That's one use case, sure, but not the only possible one.

> Reading the PR the change was needed because the old undofile format was fundamentally broken.

That's a good reason to have a new undo file that's completely separate from the old one, and use the new one instead, and tell users "Hey, whatever undo information you had in your old undo file isn't accessible any more through neovim, you'll have to use vim if you need to get to it."

It's not a good reason for just deleting the old undo file with no warning. All the new version needs to do is ignore it, not nuke it.

From what I can gather, you can use the same vimrc file to control both vim and neovim.

If that's not your point, then I have no idea what you're trying to say.

If it's going to nuke vim's undo files, it can't hide behind "another program".

The only way to "fix" this from a source code perspective would be to fork Neovim.

Even a gift comes with an implicit promise that it will do no harm. Deleting important data of yours without warning is harm.

"It was him -> it was her" -- both are direct objects (at least as you're using them here--once upon a time the correct English would have been "it was he -> it was she", since the verb "to be" is not a transitive verb, but that seems to have gone out of fashion).

"It is his -> it is hers" -- both are possessives, but they're not directly modifying anything (they refer to "it", but the verb is in between).

"It is his thing -> it is her thing" -- both are possessives, but now they are functioning as direct modifiers of "thing", which is a different usage.

I don't know if there is a fully specified algorithm for determining these things, and even if you got one that worked in English, I don't think it would map very easily to any other language, because English is such a hodgepodge of things cherry picked from various languages over the centuries.

The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have intentionally set up a factory that puts dioxin into the water, but they're still responsible. Which means they need to take precautions to make sure such accidents can't happen. Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.

I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I think it will hit diminishing returns. But of course it is still capable of serious harm when humans misuse it.

The best analogy we have is probably weapons of mass destruction--we have international treaties about them and we don't let just anybody have them. That's the kind of framework I think we need, and it goes beyond "regulation" in the ordinary sense.

Use of such weapons is considered by international treaty to be an act of war; use of AI by, say, China and Russia against our infrastructure should be the subject of a similar international treaty with the understanding that it would have similar consequences.

Domestically, humans who misuse AI to do serious harm could be treated like, say, the people who tried to spread anthrax years back.

No, it's an example of why you have to allow people to pursue what at the time look like "curiosities", even though most of them don't go anywhere--because the very small portion that do go somewhere, end up changing the world, and we don't know in advance which ones those are going to be.

It's quite true that the funds we have for this are a finite resource. But that doesn't mean that "foreseeable practical applications" is a useful filter for how to deploy that resource.