Using high-dimensional statistics for beer money, not academic papers" is the correct use of the degree. The papers are where you prove the circle exists. The bar is where you find out it exists for everything

That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer what to do. But there's a huge difference between using someone else's abstraction and building your own from scratch. The article is about that second part - the ability to throw stuff together however you want. With a GUI, you're stuck with whatever the designer thought of. With a shell, you can build just about anything

But you’re still limited by the designer of that shell? Or userspace? Or kernel? Or cpu architecture? I mean, how deep should you go before «it’s however YOU want»?

Sure, and at some point you're limited by physics. But "limited by the universe" and "limited by what a product manager imagined in 2019" are pretty different kinds of limits

There are some really powerful UIs that are extremely flexible, like spreadsheets, or ComfyUI, or certain issue trackers. On the whole however I would say they all still are mostly their own interaction silos and integrations with other programs have to be explicitly built for each app.

The great thing about a shell is that you can glue together programs that don't know about each other. This is not a silver bullet, with shell programs being text oriented etc., but it does give rise to some powerful possibilities that don't really work with UIs.

This is the exact problem with the Unix greybeards smug nature: no matter how low level you go you are always on top of some abstractions.

Criticising people just because they don't use your choice of tools is just elitism and leaves a bad taste.

If someone uses a GUI to accomplish their goals that should be complimented not criticised.

You're limited by the time, knowledge, and complexity costs of hand-rolling and testing a solution to your problem.

As soon as commands become even a little non-trivial, those costs mount up.

The comments asking for more misery are hilarious. Armrest thieves, crying babies, the guy coughing without covering his mouth, tiny cans of Coke. But honestly, the most realistic thing would be the seatback map being wrong and the flight path not matching the real world. That's the true passenger experience

The stone erosion question is interesting. If this effect works on limestone too, it could explain some geological formations we've been attributing purely to chemical weathering. Might be a whole new field of research

isn't this still a form of chemical weathering?

The Chinese counterexample is important. The author says "base b doesn't have a single symbol for b" - but Chinese has a symbol for 10 (十) and even 20 (廿). Having a symbol for the base doesn't mean the system isn't positional. It just means you have shortcuts for common numbers. So the article's main diagnostic is flawed

The chess analogy doesn't quite work for me. In chess, an engine's move is useful because it helps you win. In math, a proof is useful because it helps you understand something - and from that, you can build more. If a proof is incomprehensible, it's like a chess move that only works in that one specific position. Useless. The ABC conjecture is a perfect example - Mochizuki's proof might be correct, but no one can follow it, so it's basically dead. AI proofs are going to be like that, but way more of them. Tao's essay is a great starting point

The 1877 El Niño killed millions. We have better tech now, but also more people and more fragile supply chains. Not sure which side wins

Are you asserting that supply chains in the year 2026 are more fragile than in 1877?

Appreciate the heads-up. Even if some of this is overblown, the transparency thing is a legit concern. Gonna double-check my config before I touch OpenCode again