> I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory.
The simple answer here is still likely the best one: Smalltalk and Lisp Machine systems were expensive and proprietary right at the same time that Unix and C became free (and therefore ran everywhere)
This comes on the heels of the AHA and other parties in the suit against the government posting the video depositions of some of the DOGE people to youtube [1], which are fascinating to watch.
Justin Fox not being able to say what DEI is really tells you everything you need to know about how grants were cancelled.
He says it just fine. It's about "females" and "elevating the voices of marginalised groups" that he thinks is clearly "discriminatory". Don't think for a second that these people are dumb, they knowingly support this, just refuse to incriminate themselves further in front of people who can hold them accountable. It's no accident that he tries to sound like Musk.
Exactly. By repeatedly saying "the definition is exactly what the EO said," he’s essentially deflecting responsibility and shifting the accountability upstream.
A little later, he explicitely says that documentary about WWII jewish female slaves is "inherently discriminatory" because it "amplifies marginalized voices".
Imo, he knew exactly what he means. Imo, he was told by a layer that is better to look like idiot then say what it means to him.
I think it's both. The Right excels at grooming and propaganda and has effectively trained its flock that DEI is Affirmative Action v2, and that its goal is to take away jobs from white people who are the ones that deserve them, because white.
What I hate about it is that I listen to that and hear not so much actual brazen idiocy, as yet another example of flaws in an obviously defective process being exploited to deflect accountability. The meta for depositions at this point is such that the ideal witness is a lot like someone who has just experienced severe head trauma. They can sound insane, idiotic, clueless, lazy, forgetful, obtuse, anything in the world except liable.
Well, the solution to the paradox of tolerance is to utterly void the social contract with those violating it as they have already seen fit to void it themselves. So the response is to immediately see their escalation and escalate beyond all reasonable measures. The wrath of a good man is not to be tempted and the fury of a patient man is to be avoided at all costs. Both wrath and fury are the appropriate response to one side of a social contract breaking said contract.
These folks will push until the dam breaks. When it does, all will be washed away by wrath and fury.
The problem is that wrath and fury of ordinary men will be countered by fascists with more power. And it can go to the very top. The entire system is designed to keep the chain of command, it doesn't give a shit about what you think your "social contract" is. Go figure how many criminals Trump has pardoned.
But America isn't a high-trust society. Roughly half of Americans proudly assert that their government must be small, gridlocked, and incompetent, and that's by design, because if the government becomes too efficient it will infringe upon Americans' freedom.
So instead Americans keep electing people who say "The government can't do anything right! Elect me and I'll prove it to you!"
Not exactly a mark of a high-trust society, whatever that means.
Are you pointing out the irony that the fraud and harm being performed in DC by the current administration outweighs by great orders of magnitude the fraud and harm that is meant to be a racist distraction?
If so, bravo. If not, whelp, let me know when you escape the reality distortion field and we can grab a beer.
DEI is for all marginalized communities, not singled out to race or ethnicity. To call it racist is ignorant at best, and malicious at worst.
"Illegal" is not really a good proxy for this. DEI was perfectly legal a few years ago. Now DEI is illegal in some contexts because someone up top thought DEI was illegal and here we are.
If you don't want diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workforce, I'm not gonna call you racist, but it's pretty obvious that you don't care about the point of view of other cultures and people of different walks of life.
I mused about the idea of a version of Hypercard where you could load cards from network resources, or even just stacks. Ultimately though it would have been an even bigger security nightmare than the original Javascript. Hypercard was developed long before security was even a consideration on consumer hardware. The only thing it had was 5 different access levels, from a view only mode to full developer support.
It's as much of a fantasy as the one where Apple released a version of Hypercard for Windows 3.1 and blew Qbasic out of the water. It's a real shame Apple just chucked one of the most interesting beginner programming environments in the trash just as so many new people were getting interested in programming.
HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard and implemented for the NeWS window system in PostScript, and supported networking. I used it to implement SimCity for Unix.
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
We're finally getting there. The model of web notebooks look a lot like Hypercard stacks in terms of usability; there's only missing someone packing them in and easy-to-use distribution and sharing environment that does not depend on users installing their own web server.
And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.
I didn't mean "like hypercard" so literally in this manner. What I meant was, a computing environment that seems to blend seamlessly into the wider operating system, and that is able to sufficiently blur the line between end users and "programmers" (here called "authors"). Critical to this capability was the ability to "pop the hood" easily and mess with what was going on underneath.
All of today's computing is fundamentally based on a strong division between programmers and users. That division has only grown more stark with time. The dominance of Unix is partly to blame, in my view.
The enduse developer experience sees the 17e and Neo paired with spoken instruction AI prompts going to the iPhone that effects the Hypercard network aware environment do the thing on the laptop.
It's the "no stopping it at this point" that always sticks out to me in these discussions. Why is there no stopping it, exactly? At this juncture these systems require massive physical infrastructure and loads of energy. It's possible to shut it all down. What's lacking is the political will.
These posts claiming that "we will review the output" etc., and that claim software engineers will still need to apply their expertise and wisdom to generated outputs, never seem to think this all the way through. Those who write such articles might indeed have enough experience and deep knowledge to evaluate AI outputs. What of subsequent generations of engineers? What about the forthcoming wave of people who may never attain the (required) deep knowledge, because they've been dependent on these generation tools during the course of their own education?
The structures of our culture combined with what generative AI necessarily is means that expertise will fade generationally. I don't see a way around that, and I see almost no discussion of ameliorating the issue.
The solution is to find a way to use these tools in such a way that saves us huge amounts of time but still forces us to think and document our decisions. Then, teach these methods in school.
Self-directed, individual use of LLMs for generating code is not the way forward for industrial software production.
I don't understand how this is a new or unique problem. Regardless of when or where (or if!) my coworkers got their degrees, before or after access to AI tools, some of them are intellectually curious. Some do their job well. Some are in over their head & are improving. Some are probably better suited for other lines of work. It's always been an organizational function to identify & retain folks who are willing and able to grow into the experience and knowledge required for the role they currently have and future roles where they may be needed.
Academically, this is a non factor as well. You still learned your multiplication tables even though calculators existed, right?
Another thing I keep thinking about is that review is harder than writing code. A casual LGTM is suitable for peer review, but applying deep context and checking for logic issues requires more thought. When I write code, I usually learn something about software or the context. "Writing is thinking" in a way that reading isn't.
Personally, I'm not as worried about this as an issue going forward.
When you look at technical people who grew up with the imperfect user interfaces/computers of the 80s, 90s and 00s before the rise of smartphones and tablets, you see people who have a naturally acquired knack for troubleshooting and organically gaining understanding of computers despite (in most cases) never being grounded in the low-level mathematical underpinnings of computer science.
IMO, the imperfections of modern AI are likely going to lead to a new generation of troubleshooters who will organically be forced to accumulate real understanding from a top-down perspective in much the same vein. It's just going to cost us all an absurd amount of electricity.
This is why you aren't seeing GenAI used more in law firms. Lawyers can be disbarred by erroneous hallucinations, so they're all extremely cautious about using them. Imagine if there was that kind of accountability in our profession.
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