2) the leader of only one of them is threatening to lock up journalists, shut down broadcasters, and use the military against his enemies.

3) only one of them led an attempted autogolpe that was condemned at the time by all sides

4) Musk is only backing the one described in 1, 2 and 3 above.

It's not really arguable, all this stuff.

The guy who thinks the USA should go to Mars clearly thinks he's better throwing in his lot with the whiny strongman dude who is on record -- via his own social media platform -- as saying that the giant imaginary fraud he projected to explain his humiliating loss was a reason to terminate the Constitution.

And he's putting a lot of money into it, and co-running the ground game. But sure, he wants to go to Mars. So it's all good.

Also there's a blockchain so that's great! I know you're not a crypto evangelist on Twitter anymore, or an NFT evangelist, and now you're an AI consultant and solutions provider. But here it is -- that great application for the blockchain you were all so sure was coming all along.

All tied up with one neat looped bow that can make you feel like it isn't somehow some empty, culture-destroying, billionaire-welfare griftapolooza.

And it's even a bit YCombinator because Sam Altman, right? He was always going to make it. He's got the killer instinct.

(This is, I think, an apolitical observation: whatever you think about Trump, he is arguing for a pretty major restructuring of political power in a manner that is identifiable in fascism. And Musk is, pretty unarguably, bankrolling this.)

Code that backtracks is hard to reason about.

Or it's a thing people can write papers about, and chase reproducibility on afterwards, as the shell game of claiming LLM reasoning continues.

It frightens me that HN is so popular with people who will strain credulity in this regard. It's like a whole decade of people engaging in cosmic-ordering wishes about crypto has now led to those same people wishing for new things as if the wishes themselves are evidence of future outcomes.

Competent CS students fail Prolog courses all the time. A lot of Prolog on the internet will either be wrong, or it will be so riddled with unnecessary/unclear backtracking that an LLM won't be able to make more sense of it than it does words.

Prolog is actually pretty difficult to do right, even if you are skilled. It actually requires reasoning. You don't just write out facts and have the system do the work. And many of the examples in the training set will be wrong, naturally simplistic or be full of backtracking that is itself difficult for a person to comprehend at a glance; why should an LLM be better at it? There can't even be that much data in the training set.

Ultimately, though: stop believing in magical solutions to fundamental problems. This is nuts.

Suggesting otherwise is intellectually on the same level as trying to make up a small consistent per-sale loss with volume.

For example, QGIS and FreeCAD are very good indeed on the Mac, and the quirky problems FreeCAD has on the Mac are generally Qt problems (font mapping, some window handling stuff, very occasional high-DPI things).

Command-line/server-based FOSS stuff is usually not a great challenge.

I guess this is kind of what one could predict, comparing Linux and the Mac. Though it's also the case that Qt and Gtk get more portability eyeballs on Windows, which again is probably what one could predict.

I just don't understand how people can pretend this isn't happening just because they find each new twist of a technology fascinating.

That could make the path from Designer to FreeCAD a bit easier; FreeCAD still has something of a special relationship with Inkscape SVG files.

Yet more "but humans also".

Is this a rhetorical question? Because the answer for podcast indexing and search services is surely pretty obvious.

I once taught someone to make this jump, who was convinced he would never be able to. It is definitely a mindset change but I think a good developer can do it. Especially since these days, class and namespace stuff and Composer dependencies are increasingly common in plugin development.

I love Laravel (especially with Lighthouse) but I think the hooks/actions model in WordPress is underrated in its simplicity and appropriateness for the task.

(I am not a fan of the standard WP coding style, TBH)

I have to say this is one of the silliest takes I have ever seen on HN.

You only need to look at the way Gandhi broke the law, the methodology of his disobedience, to see that you cannot possibly make a comparison with Uber that shows them in a good light. It's absurd to draw this comparison.

More enjoyable to develop for, IMO, but otherwise the comparison holds.

I would add that other PHP-based projects have had severe maintainability crises, poorer clarity of design, even worse code quality crises (Joomla, for example), major fallings-out and multiple forks (Joomla again).

WordPress got this far in part because it managed inevitable community fallings-out and egos much better. It's totally depressing to see what is happening.

Right. But this is because of a very simple, undeniable fact that is unpopular around these here parts:

There is nothing close to as good as WordPress at everything WordPress can be made to do.

No GUI-based CMS not built on PHP can be as flexibly hosted as one that is. PHP is easy and can be secured. There are no real PHP-based competitors for WordPress that are as easy to install, configure or use.

There are no CMSes that can get close to being as good for a bespoke mix of small ecommerce, member systems, digital downloads sales, form handling etc. Hosted or not hosted.

Say what you like about the block editor (personally I think it is an impressive but ultimately ten-year-plus project). But TinyMCE and shortcodes has proved painfully non-robust and there is no other block editor on an open source CMS that gets close to being open-ended enough for an extensible CMS. Gutenberg has some strengths over hosted solutions like e.g. the Squarespace editor.

There is no open-source CMS that rolls out security patches automatically the way Wordpress does, or can do so at the scale WordPress does.

HN people may dislike this, but it has not been out-competed because it is actually basically competent and extensible, and has no real jack-of-all-trades competitors at all. There's nothing with this level of contribution, extensibility, attention to detail, longevity or backwards compatibility.

Personally I think WP Engine needed a bit of a straightener; there are things they should not have done and there are things they could do. But this was not the way to go about it.

The damage Matt is doing, in particular with the "Secure Custom Fields" gaslighting bullshit is among the most depressing examples of willingly setting one's own hair on fire that I've ever seen.

(Edited for clarity, but sorry everyone, I'm waiting for a new coffee grinder to be delivered this morning)