This is not VCs being evil and corrupting a pristine engineer- or hacker-defined concept of true value. The VCs are all following the rules and are trying to make money off of risky investments (it's "venture" capital, after all). But the incentive structure just forces the market into either an oligopoly of largely extractive services (or into everything being free: that's why open source is also a stable point for software).

My hope is that in time, basic software services, like for communication, socialising, community hosting, and so on, will eventually become seen as core social infrastructure. I don't really think this can happen via existing institutions, even open source, because the fixed costs of making software are really high. You really need _tax_ to support this. But it's very difficult to do because the internet cuts across borders.

It's quite sad to think this experience might be on its way out, and it really highlights that "junior problem" from AI. There is just no way around diving in to get an intuition for things. Naur warned us of this 40 years ago but the lesson never seems to get learned.

By all means, put pressure on companies who are doing this. Public opinion does matter. But the fundamentals are just not going to change without regulation. It is a tough nut to crack.

If you want my opinion on that, Odin seems pretty notable to me, and I would expect there to be a Wikipedia article for it, and I'd be all for engaging with the editors on that. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia moderators to be plugged into the world of programming languages the way I am, though. Like the article says, this seems like subject-specific notability guidelines could help. It's definitely true that the programming world is missing the kind of institutional material that works well for, say, science or news.

So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.

It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.

Once I started looking for it, I started noticing some of my colleagues' abilities to navigate their way through meetings and disagreements and getting their way without things even becoming arguments, the ability of some people to just put a room at ease or to communicate. And the inability of others to do so.

"Politics" is an unsavory term for somebody with engineering predilections. It evokes backhandedness and self-interest. But you can't actually both be a human being and be "above it". Every sentence, no matter how concrete and technical, is a social act with social ramifications.

I've come to have a lot of respect for people who are actually able to lead and make things happen. It is not a skill I am terribly practiced with.

It can be frustrating. The AI pretends to be a human, and so a part of my brain expects them to commit and have a "parti pris" like a human, so the exercise is a good reminder of the feedback loop. My mental model is that before the first three or four messages, the model has many finer points of its personality still underdetermined. I'd suggest that as the mechanism for "role-based prompting". And it explains the "savant sleeper agent" thing you describe. You want to get the state in the right attractor on the manifold.

These machines are pretty incredible, but for conversation-driven workflows you really have to be in the driver's seat. A human has a property that the AI does not have, at least under current architectures: we are regulated by the outside world. A bit of a tangent, but I can see how AI psychosis arises from these dynamics.

Thank you for that line --- I may steal it :)

We don't let private capital build nuclear powerplants willy nilly. Energy markets are regulated, key materials are subject to control.

It's not a perfect analogy, there's no fissile uranium to build physical guardrails around with critical technology. But the point is that Big Tech lives more or less in its own world insulated from regulatory and political oversight, and governments have been scared to intervene (lest the big GDP-making machine stop laying golden eggs).

Getting to specifics, windfall taxes and capital gains taxes are on the table. Next step up is mandatory reporting and interoperability. Then there's public–private partnership and public stakes in AI technology.

Strategically, the point is less that these policies are all actively required today. You don't want to over-anticipate, over-regulate, and thus destroy the potential of the technology (or, more destructively, hand the initiative over to undemocratic countries). It's more to get the Overton window moving a bit so our governments don't get caught with their trousers down. Tech must not be untouchable, that applies no matter what level of disruption AI ends up causing.

To be clear, you still pay indirection cost: when you do opt in you have to hope the upstairs implementation is compliant to the contract. But that does also apply to interfaces/typeclasses.

In practice, what that means is you get a strong temptation to hang behaviour on data even when it doesn't fit perfectly. Because of the natural desire to reduce the number of entity definitions, you end up defining a typeclass on a data type that doesn't fit exactly just to get the behaviour to the right place without having to introduce a new policy or something.

Effects change this by essentially letting you provide multiple names implementations for the same data type, and you don't need to pass around a policy type because the polymorphism lets you tie handlers to scope.

So, if the fancy type-safe library-based control flow doesn't really do much for you, I think that their potential for code design is a good reason to still be excited!

[0] Really as a continuation of existing trends rather than its own unique thing.