We are, after all, in the holy temple of the adherents of the Great Disenfranchisement Machine.

The gravity well's pull toward a management track, or in the very least the desire to align one's sympathies with management, is simply irresistible to some people. Unfortunately I do not think Hacker News is the best venue to discuss solutions to this issue.

> The software world is not monolithic. Pleas for everyone to stop building for the way the world works and start building for highly unusual and specific use cases isn’t reasonable.

This expressed expectation of "how the world works" is the perception of a monolith, however. There is no divine right or reason for things to be designed online-first, except for incentives to the service providers. When somebody designs an app to be online-first, they are choosing to be a service provider, and not an app author. This distinction may not be clear to developers who came to be in a culture where online-first is a first order concern, but it is immediately clear to anybody who "owns" the "app" in question when the service is either neglected or decommissioned in a few years, or is otherwise made inaccessible via the internet.

I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.

This is performance art and certain members of the audience are the punchline; I genuinely cannot conceive of any other meaning or purpose for this.

If there weren’t a repo I think it was satire.

There is a repo and I am not sure; the only way to resolve it probably is to spend some of that money he’s talking about.

I think the crucial difference here is that literally anybody can write without taking on years of training or a tremendous financial burden.

But are they writing? In that specific sense of high prestige communication? Sounds like stolen aura.

Now, code by Gen AI is straightforward in comparison. Coding is not writing poetry, even if the lines also don't reach the right margin

It's very unfortunate that, in the current moment, AI is the spear tip of one of the largest consolidations of power, at the combined annex of capital and political wealth, in recent history.

I will grant you that, however, it does not take much reading-between-the-lines to understand that Rob is referring to the economic conditions and corporations that exist which allow people to develop things like AI Village.

I agree that's what he's trying to refer to, but there just aren't any such conditions or corporations. Sending emails like this is neither a goal nor a common effect of corporate AI research, and a similar email (it's not exactly well written!) could easily have been generated on consumer hardware using open source models. It's like seeing someone pass out dumb flyers and cursing at Xerox for building photocopiers - he's mad at the wrong people because he's diagnosed a systemic issue that doesn't exist.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's correct. Just whipped this up, using the WGS-84 datum.

  (use-modules (geo vincenty))
  
  (let walk ((p '(0 0 180))
             (i 0))
    (cond ((= i 3)
           (display p)
           (newline))
          (else
            (walk (apply vincenty
                         (list (car p) (cadr p) (+ 90 (caddr p)) 10000000))
                  (+ i 1)))))

Running this yields:

  (0.01777744062090717 0.16837322410251268 179.98234155229127)

Surely the discrepancy is down to spheroid vs sphere, yeah?