Enjoy this Rat pitch for a "pastor" who shall spread the gospel of Bayes to the unwashed masses:
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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A second trashfire has hit the Ruby language - RubyGems was hit with a hostile takeover from Ruby Central, seemingly to squash an attempt at putting together an official governance policy.
Between that and DHH's fascist screed, its not been a good week for Ruby.
Wonder if, esp considering the DHH situations this is sort of a nazi bar style takeover. Where the people who don't want to make a fuss let in the nice but iffy people who then go mask off, and let the rest in. (The thing the far right accused the left of doing, in a bit of projections). But I know nothing about the politics of anybody involved, could also just be a regular hostile takeover.
(Doesn't feel like one just looking at the rubycentral bsky account for a second though. They do have an amazing spin on it. It was to protect against supply chain attacks (also a link to an email article of them, which just feels weird)).
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This one's been making the rounds, so people have probably already seen it. But just in case...
Meta did a live "demo" of their ~~recording~~ new AI.
There's an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isn't really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the "six months" joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanadu's micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:
The details lie in the devil, for sure...you'd want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.
Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Miller's E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribble's Joule. I'm in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.
The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a 'it costs ten bucks to store a file here' 'sorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bucks please'. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use. And a lot of technical solutions for social problems.
It's nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.
much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. I've had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people I've known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to "they're big mad that they have to even consider other people and can't just do whatever they like")
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hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
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