I think I missed the significance of your narrowed definition of recursion, and didn't apply it the way you intended when I read the article. I admit to my bad reading.

I went on to discuss your article with an LLM and used the experiences I've had _using_ some functional approaches in JS to help it give me a tutorial on the combinators, to try to better understand your article and the underlying principles. I "mostly get it" now, but I will have to go over it a couple more times.

You shared a thought-provoking article, even if I didn't immediately get your intended lesson out of it.

My first two attempts made it seem like it was building on a function calling itself, with itself as an argument (so that it can call itself). I’m not sure how that isn’t recursion, and I didn’t read it as throwing away those approaches. But, as I say, I’ll re-read it…

It sets a challenge as a rhetorical tool, but then completely fails to honour the challenge through the bulk of the explanation.

- don’t use recursion: spends multiple paragraphs implying that a function calling itself isn’t recursion

- don’t use declaration: ignoring that defining arguments to a function is declaration

I’m not saying the article is “wrong”. But I thunk I’d have preferred a plain intro to lambda calculus.

(Writing this as someone who has struggled to learn “real” functional programming the few times I’ve tried over the past 20+ years, but who very much likes using RxJS and the functional flavour of lodash and wishes I could see deeper into that black hole.)

My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.

And I'm not sure how this relates to TFA's point. Are you saying we collectively need to get better at abstraction so that LLMs get better at abstraction (either by training, or our prompting), so that their code is easier to read?

Thinking out load a bit here:

- maybe the existence of West-coast style "low pass gates" proves me wrong...

- gates sometimes have release controls, which would make them "automated volume control", but I still contend that aiming for zero gain when the gate closes makes them in/out controls not "dynamics" controls).

Only the investigative or journalistically inclined will make use of this, and those people already fact check.

Where’s the en mass gain?

True.

We can frame it even more strongly: "default societal practices actively discriminate against people with disabilities; they intentionally, consciously choose to make life harder for people who're disadvantaged".

The CSS version is a risk, for sure. The dev tools in all the main browsers will tell you where the extension happens and show yiu the order the complecting rules are applied, so it’s fairly easy to debug. Bugs/misbehaving code is usually a problem of structure. In other languages, we take on the need to apply structure; just do the same with CSS.

The mechanism that allows this merging behavior is the means by which intentional reuse is composed. It allows yiu to set general and specific rules sets. This seems conceptually similar to OO classes and subclasses, to me.

In your "programmatic" code (your JS/TS, python, C++, whatever..) your classes are global. Even if the language supports flexible namespaces, or module scoping, you still have to take great care naming because reusing a name will cause you confusion. Giving two things the same name makes them harder to import, and risks clashes and bugs.

No-one complains about this. This is just how you code in all those other languages.

This might overtake “a haiku+macOS mashup” as my idealised computing future.

I agree, it would be nice if Apple added stickers, but the problem isn't, IMO, as bad as you make out.

Exceptions include transport and concert tickets. Most of the time this doesn't cause problems because I'm standing with the other people I'm travelling/gigging with, and the agent scanning the tickets doesn't care about any names on them.

In the case of the orange in the bag, both Altman and his interlocutor can see the bag and the truth can be exposed by rummaging.

In the case of ads in the oAI chat feed, at the time Altman made the comment he was probably planning to puts ads in the feed. But there might not even be emails about this, just conversation. And the engineers might not solve the "how" for a while... so there's nothing to rummage for.

However, in both cases Altman wants you to think something other than what's on his mind. There's an orange in his bag, but he wants you to think there is not. There's going to be ads because he owes the investors a tonne of money but he wants you to think it wont happen, or wont happen soon, or will be "nice" ads...

The distinction is in the nature of the underlying truth, not in Altmans words or actions in the moment. In the moment, in both cases, he's lying.

There’s also nothing inherently wrong with carrying sensors in your pocket. The “wrong” is in the providers/manufacturers exploiting the position they put themselves in. Managing data is hard, and most people don’t want to do the necessary work most of the time, so the providers/manufacturers offer to do that for their users/customers. However, they also exploit their csretaker position by tresting the data like they own it too, and extracting profit.

If the solutions to the Flock problems could be framed such that other providers/manufacturers had to build systems that were “local first” or “private by default” (as in pre-internet home computing plus explicit, finegrained shsring consents), then it would also be fine to carry sensors. I want my fitness tracker and GPS. I just don’t want the data it generates used to build advertising profiles on me such that ads (and government mass surveillance dragnets) can follow my every other move.

All AI prices will rise soon - probably shortly after the IPOs. The new prices will be eyewatering compared with today’s. This bulling change is lengthening the time until Anthropic have to raise the subscription prices, so those of us who’re not doing 24hr claw stuff can continue to use the tools the way we’ve gotten used to.