setsubyou

It was called 世界でいちばん透きとおった物語 by Hikaru Sugi, but I don’t think there’s an English translation because this kind of gimmick works a lot better in scripts where all characters are the same size, and a translation that ends up with a comparable arrangement of those letters would be a major pain too.

I don’t think it means that by definition. Not knowing how to do things yourself is a choice. And it’s the same choice we’ve been making ever since human civilization became too complex for one person to be an expert at everything. We choose to not learn how to do jobs we can have someone else, or a machine, handle all the time. If we choose wisely, we can greatly increase our capacity to get things done.

When I went to school in the 90ies, other students were asking the same question about math, because calculators existed. I don’t think they were 100% right because at least a basic understanding of math is generally useful even now with AI. But our teachers who were saying that we shouldn’t rely on calculators because they have limits and we won’t always have one with us were certainly not right either.

Personally I don’t like AI for everything either. But also, current AI assistants are just not trustworthy and for me that’s the more important point. I do write e-mails myself but I don’t see a conceptual difference between letting an AI do it, and letting a human secretary do it, which is not exactly unheard of. I just don’t trust current models nor the companies that operate them enough to let them handle something so personal. Similarly, even though I’ve always been interested in learning languages, I don’t see a big conceptual difference between using AI for translation and asking a human to do it, which is what most people did in the past. And so on.

I read one once where being able to slightly see through the pages was a key part of the plot

I basically do option 2, but I’d never mount all my configuration. If I want an isolated environment, I’m not making all my ssh keys available to it. So some things have to stay outside for me.

8 hours a day, 5 days a week is mostly a 20th century thing. Working hours did absolutely go down from 12-16 hours a day to 8 and working days from 6 to 5.

The interesting thing is that at any point, a majority believed that shorter hours would stifle productivity. But at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th, some industrialists started actually testing it. In the US the 40 hour week was famously popularized by Henry Ford after comparing productivity to the previous 6 days a week, but this also was about 100 years after others had started theorizing about it.

In Germany the 8 hour work day was introduced in 1918, but at the time that still meant 6 working days. The 40 hour work week only started becoming the norm in the 60ies and 70ies. And in 2001 Germans gained the right to work part time in almost any job even if originally hired for full time.

If you go farther back in time it does look different though because before the industrial revolution, most people would have worked in agriculture, i.e. they were peasants. Their work days would have been long during the harvest period and otherwise quite short. Some seasons were less work in general, and there were more religious holidays. But this isn’t entirely fair because automation didn’t just automate our jobs, but also our personal chores. For example washing your clothes was a lot more manual work before we automated it.

Emacs :)

Ok joking aside there were these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

There also are modern examples but they tend to be for specific niches like Mirage.

The article already notes that

privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo

But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.

What do you mean by “change standards”? Python is older than all the other languages you mentioned other than C.

It’s also a French word that means video conference (as a shortened form of visioconférence).

You don’t have to be the first person. I joined a startup a long time ago as a regular engineer and they made me team lead within a year. Startups generally move a bit faster and a lot more chaotically. Especially when they’re growing fast. You do have to be good but having a vision also helps.

I stuck with them through acquisitions etc. and everything slowed down a lot. Should have gotten out of the large corporation life earlier tbh.

The bubble thing is more the financial aspect. None of these AI companies are profitable and they also don’t have a clear path to profit. For some time the business plan of Open AI was literally develop advanced AI and then let the AI figure out how to make money. Yet, these companies attract huge amounts of investment and are responsible for basically all of the economic growth in the US.

Nobody thinks there are no uses at all for LLMs or image generation etc. or that people in general hate all AI. It’s a bubble because a lot of money is being invested in something that nobody managed to make profitable yet, so if the investment stops, then these companies will all implode.

Dictators are more efficient and agile than democratic governments. That’s why the Romans originally had them. In the early Roman republic dictators were appointed to fix a specific problem and given significant power to do specifically and only that. So for example you could have a “fix gerrymandering dictator” that would be able to sidestep normal processes to fix gerrymandering, and then disappear.

I don’t have ai psychosis myself but man did Claude Code make it easy to see how people could develop it. I guess it makes sense too considering humans thought ELIZA was intelligent. My employer does some AI stuff and I think it just took me a while to understand how these LLMs appear to people outside that sphere.

In some countries, if you hire artists for an event, you are responsible for withholding taxes that are due on the artist’s income. Regular employment often works like this too. Taxes that are withheld at the source are called withholding taxes.

For example if I were to host an artist from the UK for an event here in Germany, I would have to deduct ~15% of their pay and pay it directly to the German tax authority. Basically in the same way that if I hired an employee in Germany I would have to estimate the income tax on their salary and withhold it too.

You can’t generally get these taxes back because they are normal taxes that are just paid in a specific way. But foreign artists from a country that both taxes foreign income and has some kind of double taxation agreement with the country they’re performing in would be able to get some of their tax payments back. There may be other reasons too, I’m not familiar with regulations regarding artists.

For normal employees it’s not uncommon either for the final tax to be different from what was withheld and then the difference is paid/reimbursed when they file their taxes.

Wait, you’re saying we didn’t already think that?

There were some last year specifically for games on SteamOS vs Windows, like this: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-steamos-than-windows-11-ars-testing-finds/

Even that is just confusing. I sometimes use Perplexity (because Pro comes with my bank account - neobanks have zero focus). And by default it remembers things you say. So when I ask a question sometimes it will randomly decide to bring in something else I asked about before. E.g. I sometimes use it to look up programming related stuff, and then when I ask something else it will randomly research whatever language it thinks I like now in that context too and do things like suggest an anime based on my recent interest in Rust for no good reason.

Tbh I think the Sun Ray thin terminals were pretty cool at the time. Not really cloud because it was an enterprise product 20 years ago, so they used servers hosted by the enterprise. But at the time this idea of taking my entire desktop session with me via my employee badge felt pretty cool. Of course only supporting X11 sessions on Solaris meant that nobody outside Sun wanted it though but that’s not really a problem with the concept as such.

In October 2025, so much later.

Yeah, it’s a major pain at my work because our cloud doesn’t support Macs (like e.g. AWS would), so we run a server room with a bunch of Macs that we wouldn’t otherwise need.