Now, of course, we know those algorithms warp regular users (and by extension societies). Or... maybe they don't? Some research has suggested that just putting this many people in direct communication with each other is the root cause of the problems we see. There could be other ways to fix those without shutting down the internet. How would we know without more exploration?

    - Wait, WTF? Really??
    - But but but it's a *chatbot*, not an authority 
    - We're doomed

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

I'm glad this isn't just me. I occasionally watch anime and the English dubs are seemingly universally terrible compared to the originals. Subtitles are annoying but nothing like listening to someone mumble their way though a script.

Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.

It sucks.

The software is a different story. Sure, the brain does all sorts of things that aren't necessary for $TASK, but we aren't necessarily going to be able to correctly identify which are which. Is your inner experience of your arm motion needed to fully parse the meaning in "raise a glass to toast the bride and groom", or respond meaningfully to someone who says that? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter - language is already a decent tool for bridging disjoint creature realities, maybe it'll stretch to synthetic consciousness too.

As usual, without much regard to consequences.

You are assuming that a pure function has access to some source of randomness. I think that's a bit less than pure unless a source of randomness is one of the inputs. Doesn't change your point at all, but it distracted me from what you were saying.

Speaking as someone who has occasionally invented new things, I think you underestimate the variety of outputs that can arise from a lifetime of accumulated experiential cruft and a situational fitting function (e.g. "we need a working teleporter to stay competitive"), without bringing in randomness at all.

We have way better hardware abstractions in the OS today, which I would agree makes modern development easier overall.

It's fine if you're collaborating with someone else or a team, as long as there are some good-sized chunks in there that you can point to and say "I did that part." Your customer might only be a different team in your company. The point is that you created something that had an impact on other people.

PS I'd also suggest: Take some time and build something small in assembly language. Getting even a bit of a feeling for how the CPU actually interacts with memory and registers and math and branching will give you a completely different perspective on higher-level languages.

To me it's kind of interesting that this person's stream of consciousness results in such visually coherent stuff, but that's about it. One might need to be more plugged in to modern art culture to get anything "moving" out of the meta.

It feels like progress here is really jerky, with periods of aimless milling about interspersed with breakthroughs that spread rapidly. Some examples that come readily to mind are A* graph traversal, BNF parser generators, BSP trees for game world rendering.

It seems rare that a working developer gets to sit back and think, "huh, this problem actually feels a bit like that physics/math/statistics thing I was reading about the other day/year/decade" and spend any time usefully thinking about it. So any language or library we have to hand gets bent into solving the problem the way we're thinking about it right now.