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When I read about Markov Chains and hallucination of LLMs, the first thing that comes to my mind is Reggie watts [0] performances, also remind me i used to do the same thing when i was bored in the classroom, but on my paper notebooks,just nonsense that seems plausible, it was kind of entering in a meditative state, it felt good. when i discovered watts i thought to my self, 'what?! I cloud have done that for a living?'.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXyHf_SpUUI


I agree with your sentiment and resonate with some of my opinions on languages (been reading about TT and abstract math in general for a while as a hobby)

my opinions so far (subject to change as i read more):

dynamic typing = just one type [0]. yes, good to test ideas quick, to develop quick gigs that i don't care about and tiny snippets/scripts, i use js for that.

gradual typing = guaranteed mess evolving large code bases, I guess the gradual typing thing in practice never happen and when it happens your IDE becomes red and your compiler errors explode, i don't recall where i read about that but it made sense to me, i used groovy to take advantage of the optional typing but i was the only dev in that project.

sound type system + parametric polymorphism = the best thing around, although i prefer to have explicit type annotations.

no formal math object behind a language = the language does not exist, just , absurd rules ,idioms and syntactic mess that you have to remember and tied to specific monkey patched implementations to compensate incoherent foundations, sadly unavoidable, as most, if not all popular languages do not exist,.

Yes, I've been reading Harper a lot.

[0] https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lan...

edit: formatting


(im just going to ramble about it, cos im really mad about the state of IT right now and i cant articulate some ideas well) sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos. the thing is to have a human being to talk about this. not an dark algorithm that is adjusted constantly for profit for a soulless company. Some other ideas revolt time to time on my head : community run local data centers(kind of libraries) or providing simple content services from your home internet connection (that's why i loved this idea: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid). Your personal digital human(but maybe AI assisted) curators,all part of a idealized "virtual solar punk world", sustainable, private and healthier with humans put first, far from the toxic fascination with disruption , profit, perpetual and global growth and all of the startup toxic crap, we have everything we just have to glue it, and i see people thirsty for a digital world like that.

its not the first time i hear about feeling healthier after moving to the feediverse. i have my own set of scripts and mini apps running on top puppeteer with a local llamacpp for summaries and recommendations, its not perfect but im planning to put more effort on this and maybe look for OSS projects that are aiming at that (ie. (*arr suites, nostr, activitypub, veilid).) and offer that to friends and family members to see if they like the idea, also i have a name for all those scripts: "not a browser" the web without HTML CSS and JS served along with the data, just provide the data, how you displayed, its the user concern.


I can really commiserate with how you are feeling. Something I’ve done recently is set up a “homelab” server and running a few web apps on it of various functions. Nothing novel here, but what I really love about this is how all of these apps are user centric and open source/community built. There’s no user hostile algorithms here or even ad based systems. Only software that tends to put the user first and tends to speak open protocols.

This sort of thing is very achievable if you work in IT and can run your own server. But what about everyone else?

Your idea of a personal “IT person”, like your own personal barber or tailor, is very intriguing. I wonder if its feasible to provide a service like this to people who are of a similar mindset about disconnecting from huge tech companies/algorithms and using something more personal, but don’t have the technical means to achieve this?

I’ve also been thinking about the personal data aspect of healthcare. I hate that my medical records are stored in MyChart and a dozen other proprietary systems that I have no control over. Yet, I have a super computer in my pocket. Why can’t I maintain my own copy of my records and selectively share data with my doctors when I arrive for an appointment? Why do I still need to have one doctor’s office fax something to another’s? I should be able to own my data and tap a button on my phone to do this. Only Apple’s Health app seems to come anywhere close to providing a fraction of this functionality, but there seems to be 0 adoption of this within the US. Even then, this only benefits Apple users. Something like health data should not be locked in a propriety system, even one that runs locally like Apple Health. There should be some open protocol and an ecosystem of implementations.


I’m 100% in agreement, the state of IT makes me mad.

We had something close to good for a brief window before marketing and greed took over the internet.

I think if someone bully a synology nas-like product with apps designed to benefit the end user and people (“your IT person”) to support you which wasn’t aimed at fleecing all personal data and dollars out of customers it may very well work and would be utopia for the end user but the economics probably makes it a low margin business with lots of risks (e.g. liability over losing peoples files)


> sometimes i fantasize about the concept of "your IT person", kind of your local barber, general practitioner, tailor or baker. that is on charge of some aspect of your digital life with their own local little infra, tailoring personalized feeds and takes care of privacy/health issues, and provides you with their own simple interfaces or "speak" open protocols that connects with your feed reader, from movies, written articles to memes and funny videos.

Wow, I haven't thought about this idea before. I really resonate with this and can see it being an actual reality in the next 5-10 years. That being said, I'm sure somebody has tried the approach. What's preventing it from happening now?


> What's preventing it from happening now?

Just improvising with the idea and trashing more on big tech: I would say, nothing, if something like that gets to happen, my guess, it will be silent, away from the noise, would not be a sexy tech headline, kind of what is happening with mastodon, there is no big names, personalities or numbers with tons of 0s behind it, just an interoperable protocol, you know, real tech. it does not need marketing or infinite scale, dependent on FOMO or other social phenomenons, its just pure value for its users, also, as Cory Doctorow said somewhere, as instances of mastodon, ideas like that are going to come and go, and that's fine, that's the process of finding the next valuable thing that will stick with us, it should be organic, the next big thing will not come from the silicon valley casino like esque. An "IT person" would be just a job. pretty much as any other craft, what happens its that some of the most noisy parts of our industry are sick, feverish, delusional and full of their own bullshit, and we have in our subconsciousness that everything needs to be flashy, glorious, amazing, disruptive, big, competition proof and fast (in terms of success), not sustainable at all.


The idea is lovely and really appealing — I think the main reason it hasn’t gone that way is because this technology is inherently about leverage and scale. Write code once, run it a million times for little marginal cost. All structural forces seem to be working against this. Maybe when we’re all out of a job replaced by AI it will be more feasible??


nice to see effort to shake a little the terminal space, and that you can receive 6MM dollars to play with it, but, having tried things like nushell i came back to zsh after i realized that is too much of an investment for something that can disappear in 5 minutes, get poisoned by VC money or be out shined by the next bright thing, and you are competing with 100s of little binaries and ways to do things that have been around for decades here. also i find those star graph so cringe, who cares?, is someone going to decide to use this based on that?, i mean that trend can be cause of a marketing move, that is.it says nothing about the project it self.


nice to know, kind of suspected that. for me, a good non sleep night = bye cockroach mode and hello overenthusiastic maniac for a week. quite a ride. 100% recommended.


as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.


every 'Every X will become a Y sooner or later' title will become 'Every X becomes a monoid sooner or later' sooner or later


shocking, bullshit tech for bullshit people improves bullshit.


in my experience all middle management people that wants everyone to go back to the offices are useless pieces of crap.


this has nothing to do with bad engineering, it's about stupid greedy investors/managers with to much power on decision making, decisions that they should not make. this is sad and an embarrassment to tech people. this industry is a joke.


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