> Maybe someday we'll live in a world where sticking a person's name at the top of a book doesn't carry the implication that they wrote the words in the book.

Not even an AI thing, we don't. Ghost writing has been going on for centuries.

I don't like that! I agree it's dishonest and I wish we lived in a world where having been exposed employing a ghostwriter is a disgrace no public figure can come back from. I don't like that AI has made it worse, either. At least with ghost writing there are some contexts (politicians, celebrity bios) where you might suspect it, but in most you won't.

But, we do live in that world right now.

Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of ghostwriting in the domains where it's prevalent. For what it's worth, though, academic writing is very much not one of those domains: taking LLM's out of it, if ten years ago it had turned out that the "author" of a math textbook like this one had paid someone else to write the whole book for them, that would be considered major academic misconduct and that person's reputation would have been pretty severely damaged. I do think it makes sense to take the norms of a particular subset of the publishing world into account when thinking about what a reasonable reader expects when they see someone's name on a book.

The permanent members of the Security Council, obviously.

Yes it is. I mean, you’re not going to play Chopin on it, obviously. But for selecting notes into a DAW? Hella convenient.

Repliers: stop pretending you make music. You don’t and it shows. Producers are going to love this.

How is it convenient? A pro workflow is not holding your arm with the finger up in the air trying to avoid accidental taps, when you can get a small 25 key akai midi controller for a 100 usd. And it's easy to carry around and comes with velocity-sensitive keys and pressure-sensitive pads.

Yeah that's a much better use case. Now you mention it I could see it being useful for soft synths, mixing, arranging, effects, etc.

I don't think I'd every want to "play" on it except as a last resort but it could definitely be handy for other virtual interfaces.

Imagine a knob per function synth or a modular setup being able to go straight the control in question would be useful.

we have computer keyboard playing mode in nearly every DAW under the sun. It's useless

Just chiming in: I upvoted both the post you replied to and the post it was replying to. All of yours got the thumbs down. No one appointed you the order police and this entire train was net-negative.

Do those organizations determine your acceptable level of practice? I would argue they do not and are thus not relevant to this conversation.

What was your last employer that asked for your license number of member ID from any of those organizations? I am guessing it has never happened.

Normally when people try this argument they are hoping a for a dog whistle to shift ground because they don't want to be regulated.

None of those certify the vast majority of those who work as software engineers.

Not to toss cold water in the face of your maudlin science-fictional musings (kidding I’m totally doing that), QM2 is the 51st largest passenger ship afloat.

They call them “cruise ships” now, because the only reason to float around like that is fun, not business. So they have waterslides and such. Slightly less old-growth hardwood paneling, fewer places where one is allowed to smoke cigars.

But no. There are ten Greeks who could build another Queen Mary as a lark, and that’s just counting Greeks. However rich you think the world is? It’s richer than that.

Zeppelins, though. Those, I will grant you, have gotten scarce. Oh, the humanity.

Cruise ships and ocean liners are two different kinds of ship. An ocean liner has higher freeboard, higher service speed, longer bow, greater draft, and other features that make it more suitable for crossing oceans.

Forget the Greeks, have a look at Clive Palmer. Not just dreaming about building a replica Titanic, but also wanted to revive zeppelins commercially.

I always wondered if there is not a market for old-school travel using such liners, not just for recreation.

Many people hate or fear flying. Some might also just prefer the laid back, retro, travel style. Not all are in a mad rush to get somewhere.

But I guess the market might be too small for regularly scheduled trips.

Maybe you're right.

> Zeppelins, though. Those, I will grant you, have gotten scarce.

Just saw a Zeppelin cruising over Woodside today. It's Sergey Brin's personal project, Pathfinder. It's a true Zeppelin, a rigid airship, not a blimp, and the world's largest air vehicle. [1] First flew in 2025, but, unlike the Airship Ventures craft we used to see giving tours over Silicon Valley, it's not flown often. It's normally parked in Hangar One at Moffet Field.

[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/big-helium-airship-spott...

Thank God for billionaires, but why can't he stop Google from creating dystopia instead?

Probably much, much easier to make a zeppelin

I think it’s actually reasonable to say that a Blub library should run on every implementation of Blub. So, GraalBlub and BlubBlub, not just CBlub.

Otherwise it’s just a sparkling FFI.

Lua has the same property with metatables. LuaJIT, which is very fast, has a solution: if you change a metatable after assigning it, or reassign a metatable, Mike Pall turns his back on you. Your code dies slowly, in the outer darkness of the interpreter loop, never to be JIT’ted upon again.

This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two.

> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.

Cool. How are you backing it up?