Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."

[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/free-c... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/free-c...

Still my favorite language I had the privilege to work with professionally for over a decade. However, in this post-JVM world, I'm actually excited to see a lot more OCaml discussion on here lately. The Jane Street work on OxCaml is terrific after a long period of stagnation with the language. I'm using it for most of my projects these days.

[1] https://github.com/tixxit/framian

It's paywalled unfortunately, but [1] is an illustrative Financial Times article discussing car manufacturer behavior in relation to Covid shutdowns and strikes. Many firms found the manufacturing shutdowns to be a boon: the winning strategy to accept it as a cost cut and just raise prices on existing inventory for above average financial performance.

My sense is that Tesla is now just taking that a step further by getting rid of their Fordist aspirations and applying the unarguably successful Apple model to the automotive industry. They don't want to mass produce cars and hope for X% conversion rate to software and services over time: they literally don't want customers who are not able or not going to pay for recurring software services. Software is where free cash flow comes from and free cash flow is where dividends/buybacks come from, which determines the value of an equity. That, of course, is why we get paid well.

I end with the disclaimer that obviously I don't believe the world should be meticulously and exclusively organized for the production of free cash flow, but I do think it's important to understand the logic.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4da6406a-c888-49c1-b07f-daa6b9797...

I worked in Scala for most of my career and it was never hard to get a job on a growth stage data team or, indeed, in finance/data-intensive industries. I'm still shocked at how the language/community managed to throw away the position they had achieved. At first I was equally shocked to see the Saudi Sovereign Wealth fund investing in the language, but then realized it was just 300k from the EU and everything made sense.

It's still my favorite language for getting things done so I wouldn't be upset with a comeback for the language, but I certainly don't expect it at this point.

The public transportation point is definitely key: London is just so unspeakably large spatially and it's all more or less well-connected that there isn't the same scarcity of commutable apartments as in NYC/SF. It wasn't uncommon for older colleagues to even commute in from Kent or elsewhere in the English countryside -- and often their morning train wasn't much longer than my own.

That is, you're definitely developing the tool in a direction that I and I think most Hacker News readers will appreciate and it sounds like you're already thinking about some of the most common "extravagances" (annotations, reference lines, double y-axis etc). As OP mentioned, I think there's a big need for more performant client-side graph visualization libraries, but that's really a different project. Last I looked, you're still essentially stuck with graphviz prerendering for large enough graphs...

Experiences like that are how I understand the question of 'shame' relating to aphantasia and the importance of 'diagnosis'/understanding how your mind actually works. 'Diagnosis' just helps you understand how to adapt and prevents you from slamming your head against approaches that won't work no matter how hard you try.

Similarly on sleep, I can sleep anywhere anytime with little effort and always tell my wife, who often has insomnia, "just close your eyes until you sleep" to her frustration.

What's really remarkable is how similar the life experiences are of most who have aphantasia...

More directly relevant, I haven't looked at the D3 internals for a decade, but I wonder if it might be tractable to use your library as a GPU rendering engine. I guess the big question for the future of your project is whether you want to focus on the performance side of certain primitives or expand the library to encompass all the various types of charts/customization that users might want. Probably that would just be a different project entirely/a nightmare, but if feasible even for a subset of D3 you would get infinitely customizable charts "for free." https://github.com/d3/d3-shape might be a place to look.

In my past life, the most tedious aspect of building such a tool was how different graph standards and expectations are across different communities (data science, finance, economics, natural sciences, etc). Don't get me started about finance's love for double y-axis charts... You're probably familiar with it, but https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computing... is fantastic if you continue on your own path chart-wise and you're looking for inspiration.

All hypothetical, of course, but to me that's the most convincing bear case I've heard for NVIDIA.

TLDR; I don’t think personal benchmarks should replace the official ones of course, but I think the former are invaluable for building your intuition about the rate of AI progress beyond hype.

TLDR; in my opinion, the interesting question is less what happens at the top firms or to top engineers than what happens as the rest of the world gains access to engineering skills well above the previous floor at a reasonable price point.

For a long time, it was thought that they indeed contained only the latter, but my certainly non-specialist grasp on the matter is that we now know they were used to encode much more than that. In addition to being used directly to verify calculations [0], they contained "histories, laws and ceremonies, and economic accounts" or, as the Spanish testified at the time: "[W]hatever books can tell of histories and laws and ceremonies and accounts of business is all supplied by the quipus so accurately that the result is astonishing"[1]. My---again crude---understanding is this was through embedding categories, names and relational data in addition to numbers, signaled not least through texture and color [2].

I likely come across as if I'm trying to over-inflate the Incan knots, but really it's just to say they appear to be a rather fascinating in-between of legal-administrative inscriptions, whose discovery transformed understanding of Roman institutions over the last century or so, and the straight-forward manuscripts of the Herculaneum.

[0] My elementary and probably out-of-date recollection: an emissary would come to towns with Quipus containing work orders, which would be validated with the community on the spot.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27087183

[2] https://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-abstract/65..., https://www.jstor.org/stable/483319