I had an idea for a special reminder app I wanted for myself. It's complicated enough that it comes to 9,000+ lines of code. I wanted to write it using the C++ UI library wxWidgets, because I like that wxWidgets uses native widgets, and is cross-platform, and that it's easy to make an app look nice. And that it doesn't use tons of memory.

There's a wxPython library, but I didn't want my UI to be limited due to whatever gaps may exist in that wrapper.

So I had AI write it in C++. Took about a day for me to get it done. It's perfectly solid. It did hit a couple of memory errors when I first used it, but I could give the AI MacOS crash report and the AI fixed the bugs easily, with no other involvement from me. (I compiled in a debug-friendly mode; no downside to that because it was just for me and was plenty fast enough.)

25 years or so ago, I was a fairly good C++ programmer. Haven't touched it since. And that includes this application, which was completely AI-written.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298495

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Friedrich Nietzsche: "Only thoughts reached by walking have value."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239011

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I really enjoyed it because it was fun. You could do an incredible amount of work in a single line of code.

The only problem was, that line would then be almost impossible to read and understand! It could easily be used as a "write-only" language even without a separate obfuscation step.

When I become a professional programmer right after college, I never used it again, and learned to write code that was readable above all else.

There is a truly fascinating, and even inspiring, book about the company and the sale of FrontPage to Microsoft: https://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/...

"where required".... hmm, that seems OK. We don't want to violate the law!

"or permitted".... er...

[I wonder why this comment is being voted down. Do people here think it's NOT OK to comply with the law with respect to retaining data? Or is the reason somehow the opposite of that? Not sure. But my point was that the "where required" clause seems moot if they are going to retain data where "permitted", which in my book, is NOT OK.]

But, I haven't installed Tahoe. I may skip it entirely, hoping that they do a Snow Leopard-like clean-up-the-mess release in September.

I would argue that it should be the UN that does something like this, if it's done at all. I would like to see a world in which there was a top-level body that would arrest a dictator, the same way the US government would arrest someone who tried to become dictator of an American state.

But it wouldn't be up to the governor of one of the other states to do it without the agreement of the rest of the country. That would be chaos.

Let's change that here and now! :)

I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.

I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context: “Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).

Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...

I find that incredibly frustrating and dangerous, but as far as I can see, it's the way it is.

(The limit is 1-e^(-2).)

So, if you have a LOT of chances to try things that are highly improbable but high upside, your odds are quite good.

There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.

I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.

Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.

Watterson wrote:

> “The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.

(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)