"They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they could be considered conscious.

The thing being discussed isn't simply an arbitrary MacGuffin; in both cases the nature of the thing is central to the impact of the story.

It's difficult to tell who's trolling -- probably best to go with the charitable assumption that everyone is honestly trying to convey their opinion, but mostly talking past each other. Unfortunately these discussions about the nature of consciousness never go anywhere useful.

I think I'm probably in the same boat as you, roughly: a) LLMs are doing something really interesting that resembles in many ways both intelligence and consciousness; b) I suspect they're not actually conscious but I don't know how you'd know for sure; c) it all just drives home that we still don't really know what consciousness actually is. But like (a), it's definitely something really interesting...

I think it would benefit from some little animations so it's clearer what's going on. But making that work nicely across both desktop and mobile could be a real pain, so I wouldn't blame you for punting it until later. :)

A smaller suggestion: maybe draw all the spare pieces on screen, rather than just displaying e.g. "15 pcs" as text. That way you can see at a glance when your stock is dwindling. Experts won't need that but it could be useful for beginners.

If you’re specifically thinking of native ephemeral workers with very fast startup, it seems like those would have to be sandboxed somehow, and WebAssembly seems like a decent solution. Is there really a significant native code gap between WebAssembly workers and native containers?

I’m not sure that’s actually the case.

Steve Jobs argued in his “thoughts on Flash” letter that Flash was too buggy, insecure and resource-hungry for mobile platforms. I worked on Chrome around that time and the Flash plugin was definitely one of the biggest sources of problems.

I think all the stuff you’re complaining about is to do with business models and not really anything to do with the technology. I reckon if Flash were still around we’d probably be in much the same place we are now. People would be complaining about restaurant menus being written in Flash instead of plain old HTML, etc etc.

You can do terrible things with JS but you can do great things too.

What? Why not?

It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?

or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way

There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!

I don't think there's enough information to say.

Why so pedantic?

In Python in seems like there are multiple type-checkers with widely differing levels of coverage, so it's not at all obvious which one to use, and typing is really spotty in third-party libraries. So you can get some level of type-safety but it doesn't feel very dependable.

In TS, there's one canonical checker and the others work hard to stay compatible with it; and typing in third-party libraries is generally very solid. There are still some old libraries without types, but I think those headaches are mostly in the past now (similar to the Python 2 -> 3 switch).

Of course there's nothing to stop you using URIs like this (I think Angular does, or did at one point?) but I don't think the rules for relative matrix URIs were ever figured out and standardised, so browsers don't do anything useful with them.