I love how much this keeps on going. Faster typing? Check! But what about image upload? Check! Ok, now what about video somehow? Check! Ok, what about a video game inside the knitting UI?
It seemed like a pretty logical progression to me! I half considered adding a two-player mode to the Snake game, but of course that would be ridiculous.
This is a great take! Similarly, I've seen shadow IT and sneaky work around type stuff crop up a lot before because the "official" way of doing something has picked up too much friction.
> EU OS is not a project of the European Union, but it should be.
Just flagging this because a lot of comment here and anywhere else EU OS gets discussed, end up assuming this is affiliated with the EU in some way.
It's not affiliated in any way, so whatever you feel about this project, and the EU as a political institution, you probably shouldn't infer anything about one based on the other.
The "EU" is not a political institution. It is a "a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.".
The (main) political institutions of the EU are:
- the European Parliament,
- the European Council (of heads of state or government),
- the Council of the European Union (of member state ministers, a council for each area of responsibility),
I think the answer to this question (with emphasis on "all") is clearly none that we know of. Plastic is really hundreds of different polymers, each with different priperties and uses.
If a new material can take the place of some of those, that's a win. We don't need to replace plastic wholesale with a single new thing, there's no rule against using multiple targeted materials, we've just got used to material science being all about one material for recent history.
I think the "javascript everywhere" phenomenon this article talks about comes from us misjudging the difficulty of learning a new language.
Python's a good example of this (or at least its one I use every day). In order to be able to keep using Python at larger scales, it's become a very big, complex language.
Sometimes I wonder if a lot of use cases for typed Python would be better matched by starting out in a typed language like Go in the first place.
In some ways, learning a new language can be easier than learning lots and lots of features of an increasingly complex language.
Maybe. But the cognitive load of learning a new language (and programming correctly in that language) is real.
And even more real is the emotional stress and mental turmoil a person faces when they're required to learn something new rather than pick up something familiar. When someone has deadlines, a home life, strong demands from their boss, familiarity with build pipelines, a team full of people that they can call on, etc, it's often easier to keep the stress and confusion count lower by sticking to the familiar.
Especially when, in cases like Python with types or Java with Lombok and "just one more thing" will "fix" the rough edges or difficult scenarios that the those specific developers have. Sure it's "one more step", but it's probably a small one and one they can reason about without having to upend their entire mental model (even if in practice they might not need to).
> The progress of knowledge—and the fact that we’re educated about it—lets us get to a certain level of abstraction. And, one suspects, the more capacity there is in a brain, the further it will be able to go.
This is the underlying assumption behind most of the article, which is that brains are computational, so more computation means more thinking (ish).
I think that's probsbly somewhat true, but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually represent and relate. The article talks about this but it glosses over that part a bit.
In my experience, the people who have the deepest intellectual insights aren't necessarily the ones who have the most "processing power", they often have good intellectual judgement on where their own ideas stand, and strong understanding of the limits of their judgements.
I think we could all, at least hypothetically, go a lot further with the brain power we have, and similarly, fail just as much, even with more brain power.
>but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually represent and relate
You seem to be drawing a distinction between that and computation. But I would like to think that conceptualization is one of the things that computation is doing. The devil's in the details of course, because it hinges on like a specific forms and manner of informational representation, it's not simply a matter of there being computation there, but even so, I think it's within the capabilities of engines that do computations, and not something that's missing.
Yes, I think I'd agree. To make an analogy to computers though, some algorithms are much faster than others, and finding the right algorithm is a better route to effectiveness than throwing more CPU at a problem.
That said, there are obviously whole categories of problem that we can only solve, even with the best choice of programme, with a certain level of CPU.
Not tenuous at all, a great example. The ability of computers to do fancy stuff with information, up to and including abstract conceptualization and association between concepts, hinges on details about how it's doing it, and how efficient it is. The discussion of the details, in their execution, is where all the meat and potatoes are to be found.
This is one of the reasons why intelligence and wisdom are separate stats in AD&D :)
Intelligence is about how big is your gun, and wisdom is about how well can you aim. Success in intellectual pursuits is often not as much about thinking hard about a problem but more about identifying the right problem to solve.
In my highest ego moments I've probably regarded my strength in the space you articulately describe - that sort of balanced points, connector, abstractor, quick learner, cross-domain renaissance dabbler.
It also seems to be something that LLMs are remarkably strong at, of course threatening my value to society.
They're not quite as good at hunches, intuition, instinct, and the meta-version of doing this kind of problem solving just yet, but despite being on the whole a doubter about how far this current AI wave will get us and how much it is oversold, I'm not so confident that it won't get very good at this kind of reasoning that I've held so dearly as my UVP.
This is insanely cool! I really want to know how programmes like Vim are running under the hood, is this emulation? Either way, massive congrats on an awesome fun project.
Elm's a great example of a language that's fully statically typed, but where the language doesn't result in long complex types.
In my mind Rust is one of the nicest, most ergonomic type systems. People say it's highly complex, but I think that's really because its type system also includes reference and lifetime annotation.
As a culture, I think Rust developers do a great job of designing well for a simpler type signature.
Also an extra, but read the error first! I think reading errors is a skill people seem to learn over time, but often I get questipns from people about how errors, and the error message says something like "Expected input of x or y, you gave z" in it.
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