Still a net pollution win. Pollution associated with industrial manufacturing of durable goods can be contained to specific areas and dealt with at scale by domain experts more easily than the diffuse pollution associated with burning fuel at point of use.
> It is. Education has been an excuse for discrimination for a long time. When you describe a whole demographic as being uneducated you are applying exactly the kind of rhetoric which white Rhodesians used to excuse their discrimination[1].
Modern Zimbabwe is not particularly known for having reliable electric infrastructure, even by the low standards of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a good argument against the parent commenter's point.
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
We know that discrimination, even between whites, has a negative impact on test scores. It seems like discrimination can hurt people's performance, but the type of discrimination, how impactful it is on the people being discriminated against, and the extent to which it happens over the population probably matters.
Libghostty is a very cool project, this is an exciting release, kudos to mitchellh for spearheading this as well as all the people who have made contributions to the project. I use ghostty as my primary terminal emulator today and a few months ago I was experimenting with using libghostty in an android project that I plan to jump back to someday when I have the time, so I personally benefit from this work.
Indeed it is. It feels like libghostty was only announced yesterday and already there are things like ghostel for emacs that are imo far above and beyond the other emacs terminal options.
Ghostel is the first Emacs terminal emulator I've used that really just worked. Vterm and EAT were nice at for time but it's like night and day to Ghostel.
wow. Even today, all the modal interface options for emacs feel too slow for my fingers. Maybe a different terminal root will fix that? I should reinvestigate.
You can literally type that question into any search engine or LLM. Don't challenge me like we're on a school bus. I'm a die-hard vimmer, been hjkl-ming for 17 years. I don't mince my modes here.
And the LLM tried for a bit (mostly things I know), and then concluded:
> And the original commenter never actually explains what Emacs does better. When challenged, they get defensive rather than providing examples. So we're interpreting a provocative claim, not a demonstrated advantage.
I found that very enlightening! Thank you for your suggestion to ask an LLM!
That's exactly why I didn't take your bait. You already know the reasons for my statement; you simply choose to ignore them. That's fine, Neovim is an excellent text editor, perhaps the best modal editor out there. For me, the idea of vim modality, a brilliant, practical, beautiful model, has more value as an abstraction rather than as a concrete implementation. It's a magnificent idea, and ideas do port.
For years, my every single choice of a tool that had anything to do with text composition got paired with vim modality; every IDE, every editor, terminal, browser, WM invariably went with it. It's been years since it stopped being just an instrument of ergonomics, productivity, faster typing - it became my identity. Just like a left-handed person can't contemplate one day becoming different, I have zero practical, emotional or whatever reasons to stop being a vimmer.
Gary Bernhardt (the wat javascript guy) once said, "There's no vim-mode, there's only Vim," meaning that not a single vim emulation has ever gotten to the point of not having glaring, annoying deficiencies. I've used vim-motions in Sublime, Atom, IntelliJ, VSCode, Chrome, Firefox, Brave - not a single extension gets it to the point where it starts feeling natural.
I had to agree with Gary until the day I found Evil-mode in Emacs. It is surprisingly good. It is so good that you forget - it is not a built-in feature of Emacs. And when you understand the sheer amount of effort required to get vim modality right, you just can't remain unimpressed. And Evil-mode is such a small chunk of what Emacs is about; it's not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. If there were a jet plane that could perform a perfect vertical landing and yet almost never had to use or even advertise that feature, it would still amaze you as a masterpiece of engineering.
That's where you might realize that Emacs isn't a mere text editor, it's a darn text orchestrator - it doesn't only focus on text composition, it also shifts the attention to valuing text consumption. The grand idea behind a Lisp REPL with a built-in text editor is a magnificent abstraction. Anyone who tries to compare Emacs with any other IDE or text editor would miss the point; it's a categorical error to even attempt to do that.
Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM, in the context of a conversation about DRAM shortages and precisely why it is difficult for DRAM manufacturers to respond to the market price incentive to increase DRAM production. Even if you think it is bad that DRAM is currently expensive, as I do, that doesn't change the underlying fact about the world that Altman's comment reflects.
Thiel's comment is also pro-individual-ownership - in context he was talking about the danger that in a mass democracy the people as a whole would vote to have the government restrict the freedom and confiscate the property of successful people (particularly prescient in light of the recent California attempt at a billionaire wealth tax). RAM being expensive is better than RAM being rationed by a democratically-elected government so no one person has too much, as judged by the voting masses.
> Altman was simply making an accurate observation about DRAM
no, he was lying by omission
"it's quite terrible" only if you ignore all the problems with plans they promote and measure it only in metrics Altman wants to measure, as they support his plans
For start, Altman would charge as much as possible to optimize profits, so very significant part of efficiency increase would become profits of "Open"AI.
As another obvious problem: handing so much power to a specific company has own costs.
There are so many problems here with this specific part - starting from their power dictating how can you use it, access to your data. And that part is getting worse for anyone not planning to obey all decisions coming from USA. We have already seen export controls being invoked.
But wider, if you think that outsourcing thinking to a specific SaaS has no costs, beyond current subscription costs, then I have several thousands of bridges for sale.
The sci-fi story that I constantly find myself thinking about when I read about real-world AI developments is Ra, by qntm/Sam Hughes: https://qntm.org/ra
I just voted in favor of California proposition 45, which weakens a huge amount of California environmental review law, specifically in order to prevent it from being weaponized by NIMBYs to block or delay housing developments. Unfortunately it looks like the measure is losing, because housing NIMBYs have a great deal of political power in California. Anyway, I would support similar legislation aimed at allowing data centers to be built for exactly the same reasons.
The homelessness problem in the bay area is mostly caused by the extremely high housing prices, which are ultimately caused by NIMBYism; and by the stupid and self-destructive empathy of the local progressive elites who think it's oppressive to use the police to force the most dysfunctional visibly homeless people living on the streets into involuntary treatment and shelter.
Neither of these phenomena are primarily the fault of the Silicon Valley tech industry; and NIMBYism in particular is largely driven by people who bought bay area houses many decades ago (my family is from the bay area, and I'm absolutely including my relatives in my parents' generation in that number - none of them work in the tech industry).
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