Daily Archives: 2023-08-30

Article note: Holy crap, common sense prevailed, a western country is backing away from overbearing internet legislation motivated by "Think of the children!"

Article note: There is, as always, a problem of extremes. Thinking about long-term ramifications is _generally_ a good thing, but you run into camps of true believers who spend too much time huffing their own farts and get to some weird places. Long-term: "Perhaps we should accept some short-term economic contraction in order to head off the effects of increasing climate instability" - I'm totally on board. Long-term: "We should let billions of the poor die horribly to accelerate the possibility that our progeny's progeny might live forever in pleasure domes floating through space" - Go fuck yourself. Long-term: "We should think about sustainable, humane ways to distribute material goods a society in which automation performs most of the actual labor." - Yup, that's a thing to think about before it becomes any more of a problem. Long-term: "BRO DID YOU SEE TERMINATOR AND THE MATRIX? OUR SHITTY CHATTERBOTS ARE TOTALLY ON THE CUSP OF AGI AND WILL KILL US ALL!1!" - no. touch grass.

Article note: Oooh, from the guy who wrote the excellent Micro editor, which I use on a daily basis. In D with no runtime (they call it "betterC" mode, in the vein of Rusts' #![no_std] or -nostdlib in C++), something that many of the modern "systems languages" are struggling with handling well. This should be instructive to watch.