My big issue with Go is, the language just isn't that great. Zero values instead of sum types, reflection instead of proper macros, a mediocre module system…
Java's warts are far worse than Go. Everything is nullable. There's no module system to speak of. It's so IDE-dependant.
I agree with the spirit of "use boring technology." So thank god Go is boring enough that I don't have to write Java anymore.
Only reference types, the same as in golang (which also has nullable pointers, and its interfaces interact weirdly with null). Java is getting value types, which can be declared as non-nullable.
Everything's a reference in Java except primitives, and even primitives get object wrappers. In Java, String, Long, and Bool can all be null. Go isn't like that—only explicit pointer types and interfaces can be nil. In practice it really cuts down on NPEs.
Ok, granted, but I have never seen these in actual use. Java's ecosystem is big enough that you can use Java for years and not even know it has modules. I find this profusion of features unboring for the same reason that C++ is unboring.
In Go, everything's already in modules. It's just simpler. And when they did add generics, it was backwards-compatible, so there was no Java 8/Java 11 thing.
> Furthermore, any non-trivial project is better served with an IDE
In any other language, I can get by fine with vim + LSP regardless of project size. Java has a uniquely bad LSP story.
Can we? We can vote for a party, but I don't know that any party here has permacomputing in their platform. If you want to add something to a party's platform, the usual way to do that is lobbying, but who can afford lobbyists? The alternative—grassroots activism—tends to involve a lot of stuff like local repair cafes that attract volunteers and get people talking.
No? I imagine, in this context, that he thinks of himself as an advocate against police violence, since he retweeted a video of cops kicking a man in the head and said he thought it was bad. Doesn't seem particularly Jewish to me, one way or another.
You are parroting criticisms made by antiracists and intersectional feminists who are themselves part of the contemporary progressive movement.
This is like when laypeople say "economics is all hogwash because humans aren't rational actors": They are citing behavioural economics as if it disqualifies the field of economics rather than being part of the field.
The way people talk about Just Stop Oil is interesting. People often say, "Just Stop Oil is doing activism wrong," but I never hear anyone talk about orgs that "do activism right" because the public never talks about them at all.
Like them or not, Just Stop Oil is very good at making headlines and stirring up controversy, which is their goal. If you go into a party with a megaphone and shout about beavers, everyone will eventually be talking and thinking about beavers. Conservatives use this strategy to manufacture controversies like "critical race theory" all the time. As a radical group, simply being in the headlines benefits them.
At least in recent years, conservatives don’t usually do radical stunts like throwing junk on paintings, which may be why their activism has been more effective lately. Conservative activists do often say things that cause controversy, but the public seems more forgiving of words alone versus things like defacing art or blocking traffic at random.
Note that I said blocking traffic at random. Targeted roadblocks are actually effective (such as in the ICE protests/interventions) and were also used to great effect by Canadian truckers. (Speaking of the Canadian truckers, maybe you noticed how the useless and constant honking was the thing that turned the public against them.)
This idea that attention alone, even negative attention, is enough is one of the worst mistakes of modern activists, particularly on the left, and it’s completely derailed their effectiveness in many cases.
"Intersectionality at an individual level" is poison for a social movement. If everyone lends their support only to movements that benefit them personally, that creates a fragmented ecosystem of niche groups that accomplish nothing. Strength lies in solidarity—in big-tent alliances of disparate groups.
The drawback with a big tent is that small subgroups inside that tent may have their concerns ignored. For instance, black women in early feminist movements were treated poorly, but what were they going to do? Start a schism? That'd be a setback for everyone.
Intersectionality is a second-order tool that protects the interests of smaller sub-groups within a big tent. You're wrong to assume that everyone outside the intersection is "actively repelled." When an environmentalist group says they're anticolonial, feminist, BLM, etc., environmentalists are typically fine with it. Sure, it does turn some people off, but that's a feature, not bug. If your group gets co-opted by people who reject some of these values, it makes it difficult to work together with groups that do focus on issues affecting indigenous people, women, etc.
Conservatives tend to gloss over what it is exactly that they want to conserve. The environment? No. Norms? Sometimes, but not always. Before the 19th century, abortion was relatively uncontroversial; anti-abortion rhetoric was a "conservative innovation."
What they always defend is social hierarchies. Anti-abortion rhetoric may break from the status quo, but it does so in defence of preserving women's role in society as obligate mothers. Starting wars in the Middle East isn't staid or responsible, but the performance of these wars situates America at the top of a symbolic hierarchy of global power.
If you dig into the fathers of modern conservative thought (people like Edmund Burke), one thing they were very concerned about was the preservation of aristocratic hierarchy beyond the end of monarchism. How can a liberal society maintain a class distinction between the rulers and the ruled? These are the intellectual roots of meritocracy: Let the free market pick winners without any interference by egalitarian meddlers, and the upper class will naturally select itself.
From this standpoint, the conservative disinterest in sustainability becomes obvious. The machines that are destroying the environment are owned by wealthy people whose fortunes may be destabilized by switching to a newer, more sustainable technologies. The conservative movement exists to protect the social status of the wealthy; therefore, concern for the environment is a liability.
> There are huge environmental and societal issues in today's computing, and permacomputing specifically wants to challenge them in the same way as permaculture has challenged industrial agriculture.
Permacomputing seems like a body of values and practices that is extremely grounded in a particular political perspective.
It's odd to regard permaculture, degrowth, anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, etc. as completely orthogonal. They're all part of a shared tradition of thought—not an "omnicause," but an ecosystem. You won't find a lot of people who love intersectional feminism but hate decoloniality. Appropriately enough, plucking a single plant from the earth and then dismissing the rest of the garden is exactly the type of blinkered thinking which permaculture discourages.
And then how do you uncover bias in your chatbot? Do you ask it to analyze its own analysis? For that matter, what about the bias in your prompt, which LLMs tend to accept uncritically? Do your own preconceived opinions bias you against the argument made in the article? Are you using a chatbot to think critically about the article, or to avoid thinking critically about your own beliefs?
> At the same time, 79 percent of those surveyed by Gallup “expressed concern that AI makes people lazier,” and 65 percent said that using chatbots “promotes instant gratification, not real understanding” and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way.
Perhaps you should take a cue from these surveyees and do your own thinking.
I actually did this - I plugged The Verge article into Claude and got the following critique of what biases are there:
> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*
Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:
> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*
So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.
LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.
> LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.
I'm honestly very impressed. You read these passages multiple times across composing two HN replies and did not, at any point, realize that curiosity is not an inherently positive emotion.
Curiosity is a "desire to know." We badly want to know about things that threaten us. People in 2020 were extremely curious about COVID-19, but that doesn't mean they liked it.
You might say, "well it's open for interpretation. It could be positive curiosity." But why stop there? Interpret: Anxiety is more common than anger, and anger is more common than excitement. Given a sample member who is anxious, angry, not excited, and not hopeful, do you think their curiosity is positively or negatively inflected?
Additionally, I don't know where Claude got the idea that "daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest." That's not in the data set, and a different data set will need to be interpreted separately.
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but you've completely failed to engage critically with either the article or with Claude. Claude misread the article and then affirmed its own misreading, and you took that all at face value.
I think there's a big difference between "your drawing skills will atrophy if you use CAD to draw for you" and "your brain will atrophy if you ask an LLM to think for you." Personally I don't judge people for being unable to draw, but I do judge them for being unable to think for themselves.
I can't believe I am about to post this comment, but I feel a compulsion:
The human mind adapts the best it can for its environment. While not being able to think for oneself is highly detrimental, there may come a time in the distant future where strong abilities to think and reason are less valuable/important. I know it may come off as absolutely ridiculous, but I do not think (no pun intended) that such an uncomfortable idea violates any principles of evolution.
I would argue our ability to think and reason about our environment has been paramount to the survival humanity. Just as hunting abilities were paramount to the ancestors of both my pet dogs.
However, both my dogs would make horrible hunters and would likely starve or die of exposure if left in the woods. But the ability to hunt has been useless to my dogs for their entire lives and for many generations prior.
Both my dogs still have remnants of a prey-drive, and I would argue humans will likely retain some ability to think and reason. But just because an ability is valuable now does not guarantee its future value.
The rise in literacy likely contributed great harm to the ability for one memorize entire epics like ancient Greek poets. However, is there really much value in the ability to memorize an entire Greek epic?
Not to mention, I have met some individuals in my life who would likely cause less harm to themselves and others had an LLM thought on their behalf (I'm kidding, of course).
> such an uncomfortable idea violates any principles of evolution.
Evolution isn't a normative thing. It's perfectly possible for us to evolve into something that morally shouldn't exist, especially in an artificial environment.
If we run with your theory that the human mind adapts and thinking becomes less valuable that should be setting off alarmbells. What kind of world would be one where thinking is not considered a valuable skill. If I thought that was true I would be in favour of restricting AI use to certain workflows.
Java's warts are far worse than Go. Everything is nullable. There's no module system to speak of. It's so IDE-dependant.
I agree with the spirit of "use boring technology." So thank god Go is boring enough that I don't have to write Java anymore.
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