d say, for instance, weights for discontinued Claude and OpenAI versions would fit. And it’s exactly the type of problem (functioning) democracies are meant for.
> Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democracies. Kings were the ultimate rent-seekers: every citizen was the product.
It's really not. Opposing rent-seeking in a general sense isn't what motivated the American revolution; and the King of England in the 18th century wasn't primarily a rent-seeker. The royal family did and does own a great deal of land in Britain which they collect rents on, but this is true of a lot of the historic and current British nobility; and the institution of the British monarchy was and is doing a lot of other things socially that just have no relationship to rent-seeking one way or the other. Ruling monarchs aren't "rent-seekers" where their citizens are "products", except insofar as any government of any group of people is; and I think that's way too reductive a way to explain why societies and governments work the way they do.
Rent-seeking is a temptation that all sorts of people under all sorts of political and economic systems are prone to. Democracy is no particular guard against it, because people who benefit from rent-seeking in some particular set of circumstances can vote too.
This isn't to say that rent-seeking is good, but it's also a pretty hard thing to regulate. It's really hard to codify in law which economic activities are rent-seeking and which ones are people buying a product or service that someone else thinks is a bad deal for them.
Also: Those ownership/privacy obligations to customers should come first in bankruptcy proceedings, ahead of other debts.
IANABankrupcyLawyer, but I believe the status-quo is that various promises like "we'll open-source the server in the end" or "we'll never sell your data" can become voided in the name of making a buck to repay the landlord or business-partner.
I think the obligation should be transfer to the copyright holder in the case of bankruptcy. They can then choose to either make individual buyers whole or give up copyright protection.
That might work for static videos and music where the thing isn't interactive, but I don't think it maps cleanly to things like games with an online component, or "we won't sell your private data" SaaS promises.
For example, imagine an MMO, where the buyer says: "I want the trademark and the copyright to all textures and 3D models, but I am not buying the copyright to the source code because I'm going to make a sequel."
>>I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for.
This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).
(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)
a) no one said it was easy. I'd just like some progress on it instead of another 30 years of slowly losing rights to things I buy.
b) yes, there are more important regulations to take into account. But governments also deal with hundreds of proposals. I can want proper digital ownership and still care about building more housing, creating stronger labor protections, and overhaulijg urban development.
A simple law: everything the customer buys must always behave *in favor of the customer over anything else*. If the product/service contradicts this, it must be fully stated before the purchase and cannot be updated. <= This would be a sane balance.
Depending on how you (you specifically) are defining "fully stated":
1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.
2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.
> This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.
Yes, but they "reserve the right" to update whenever, making it pointless
> "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.
I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way. What's lacking is the will.
> I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way.
That's precisely the problem here. You're "sure" that a problem you don't actually fully understand is trivially solved in a simple manner, when the reality is that this sort of thing is incredibly complicated, and there's a multitude of reasons and competing interests that have resulted in the current equilibrium.
This is the sort of change that requires a country's laws to have to be rewritten from the ground-up, because it invalidates so many assumptions. It's the sort of thing you typically need a constitutional amendment (or at least, a novel interpretation of the existing text) for.
So, yeah, they're lacking the political will for that.
It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that it is distinguishable from a perpetual lease with a cancellation clause _to buyers_, without also disallowing a lot of actually useful leasing agreements.
The thing is, you never did _buy_ that Steam game.
And you never bought the software on the TV, which you did buy the hardware of, you bought a software lease along with the hardware.
The latter case I can see something to do about - define the software and its functionality as an "essential component" of the hardware, and require companies to not break essential components of hardware they sell. They can stop offering online services, but the rest of the device should keep working.
For pure software leases, I don't see a good way to not have them be whatever the contract say they are, not without reclassifying them as something else than a copyrighted work. (But then "sellers" should be very clear what you're "buying".)
A lease should have a clear timetable. How long am I leasing this thing for? 1 year? 3 years?
I'm fine with companies leasing software. I don't like it, and I much prefer buying, but that's fine. That is what software subscriptions are, the terms and conditions are clear.
"Buying" something where access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, needs to become illegal.
> It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that
One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.
I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.
Your post made me go on a thought exercise: imagine a world where you could either own or lease software products. Game developers could decide whether their customers can actually buy the product (which involves ownership) or just the traditional licensing/leasing, which is the prevailing model today.
How would ownership actually work? What does ownership of digital goods mean? Can they even be owned? You get 1 copy of the bytes? How is this enforced? What's to stop you from just selling it multiple times?
If you can't resell it, then what do you actually own? The right to use the product in perpetuity? But that's just another form of lease, no?
You never bought the movie on a DVD either or the text in a book. Yet everyone understands what is meant. This isn't really something that needs complex legislation.
Now, I'm sure some disciplined software lobbyist have spent a very long time and can answer such questions in legslese that protects the customers. Let's find them.
Of those 15, it might be illuminating to know how many did not on grounds of principle versus merely that the cost/benefit didn't favour it for them at that time?
Slavery was a controversy from the beginning that finally bubbled over into the Civil War. It was not, as this question seems to imply, a near universally approved of practice where a few just didn't happen to need slaves.
That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.
I don't think the above commenter disagreed with the need for regulation and the justification for it in this context. But that regulation isn't just for the things you think should be regulated and everything else shouldn't be.
>’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc
I think the apple sympathizers are a great case on some of the hypocrisy, actually. Seeing people condemn the DMA definitely shows some people will play favorites when push comes to shove.
We’re in a world where LLMs are basically going to be extensions of how we think. An additional thing we use to do a lot of thinking tasks.
As a piano player, it’s important to work hands separately. Sometimes your right hand will carry the melody and your left hand the harmony, sometimes vice versa. Sometimes there may be more than just two “voices”/melodies/lines between your two hands. Even as a very good (as in getting paid to do it) sight reader, I learn a lot working all the voices/melodic lines separately.
Singers do similar things like singing only the vowels to keep themselves in the right placement. Learning handstands, you have to work your wrists, rotator cuffs, core (which is many things), etc. separately. Yoga, Pilates, and running also help us learn to break problems down this way.
Anyway, all that to say: If LLMs are gonna be a natural extension of how we think, we need to understand what parts of problem-solving LLMs are good for, and what parts our brains are for. The nice thing about working these bits “separately” is that one side is done for us. So we just need to consciously practice using our brains.
As programmers that means, maybe we conscientiously practice writing things ourselves sometimes. Remembering that this even if this sacrifices short-term “velocity” (whose measurement is problematic, but I digress), it preserves our long-term ability to do good work. And I think any of the above physical/artistic practices (or countless others), worked in these ways, will help reinforce this entire mindset.
I think kids of the coming generation will be sharply divided on their ability to conscientiously practice things separately. It’s been happening, but I suspect LLMs will accelerate it unless how we actually teach kids can catch up.
> We’re in a world where LLMs are basically going to be extensions of how we think
If that's the case then we're in trouble based on my experience. This week I've been using ChatGPT to help figure out some old linux platform that I need to resurrect. It's very good at quickly searching and surfacing relevant information online, and that's helpful, but if I did not have a lot of experience at linux administration to be able to see where it was suggesting the wrong thing, or initially dismissing the right thing, then I'd just be thrashing.
The LLM is helping me because I know what I need, and it can search and read faster than I can. But it's not really very smart.
> An additional thing we use to do a lot of thinking tasks.
Which is to say, an additional thing you're going to be forced to pay a lifelong tithe to a trillion-dollar company in order to do a lot of thinking tasks.
I’m rather optimistic about the future of smaller open-source models and market competition actually doing its job here, honestly. I myself, again, err on the side of doing things with my own brain. But there are many things LLMs are useful for, and they’re definitely better than a “rubber duck” if you don’t trust them blindly.
I assume they are called hooks, .vscode/settings.json - you can put some linters/tests which run automatically (from my understanding, something similar to git hooks, hence the reason I called them hooks). I generally hate the concept and I generally dislike vscode so... yeah.
I think people like nuclear because, over the last half century, CO2 emissions per capita have been drastically lower in the places nuclear has a larger energy share, like France.
reply