The terminology is used to talk about languages that have async and sync functions where you declare (or color) the function as either async or sync.

In these languages it's pretty common for the language to enforce a constraint that async functions can only call other async functions. Javascript / Typescript, Python are popular examples of languages with colored functions.

Humans worked metal for a long time and you can make better and better forges without knowing the metallurgy of why the result is better. If I make the fire hotter the metal comes out better, and I can get to work making forges that produce hotter and hotter fire.

LLMs could in this analogy be the forge. We can make them bigger and bigger and get better and better answers out, in the same way a pre-metallurgy human could make their forges hotter and hotter and get better and better metal out.

But the hottest forge doesn't mean you get metallurgy.

Sad that they got acquired because it was just fascinating what they were doing, even if I was never going to use it.

It really is that easy. The interoperability between Erlang and Elixir is fantastic and the communities get along well. There has been a long time push from many of the thought leaders that BEAM (the VM that Erlang and Elixir run on) should be a community regardless of language. That way we can share resources.

When I first learned Elixir I spent all my time in Elixir. Erlang has a lot of nice libraries though, so it wasn't uncommon back when I started to reach for one.

It was a pretty gentle learning curve, you can write Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. You can consume Erlang libraries from Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. Then if you are like me, you are curious about how something works and you go read some library code and it's a bit odd but you can mostly get the gist of it. Then over time reading Erlang is easy enough, the prolog inspired syntax is the hardest hurdle to get over, but then you realize how much Erlang and Elixir have in common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(web_server)

"He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"

The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently for someone to implement.

Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy definition where you can tell someone to do something and they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.

The problem with successful software is that the users are going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are going to get their account into some weird state and click the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the users that are trying to use the site without trying to intentionally break it.

I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they realize they've just been piling up bandaids.

I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.

30 years ago we figured out how to contact charge cordless phones with metal pads and prongs.

Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.

And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.

They've shown the "putting dishes in the dishwasher" bit before, it seems to be getting better, but I imagine it still has a high failure rate.

I wonder if this company started off or has some founder that's really interested in the "handling deformable stuff" space. They really seem keen to promote that it can do tasks like folding a shirt or working with soft packages.

Definitely seems like a carefully curated video, but the longer videos make me think that either they are running a scam or they have some of this stuff working well enough.

It seems to work less these days, but in the past I would get a robot voice on the other end and just calmly start going “piss shit fuck damn ass” and it would connect me to a human operator.

If profit isn’t the excess value of labor then where does it come from. You’ve got some inputs, you transform them into some outputs, you sell the outputs for more than the inputs. Something happened to make the output more valuable than the input.

And it seems hard to argue against that idea. Capitalism as a system describes who should get to allocate that value and as the name would suggest, it’s the people with the capital. If you own the factory you get to pay people to do work, they convert low value inputs into higher value outputs, and as the person with the capital you get to capture the difference as profit.

Marx simply looks at this system and says, why should they get to decide what happens with the value that got created by labor.

That tends to be where it goes from an objective “this is how this system operates” to “here’s an alternative system”

I think people would serve themselves well to read what he had to write. Even if you come away thinking the alternative doesn’t work, the analysis of capitalisms strengths and weaknesses is interesting.

As life becomes more unaffordable for many under a capitalist system, as rent seeking and exploitation become more rampant, people are going to want to critically analyze whether this system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Why do some go hungry while Jeff Bezos has more than he can ever use? Why do the wealthy get to have an outsized say in our society and our governments? Can the set of incentives that capitalism erects survive a condition like climate change?

When we decide that people are no longer allowed to ask those questions, we need not worry about the a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat. Ask only who you are not allowed to question to see who is in charge.

No system should be above examination and reformation for the good of humanity.

The democratic party is controlled opposition. Democrats, like Republicans, take in a ton of money from the donor class.

America is a capitalist nation, in capitalism, those with the capital get to reap the profits. The people with the capital therefore end up with more money, and they can use that money to donate to the political class. This causes the political class to become an instrument of the capital class, and the parties end up being marketing.

The goals of the democratic and republican parties both end up to serve capital. Republicans have an easier time since they have incorporated serving capital into their political platform. Democrats end up seeming ineffective because their messaging is that they are somehow taking most of their money from the capital class but are actually on the side of the labor class.

The capital class has the money, but the labor class has the numbers, both parties need the numbers because until we completely do away with democracy, people, not dollars, get to vote.

As the democratic party has become more and more captured by the capital class and their donations, they can no longer seek votes through advancing policies that would support the labor class by restraining the capital class (this would make their donors unhappy). The democratic party pivoted to trying to find a way to carve out least-bad pro-capital class reforms (things like public-private partnerships, school vouchers, etc), least-disruptive pro-labor class reforms (entrenching capital class insurance companies as some kind of improvement to healthcare, slow rolling minimum wage so they could have symbolic victories for keeping up with inflation, and then not even doing that), and more and more towards cultural issues that do not threaten the capital class (LGBTQ+ rights, DEI, etc).

Republicans have adopted populism and wedge issues politics to capture the labor class vote.

The reason the democrats are terrible opposition isn't because we've somehow elected the dumbest people imaginable, it's that they are pointing at a different goal. Their goal is to remain in the political class, to keep the donations of the donor class (which just happens to be the capital class) flowing, and if that class says "let the massive tax cuts for us play out, we don't care about the fallout" that's what they will do.

Companies are not democracies, Musk says "get rid of the supercharger team" and no one gets a vote, they just get rid of them. We should all be worried about what goals he efficiently wants to achieve, if you or I were in the way, would he care.

The danger is in the unchecked nature of this power, even if someone likes Elon Musk and thinks he's a brilliant genius, what gives him the right to supplant the will of the people with his own.

Elon has shown time and again that he will prioritize what HE wants, and if that means some people don't have jobs, well that's just fine. If that means that people should have to sleep on the factory floor and wake up and make cars he can profit off of and then back to sleep on the factory floor, that's also just fine. If that means that USAID doesn't feed the hungry, that's also just fine.

And maybe to anyone reading this that's happy with what he's done, you are just fine with it too. But what happens when he decides something you do care about is alright to destroy too to meet his goals, he's just fine with it. What do you do then? How confident are you that your goals and his will stay aligned, forever, that the ax of "efficiency" won't come for you and yours someday. And if that day comes, what will you say to the people that tell you "he's a brilliant genius and he's fine with it so so am I"

Many works of fiction provide political commentary.

There's no actual invisible hand of the free market either, just some pop-culture metaphor by some Scottish guy.

Just because someone won't shut up doesn't mean they are telling you their true intentions.