The year is 2110, and two human writing powerhouses are pitched against each other in mortal confrontation. In Alexandria, Egypt, there's Writers' Street, where both seasoned and aspiring novelists type stories at street cafes, using self-invented codes in chromatic scales that they pluck on their guitars, in front of tourists and ubiquitous survtech that unwillingly--or not so much--witness. Others simply sing their tales. Not for the faint of hearing.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
Only reason these two writing powerhouses have a duopoly in 2110 is because the Irish Poet's Club will choose to throw themselves off the Cliffs of Moher in 2085.
But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
I can’t help but be eternally impressed by Lem’s ‘The Cyberiad’. Partly for Lem’s prescience and creativity. But mostly because of just how damn funny he can be.
I wonder what comes after. I'm thankful of my work colleagues who are tech-literate, and that the LLMs don't usually play online video-games, though bots and insidious surveillance abound there. It feels like we need to transition to some sort of hybrid and web-of-trust human interaction for specialized topics.
The best fully-human writers of the next generation will be those who are very conscientious at grammar class and master all the rules, because by breaking them, they'll be able to push their prose to the most remote and unlikely locales in the geodesics of LLM-next-token-prediction-probability space. Such places where the Machines deign not trudge.
Why create a simple piece of code that does exactly what you want, when an LLM can smash libraries and frameworks together as well as anybody else? I can tell because I'm doing it right now. I'm not happy with the resulting bloat, but there's no denying that you can have the worst of both worlds if you really wanna.
This will put a huge amount of projects into trouble, so I'm confident the community will come up with a solution.
But here's one thing I'm wondering: with LLMs being now super-human when it comes to algorithms and computer code, wouldn't it be possible to set up a "project super-harness" for a TLS client library for (not necessarily mbedTLS main branch!!), put up a constant "pool budget" between various individuals and organizations, and let the LLMs care for ongoing maintenance?
Not sure if I disagree with all your points, but this one caught my attention:
> HTTP is an old and quirky protocol with a lot of surface open for attackers that are rarely useful nowadays
HTTP 1.x is that, perhaps. But I was in the trenches when HTTP/2 came out, brand new and running on binary. It was so new that there were very few implementations around, and my team had to code one. The people who worked on the spec had a lot of learning to apply from HTTP 1.1. That resulted in many nice bits in HTTP/2, but HTTP/2 also had serious issues at a spec level. Which is my way of saying that "modern" doesn't necessarily mean "bug free".
WezTerm has worked fine for me. Windows however has ConPTY which is better than what was before but still a nuisance if one whats to use advanced escape sequences and other things that modern terminals support.
I concur. WezTerm is my driver for the past 3-4 years. For anyone wishing to try it, make sure you grab a nightly build.
I wish there were regular official releases that would help it get more traction. Last official release is 2.5 years ago, despite continuing development. This could drive some people away. OTOH, maybe that's the point...
> It may not be usable and the feature set may change, but since @wez uses this as a daily driver, its usually the best available version. [1]
Of course you don't need to install the new nightly on a daily basis. But running stable from early 2024 you're probably missing some (mostly invisible) improvements.
There was also a thread somewhere explaining why there won't be a new stable release soon. IIRC, it had to do with completing a list of tasks, some of which had some blockers outside the control of Wez. Unfortunately, I can't spot the thread.
I was thinking the other day, "why do we have kids?"
The most noble, selfless reason I could think of is "so that they try again". I say, the "most noble" because people have plenty of more selfish reasons: "they'll make me feel better", "to make me a better person", "to keep up with the expectations of my friends and family", "they'll give me comfort when I'm old and frail", "they will care for me". And then no-reasons such as "it's the way things are", and "everybody does it", and "god wants it".
But I prefer mine: "so that they try again". Try what? To right the wrongs, to succeed where we failed. But that is a mirror: if my kids inherit the world of my failures, can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough? When the day they lose something precious comes, and they understand this world is mostly darkness, will I be able to look them in the eyes and say that I tried hard enough to beget the light they crave?
> can I look back into my soul and say that I tried hard enough?
Imagine, if you will a large endless expanse. Clear skies above, but as you look to the floor you realize it's made of people. Compacted like tetris pieces, as far as the eye can see. You're standing there, presumably atop some people right then and there. What do you do? Do you walk forward? You'll step on the bodies; the people. Do you stand still? Won't that invalidate your life? Aren't you allowed to live?
Making that decision is trying hard enough. We all had to do it, and luckily, we did it at an age we can no longer remember; right when we were born. We decided to venture forth and try. You tried hard enough because you tried, period. That is enough.
Unless they want humanity to end, a childless person has to hope other people don't agree with their lifestyle. If everyone had 2 kids everything would be fine. If everyone was childless humanity would end.
These are the reasons, which don't start from an egocentric perspective, but try to reason about it from an absolute point. Why wouldn't they be reasons?
Two of them are not reasons, as in cause, but mere observations. The last one, involving god, needs a person to believe in a good god. A person who doesn't believe, or who would use reason to deduce that a putative god is evil, would find it as an anti-reason.
There's definitely a cluster of personalities overrepresented in the population of parents.
Historically, there has been a lot of pressure to reproduce, but in the modern era this doesn't always make as much sense. I wish there was more research to clarify this phenomena.
We'd potentially be avoiding a lot of grief and angst during young adulthood for those who choose not to be parents if they more clearly understood why it doesn't "feel right". That grief and angst from choosing "wrong" potentially translates to cases of mental illnesses in the children at best and domestic abuse at worst. Even when couples choose not to have children, they can still be very unhappy. It's as much a matter of social justice as it is health.
> Insecure software will be exploited this way or another, if the vulnerabilities are real and the threat model is valid.
The algorithm is: if the threat model is valid, there are vulnerabilities and you either have some software everybody knows about or a gang of hackers specifically targeting you, you should patch.
The part of the industry that profits from security theater will want you to patch no matter what, even if your business goes down in flames due to downtimes and new bugs introduced by patched components. They won't remind you to assess the threat model first.
There has to be a responsibility model for that; somebody who can say “we don’t do X even if the auditors say we should, because Y”. But I see where you are coming from, I’ve seen security theater to cost $$$$$$$ at the org I’m part of.
Off the shore of Italy, in Montecristo, the Benedictines have regained full control of the island. No Internet or AIs are allowed there, but their hospitality business rents mechanical typewriters by the hour. More than once, a famous writer has jumped from the island's cliffs, unable to bear the shame of being accused of using AI to produce their magnum opus.
For the unwashed masses, AI-produced literature is free and abundant. The discerning, however, have gotten a taste for manually bound tomes exclusively inked with the output of human brains.
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