It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.

Tl;dw: he has two points:

1. That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.

2. That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.

Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.

Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.

Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It’s worth thinking about how how AI changes them.

Again, that’s not what Cory Doctorow coined it to mean. However, the pressures that enshittify two sided marketplaces can be abstracted to general capitalist pressures that push you to squeeze profitability at every opportunity, even to the detriment of your customers.

Two sided marketplaces often have the dynamics of creating a massive sticky force that prevents competition or movement, which enables their exploitative behaviour, but non marketplace companies also find ways of creating that stickiness through other anti-competitive means, and the use that stickiness to make their products as shitty as possible to squeeze every penny they can put of people.

I think that Doctorow’s points about two sided marketplaces are extremely useful because of their specificity, they can lead directly to specific legislation, but the term of enshittification is rapidly expanding to be used more generally.

If something is shitty they’ll call it shitty. Enshittification is inherently used to refer to a process of getting shittier. And 99% of the time people are referring to capitalism / corporate greed as that process.

and it’s not even the way it’s usually misused, so even more confusing

How do you think it’s most commonly misused?

It does exemplify why it’s such an awful word in general though, so that’s helpful in some small way, I guess.

Why is it awful? Because people have generalized its original specific meaning? Or because of the awfulness it represents?

I watched Fallout and Silo in close succession and they felt like an inversion in terms of which parts were good.

Fallout felt like it’s scene to scene dialog was well written, but it’s overarching plot felt kind of nonsensical. Silo felt like it’s scene to scene writing was a little cheesy, but it’s bigger plot beats were far more nuanced and interesting.

I honestly have more faith that, being based on a series of books, Silo will turn out to be the better show. Fallout could be good, but it felt way more like the writers were laying down the tracks in front of the train as it was already rolling… Though again, at this point in time, Fallout’s still nowhere close to the level of bad writing that was the star wars prequels, let alone the newer three.

I do know that Cory Doctorow used it specifically to refer to the dynamics of two sided marketplaces. I chose to use it the way it’s more commonly used, to refer to the general enshittifying pressures of late stage capitalism, to get my point across.

I’m not completely sold, but at this point in time I’d say it’d work better with the new Fallout Show for one.

This would be a better comic if they chose a franchise that hadn’t been enshittified to the nth degree.

Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.

It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.

Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them, like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they’re not actually IDEs?

Drawing strong conclusions like ‘VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product’, from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.

The alternative to Electron not existing is that you have slower developed, clunkier software, that’s buggier and has fewer features.

There is no magic bullet of being like ‘just code the exact same thing in C’. There are tradeoffs to every development framework.

The upside to the situation is that electron has been a more successful cross platform development framework then literally anything that came before it, from Xamarin to Java. And it’s entirely based on open source software, and open web standards.

Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.

VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.

Decentralized identity management / verification is still the biggest unsolved problem of the fediverse, and inherently pressures things towards centralization.

Do they regrow their body or a new body made from the same parts?

Lol good luck on that promotion, you seem difficult to be around.

I wonder how your company handles performance reviews when you already know everything about all types of programming?

That variable is only created when the function is run, and it holds a constant value for the entirety of its lifetime.

It is literally constant from the perspective of the computer executing it. You’re the one adding an extra layer of expectation here.

Lol.

Pushing something onto an array isn’t changing the array? It’s not changing the reference to the array, but from a style standpoint it doesn’t make sense.

So you’re arguing for writing things as they seem, not the way that computers treat them?

You’re comment indicates the FE dev obsession with always using const stems from a misunderstanding of how computers work.

Maybe rethink this.

You are literally just describing the conceptual differences between functional programming and object oriented programming. It has nothing to do with front end vs backend, except for the fact that React has vastly popularized functional paradigms on the frontend.

If you come from a Java / Spring background, that will seem foreign, if you come from an express background it will feel natural.

Functional programming is extremely pleasant though. Its been described as what object oriented would look like if you actually followed all the SOLID principles. You should keep an open mind.