It’s not a Hello World equivalent.

So much around generative ai seems to be around “look how unrealistic you can be for not-cheap! Ai - cocaine for your machine!!”

No wonder there’s very little uptake by businesses (MIT state of ai 2025, etc)

What next, become stone masons? nah, that's too corporate, pick berries instead ;)

Come on, what happened to moderation, discipline and planning? How about use what you need, hedge your risks (mix providers, products), be more proactive than reactive to demands for consumption?

Who says the thing is done? there is a massive danger now, with the sheer amount of complexity & speed brought by ai, in that it's increasingly harder to verify / do proof-of-work.

>> AI allows me to realize my ideas

sure for a personal/pet project. however, when working for a customer/client, they've ideas, needs, wants and usually have their own users and shareholders to satisfy - need proof.

>> lighting up the gas-powered street lights

ok, no this metaphor may well be loved by ai companies, but doesn't actual work in so many levels. For one, ai (as actually provided) is not electricity or a physical system, a brain, or a mind, it's software (I use it v-selectively). Second, the job being done (lighting, or coding) is ultimately to produce / output the desired outcome for whoever ordered it - a solution to a problem - failing that it's just work and wages for the worker but no effective solution (lighting the dark side of the moon, kinda).

I agree with the OP, as system complexity went up, so does the ability to keep up.

However, a screenshot acts like a print-out / pdf, and very handy for sharing in other platforms e.g social media, mobile devices.

Like many others I like the use of ai for OCR in imagery. Won't be long before ai tool can copy the style + content from an image, or video.

In high-tech warfare we're seeing these days your metaphor is reversed. These artisans (potters etc) are tech engineers, mathematicians, chemists. They are quick to mobilize and become effective (operate drones, robots, cyber, complex machines).

I cannot comment on your opinion of Canada, it's too vague in my opinion.

Generally, western Armed Forces (CAF included) reduced their personnel and spending when the Cold War ended (90s). Rightly so. Since then, war is fought very differently and AF are now very quickly adapting.

Recent conflicts in near/along Levant and near/along the Black Sea, show how effective certain types of warfare are in the current climate.

In a high-tech modern warfare, the countries with a fighting force that has higher academic education, higher tech literacy are relatively quick to mobilize and become effective militarily.

> Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library [1]

Bloat as a moat, is sadly the strategy of much of the web or apps in recent years. High Performance has shifted into how fast we can serve bloat. Efficiency has become about pushing the most bloat with least time.

Pages are bloated, sites are bloated, browsers are bloated, browser-market is bloated (two-a-dime! or three for free). The whole damn web is a big bloat. wtf happened.

[1] https://dillo-browser.github.io/

Most of read-only content and lite editing can be achieved with raw data + xslt.

The web has become a sledgehammer for clacking a nut.

For example, with xslt you could easily render a read only content without complex and expensive office apps. That is enough for Academia, Gov, and small businesses.

cheaper, privacy-oriented and more secure lol obviously not, doesn’t help the consumer or the developer.

Xslt is brilliant at transforming raw data, a tree or table for example, without having to install Office apps or paying a number of providers to simply view it without massive disruption loops.

how about developing using WYSIWYG? drag + drop + connect + theme/style + preview.

Apple's ui is very nice, but you're stuck with a whole ecosystem for life. If you want to cross-platform, as you mentioned, well, all hell breaks loose: React & co, Flutter, web assembly.

a unified, all-batteries-included system is excellent for the manufacturer/provider - they can plan, invest, manage and rollout products at a desired rate. but for developers, third-party, and consumers is very costly, intense and risky.

fun-fact from Steve Jobs bio, he was interviewing a tech hopeful for a job, the guy showed him a prototype of what would become the Dock (aqua + animations), created using an Adobe product. Abobe etc had powerful, flexible platforms - unfortunately the market was driven by eager tech geeks - so it was easy to get curried away with fancy UIs. However, that was (20 years ago) an educational issue - not a tech issue.

the centralization of computing is distorting the Internet's core strength, the distributed nets (not aws/azure/gcloud zones).

since covid, if anything is telling, is that politics, economy and warfare has shifted into a new era, pretty much globally.

In it's conception, the internet (not www), was not envisaged as a economical medium - it's success was a lovely side-effect.

The internet was born out of the need for Distributed networks during the cold war - to reduce central points of failure - a hedging mechanism if you will.

Now it has consolidated into ever smaller mono nets. A simple mistake in on one deployment could bring banking, shopping and travel to a halt globally. This can only get much worse when cyber warfare gets involved.

Personally, I think the cloud metaphor has overstretched and has long burst.

For R&D, early stage start-ups and occasional/seasonal computing, cloud works perfectly (similar to how time-sharing systems used to work).

For well established/growth businesses and gov, you better become self-reliant and tech independent: own physical servers + own cloud + own essential services (db, messaging, payment).

There's no shortage of affordable tech, know-how or workforce.

Treat the digital ID as critical national infrastructure, or else it'll fail massively.

personally i like the dev-sidecar approach to typing that Python and JS (via TS) have taken to mitigate the issue.

I wouldn't be surprised if they move production back to the UK assuming Pi 500+ starts doing well.