Someone should reimplement this for use with cheap laser engraving machines so we can make physical backups on any material like stone, wood, stainless steel, or plastic.
How cheap are laser engraving machines? For ultra critical keys and generationally important data this sounds like a really good idea. I use M-disc currently but an engraved A4 or Letter size scannable durable material seems like the best option if it is available.
Since it seems to accept an image, the question is what material would be best to run it on and then have it be scannable well on a standard flat bed scanner, which almost certainly will be available in some form as long as our current civilization survives.
Not sure but if you want to use a flat bed scanner then maybe if the engraving is deep enough you could just ink the plate and then press a sheet of paper onto it and scan the paper instead.
If you do want to add evaluation of mathematical expressions you should check out Math.js since they provide a parser among other utilities. Please make it optional though, it would be a nightmare to debug if everything was written in strings.
Yes because the greedy capitalists will obviously keep this valuable technology all to themselves, hoarding it away so they alone can revel in its delights. Give me a break, this isn’t 1924, we know how things actually play out. The capitalists want to sell you a product and that is fundamentally at odds with hoarding beneficial technology. They will deliver those benefits straight to your door faster, cheaper and better than any socialized pipedream ever could. If you somehow seize these means I have no doubt they’ll only be available to top party members due to their great expense and the considered opinion that the average worker has no need for such tools in their assigned role.
UBI won’t happen but the price of most goods and services will fall to a tiny fraction of what they are now. There will still be people who are considered impoverished but they’ll likely have a higher standard of living than you do.
I hate this framing of humanity as a “fundamentally destructive species” it’s a meaningless sound that people make with zero serious thought given to it. Exactly which species are not destructive? All animal life must consume other life in order to survive and exactly zero of them have any inhibition that would prevent them from maximizing their consumption and reproduction at the expense of all other life if they could. Humans are the only species that cares at all what happens to other forms of life and makes efforts at our own expense to limit or temper our impact. The only reason the world around you seems even remotely safe and comfortable is due to thousands of years of sustained human effort to make it so.
Humans are the unique species that have created a highly rigid capitalistic system where the only reward for the differential survival of ideas is short-term profit. So other species do have the consumptive tendency but we are the only ones that found a ruthlessly efficient system for actualizing our consumption without bound.
That is why I used the word destructive instead of "having the tendency to destroy". All animals have that, but only we have actualized it. Hence we are destructive to a level that is unseen in other species.
The evolutionary record is piled high with the bones of extinct species, extinctions caused by changes in the environment or by other species. We are not unique, we are just one of many millions of species to find a way to rapidly outcompete others but the difference is that we often choose not to. So far we can’t even hold a candle to the humble cyanobacteria in terms of wanton destruction of their environment and all life on the planet when they evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Similar though less dramatic events have likely occurred with each major evolutionary adaptation that allows a species to exploit something not available to others. For us it’s intelligence but for others it was eyes, fins, teeth, legs, claws, etc. all leaving a path of destruction and allowing the possessors of such traits to multiply and differentiate until their unique attributes are now the common necessities for survival.
That is true, and it is a good point. But the rate at which we are causing the extinction is much faster, and we do it consciously, causing harm to millions of species including ourselves. But you do have a point, I'll acknowledge that. We are not much different than a plague or a massive infection. Nevertheless, the fact that we do have intelligence means we have the moral obligation not to destroy other life and NOT to destroy at the rate we are.
If you really want to make more work, blow up budgets and create positions for masses of developers and assistants then you should demand we go back to punch cards and doing all the planning and algorithm design on paper before we translate it to instructions and hand it off to computer operators.
If it makes you feel better, the AI will write all the code for the tests and come up with all the variations and do all the fuzzing to try to break things. You’ll just have to do a good job of explaining the requirements to it and adjusting them as it becomes clear you didn’t fully describe the outcome you wanted the first time around.
Because we’d rather be living in a world where textiles are so cheap to produce that everyone can afford to clothe themselves however they want and even the working poor can furnish their homes with upholstered furniture and own more than one towel, blanket, sheets, pillows, and have rugs, mats, carpets, etc. not to even mention all the other woven stuff that isn’t even possible to do by hand along with all the other technologies birthed from the very smart idea of automating a tool that was previously only operated by hand. I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t want to go to my grave bent over this loom.
Steps 2 and 4 through 8 are what this implementation along with others like Devin are doing. 1, 3, and 9 may have surprise answers when a reliable system can produce a working app/website/tool in a matter of minutes. If that’s possible then clients can just keep prompting and checking the results and iterating on changes until they get what they want just like people using Midjourney do to get the idea they have in their head transformed into an image. Things change a lot when apps become so quick, easy and cheap to create that you can try out a hundred variations and modifications in a day.
