No, I understand, it's the claim from the very first sentence that "gravity itself seemed to forbid" (reiterated later in the text) that annoyed me. It's just making up a non-existent obstacle to hype up the result.
It's a bit clumsily written, but I'm pretty sure that's a reference to what Tom mentions in his video, that since g = 9.81m/s^2 you're not getting close to the speed of sound just from falling from a reasonable height, even ignoring air resistance.
Thus a traditional trebuchet design cannot reach that speed.
But since potential energy from gravity is mgh and kinetic energy of a projectile is 1/2 mv^2, calculating height and mass of a weight to power the projectile is absolutely straightforward. The terminal velocity of a falling weight has nothing to do with it (even historical trebuchets used a leveraged system in any case).
The point was the leverage can't be simple, like in a traditional trebuchet. Tom ended up with a rope pulling on a cone, with the arm being accelerated over many revolutions before the projectile is let go.
Tom explained it much more straight forward in his video, the blog author tried to be fancy and made it worse.
Presumably because you've read the first sentence, Telegram Serverless lets you run backend code for your bot and Mini App directly on Telegram's infrastructure, and were interested by the service/proposition enough to keep reading and then noticing it's LLM slop. :)
Wealth concentration beyond a point which would have resulted in widespread revolution 150 years ago, but that is now being tolerated because we've grown accustomed to a level of comfort we don't want to risk losing.
I'm not so familiar with the revolutions of 1848, but it seems like most revolutions happen when a society is suffering from severe economic crisis as well as food shortage. It seems that the 1840s was referred to as "the Hungry Forties" due to severe food shortages. I don't think many people are willing to upend their lives to change a political system that isn't failing to deliver their personal basic needs. I'm also not sure if the revolutions of 1848 were primarily about wealth concentration - weren't they rather about concentration of power?
Many successful and failed revolutions happened without an economic crisis. For example, the American Revolution was led by an oligarchical class upset about taxation. The American Civil War is another example where a portion of states felt economically threatened and initiated conflict. The Glorious Revolution was almost completely ideological in nature, revolving around royalty and religion. It simply requires some powerful fraction of the country to believe they'd be better off under another ruling party, no one needs to starve for it to happen.
People who are experiencing unrest and idleness are easy to recruit -- and if you hang out with people ages of 18-30, you'll see there's no shortage of them.
Because I believe we all deserve to have a relatively equal say in how society should function, and the existence of trillionaires is antithetical to that.
There are many more economic distortions that happen from having massive wealth inequality — too many to list in one comment — but the biggest one is that democracy isn’t possible with a certain level of wealth inequality.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
I mean, this is measurable with the gini coefficient, yes. But if you generally handwave "people with lots of money", you don't have a story to tell, and then you don't convince nearly enough people of any one thing to accomplish it.
You have to pick a problem. Right now, quality of life basically keeps going up, so it's pretty hard to act on anything you might care about here.
Conjecturing standards of living is going up is overly reductive. Essential costs — housing, groceries, education, etc — have been going up for most people and hit everyday people the hardest.
Housing/medical/college etc are outpacing incomes. Loneliness has skyrocketed. People are voting for fascism and starting wars. Americans like to pretend with their big houses and fancy iphones, but things are NOT ok.
Also note on that chart: younger demographics in the US are reporting significantly lower life evaluations compared to older demographics. So if you think things right now are bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
I'm unconvinced that younger people have a harder time than the last couple of generations at the same ages, and would like to see evidence that this is not simply them overwhelming themselves with social media comparisons with others.
Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?
> Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?
Why would we intentionally narrow the discussion like this?
That's something that pretend political parties do to prop up the interests of the uniparty of capital interests while squelching actual progress for the majority.
Why? Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere. My goal is to help people make positive change, and the only way to do that is with focus.
> Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere.
Not true, but let's pretend it is: then pick the parent item that's affecting all of the child items: aforementioned faux democracy. Then everything else falls into place.
But based on your various comments here, you don't seem interested in solving the root issues.
They have social media in Finland too. Go talk it out with your favorite "pro" LLM.
You can't just pick one. The main problem is inequality is rising, which means those without serious capital (which includes the young) are much less likely to see anything from their efforts. It just pops up in different ways. All my money goes to [rent, inflation, student loans, hospital bills, .. etc].
Henry George made a compelling case that land is the inherent driver of inequality issues, and I think the work being done in housing now significantly supports that theory. If you want a bunch of those choose fixed, and they all are rooted in inequality, you may want to get rid of land use restrictions on housing development.
I'm asking genuinely, is there a connection between housing, education, and healthcare becoming so much more expensive and them also being the three parts of the economy that have the most government interference (in the US)? If so is it causal?
Well yeah. Key policy choices in housing/healthcare/education/banking/etc have financialized basic human necessities, forcing the working class to give up a growing percentage of their income to the asset-holding class.
I'm not saying "all government interference is bad". For example plenty of countries prove that if you want to control healthcare costs, you need more government intervention in drug pricing, not less.
We don't. It's not about being warm in winter. That's the least important thing as long as you're not actually freezing to death. We used to look forward to the future, now we dread it, and I don't think that's just me being in an existential crisis right now, other people have said it too.
If you're interested, I spent over a decade as a mass transit organizer, and I think there's a pretty clear path to high-speed rail in the US. But no one likes it!
As better education/tution leads to over achievement relative to natural ability. So you end up with people in positions of power that are beyond them, and low educated voter too
Shouldn't be! I recommend starting there. A lot of the problems with education funding stem from the wealthy neighborhoods getting a lot more money because their local property taxes generate more revenue. Flattening that across an entire state, in the case of the US, would likely set up incentives to force the upper middle class to push up school funding.
Yes, it's presumably a problem, but you also can't know why somebody is downvoting. They might believe a comment is dishonest or distracting or otherwise low-quality or non-curious, or breaks one of the subjective site rules.
I try not to make assumptions when I get downvoted. I think: Maybe I was a little sarcastic or aggressive or I implied something weaselly; or maybe the downvoter just disagreed with me. I don't assume either way, and I don't guess about moral high ground or whatever. All my comment's points tell me is what delta of people clicked the down arrow, not what was in their heads individually.
That's why it's best if everyone is roughly equal. Not exactly equal, mind, I'm sure a 20:1 difference between the richest and the poorest would be much better than the present situation.
What it boils down to is that a lot of the immense freedom Elon Musk has to influence our common future, due to his wealth, comes at the expense of our ability to influence our future.
Yeah, not all games are zero sum. But "power over others" is, and it's a pretty important one, and other people are playing it whether you want to or not.
That's right, causation goes the other way: many people have to be poor in order for one person to be rich. Where did Elon get his money, again? Being at the right place at the right time in PayPal and being so incompetent they paid him to leave; selling overpriced underperforming electric cybertrucks to his fanbase; billions of taxpayer dollars (which directly make us poorer) to SpaceX; and most recently tricking index fund investors to buy his IPO?
v0 / Claude Design does this these days. As in, I may be wrong here, but this aesthetic is a good clue that the site was designed by AI. These models seem to love this brutalist high contrast look.
probably at the same stage where a bunch of peptides activating some receptors and triggering the pumping of electrolytes in an out of lipid walls does, i guess
> For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me.
And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse, and you have no way of forcing it to be the good one every time.
> If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better.
But it can’t. Not definitively and consistently, so that hypothetical is about as meaningful as “if I had a magic wand to end world hunger, I’d use it”.
> Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.
If you don’t think to do regular things, you won’t be able to think to do advanced things. It’s akin to any muscle; you don’t use it, it atrophies.
> And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse, and you have no way of forcing it to be the good one every time.
That's solvable though, whether through changing training data or RL.
> And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse
Theoretically fixable, then.
> But it can’t. Not definitively and consistently
Again, it can't, yet, but with better training data I don't see a fundamental impossibility here. The comparison with any magic wand is, in my opinion, disingenuous.
> If you don’t think to do regular things, you won’t be able to think to do advanced things
Humans already don't think for a myriad of critical jobs. Once expertise is achieved on a particular task, it becomes mostly mechanical.
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Again, I agree with the original comment I was answering to in essence. I do think AI will make us dumber overall, and I sort of wish it was never invented.
But it was. And, being realistic, I will try to extract as much positive value from it as possible instead of discounting it wholly.
Your comment is nonsensical. Have you ever used any LLM?
Ask the LLM to... I don't know, to explain to you the chemistry of aluminium oxides.
Do you really think the average human will even get remotely close to the knowledge an LLM will return to such a simple question?
Ask an LLM to amend a commit. Ask it to initialize a rails project. Have it look at a piece of C code and figure out if there are any off-by-one errors.
Then try the same to a few random people on the street.
If you think the knowledge stored in the LLM weights for any of these questions is that of the average person I don't even know what to say. You must live in some secluded community of savant polymaths.
A general question for the room: where's the tipping point where you need a "proper" backend, in a different language, with all the inconveniences of possible type safety issues and impedance mismatches?
Because I feel like for 90% of small-medium projects it's just good enough with all the backend stuff within the same Next.js process as the front-end. I just do "separation of concerns"-ish with the code organization and funnel all communication with something structured and type safe like tRPC.
Feels separate enough but very pleasant to work anyway.
For most CRUD apps, Next.js + tRPC is the right call.
My tipping point was long-running tasks (OCR, AI processing that takes 30+ seconds) and wanting to scale backend compute separately from frontend serving.
If you don't have those needs, stick with what you have.
Thanks for the answer! I've hit those tipping points myself in exactly the same scenarios (OCR and AI). For me, ends up being hacky or just decoupled (independent job runners). Makes sense to have a proper monolith backend for these.
What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?
I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now, using Doom Emacs. Rationale was that it'd be mostly pre-configured to a sane standard and that, for actual text editing, I'm a long time vim enjoyer, so evil mode is great there.
However I always feel that when I go beyond the safe borders of the preconfigured, leader-key-accessible realm, I'm quite lost. I don't have good intuitions on how to interact with more raw parts of the system.
And I do want to venture further, so I'm feeling I need to get re-started with one of the recommended tutorials/books.
Should I start fresh Emacs install instead?
PS: I've coded in a bunch of lisps in the past and I have already done a bit of customization on top of Doom, so I sort of know my way around, but I'm just not comfortable I guess.
My petty opinion is that distributions which disable the menu bar are bad, distributions which use an edgelord dark theme are bad, and distributions which do both are terrible. Where Doom in particular is concerned I dislike the fact that it starts with Vi keybindings by default (I quite disfavour modal editing, there's a reason I switched away from Vim after 5 years) and that it changes the 's' binding so I can't even rely on my muscle memory.
I've tried both Spacemacs and Doom (and others like Witchmacs and Bedrock) and now I'm just using my own 800 line init.el (which does include comments and whitespace so the actual LOC will be lower) and 110 line custom.el (if you set the custom file to a different file than your init then using customize to change settings won't mess things up if you manually edit your init).
If you really like Doom you can try reading its code base, if it's just too much then maybe it would be better to try setting up your own configuration from scratch.
I think some of these are unfair criticisms, because they are things that can be trivially changed. E.g. disabling evil mode or changing the theme are one-line modifications in the Doom config. After all, any opinionated Emacs distro has to make some choices otherwise there would be little point in anyone using one.
For me the issues with Doom are (a) the complexity as a whole that it introduces, and (b) so many things are already installed/configured that you end up using them without any real "under the hood" understanding which is so essential for customisation.
One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and once you're up and running you won't need it (but you can ctrl+right click on the buffer to get if you ever feel like you do...) - and, meanwhile, it's taking up space on the screen that you could use for more lines of text.
(macOS users are stuck with the menu bar generally, and that means they're stuck with the Emacs menu bar too. Just ignore it.)
While you're there, get rid of the scroll bars too. They never work properly, and this way you get an extra column or two of text per window.
The Edit menu has undo, cut, copy, and paste. Is that stuff that only makes sense if you're into Emacs already? The Help menu has the tutorial and the manual. Same question. The File menu has open file, save, save as, close, and quit. If you open a file which uses a mode which has options you get a menu showing those options.
I don't think the discoverability of all those things is worth giving up in exchange for 1 more line of text, but of course everyone is different and that makes the world such an interesting place.
Hmm, good question. I had another go, for the first time in years, albeit with experienced Emacs eyes now, so I know roughly what's going on. Still felt like every click just gave me More Emacs Shit, which I remember being the main confusing thing.
Almost none of the options bring up a friendly GUI dialog of the sort you might be accustomed to; you're most likely just plonked back in the Emacs frame, possibly in some new window that opened in some random place, that doesn't seem to work quite like anything you've ever seen before, or possibly in the minibuffer, ditto, plus its own set of additional confusing aspects.
So perhaps the suggestion to just dispense with it entirely (along with the toolbar, which I forgot to mention...) was just the thing that got me over this initial notch in the difficulty curve, the bit where I just needed to give up and accept that Emacs was going to be one of those things that was absolutely not like anything else.
(You're not wrong about the discoverability though. I've been using Emacs for 20 years now and I did find a couple of interesting-looking things.)
> What's your take on opinionated distros like Doom Emacs or Spacemacs?
If you use vanilla emacs without customization, you are going to have a very basic text editor experience. That is fine if you understand that, and understand that you'll need to start adding your own customizations (like enabling eglot for LSP, and company-mode for code completions, etc) in order to get to an experience closer to what you'd get out of the box in an IDE like vscode.
Some people might see vanilla emacs, assume emacs is just a plain text editor, and go back to their fancy IDEs. For them, distros like doom/space would be good for avoiding that initial shock/disappointment.
Another great use for doom/space is to see what is possible. Figure out what bits you like, and then figure out how to enable them in your own vanilla-based config. Essentially window-shopping for your own emacs config.
But in the end, I'd recommend you eventually get to the state I am in: I started with a completely vanilla emacs and then slowly added the bits that I wanted. That way I have only what I want, and nothing that I don't want. I don't get surprised by unexpected features. My breakages are fewer because I use so few packages. My load times are great because I am not loading a bunch of stuff I don't use. I understand everything that is enabled in my config.
You also might want to check out emacs-solo. It's a config that is built based entirely on built-in packages rather than 3rd party packages. I still use some 3rd-party packages like company-mode but it is good to see just how far you can go with the built-in stuff (for example, you probably don't need projectile, you can use the built-in project.el, and you probably don't need lsp-mode, you can use the built-in eglot): https://github.com/LionyxML/emacs-solo
Whatever works for you works. If you want to use your editor for a goal, using the guardrails of Doom is fine. I use a vanilla setup as my base but I've been using emacs since before distributions. If you want to tinker or otherwise learn emacs more deeply, feel free to start from a vanilla config.
Don't use them. A personal config is highly personal, and a distro force someone else's preferences onto you. Even things like how exactly your config is organized.
But ultimately it's all about tradeoffs and what works for you. You don't necessarily need to go beyond your distro, but if you want to or need to, then that's a good sign to try it
I went from Emacs to Vim to Vscode and back to Emacs with Doom, but I still use pretty much all of them. Vscode has copilot, Emacs has org mode, vim is great for light editing.
Vim is the magic that lets me use all of those for what I want without having to change muscle memory, and Doom just happens to aligns with my needs perfectly on that regard.
I think anyone trying to master Emacs within the lines of this article will be trying to bend it to their particular needs and likely will be annoyed at any opinionated configuration.
The answer to your question will depend if you want to add community extensions beyond what Doom integrates or if you want to personalize Emacs by yourself. The latter will work just fine with leader keys as long as you map them, all Elisp should be still available in pretty much the same way. The former will probably be much harder.
I personally use Doom because there are a lot of out of the box optimizations, some don't like how hlissner has brought nix ideas of declarative package management into the mix, but I am a nix user so it makes sense. I also am an evil (heretic) user - Doom is configured from the get go as a gateway from vim/neovim into emacs, and it does that job very well.
I would say use both. You can run multiple emacs configurations, and you could have your vanilla config which you slowly build as well as Doom/spacemacs where you can see what is possible.
They have their place. I started out with Doom and it definitely helped to streamline the beginner phase where vanilla would have felt overwhelming. But, as with you, I soon became frustrated when I wanted to move beyond its default configuration.
I've since switched to Vanilla and I've been using ChatGPT to gradually explain and help me integrate the Doom features that I like, so that I end up with a similar base that I actually understand and which I can deviate from where I want to.
I have tried Doom Emacs in a Debian VM on Windows host, because that was the opportunity to install a new Emacs thing for me (to code while playing a game). There Doom Emacs was not stable. Sometimes it just crashed and one time I even lost a whole function I wrote, because somehow it doesn't do the same backup file thing Emacs usually does. The keybindings were nice, but the stability requirement I have overrules it. So I am back to standard Emacs and currently using evil mode.
I'm in the same boat and curious if other more experienced users have any resources to point to. My anedoctal data point is that after starting with doom emacs and having problems to set it up on another machine i fund out all i needed was a very small configuration file to accomplish my orgmode/agenda usage needs. So all it took was an issue and a clear vision of the goal to find a way through. Maybe it is a healthy approach to keep the complexity manageable to your usage
IMO, they're a great way to get started without having to invest too much time up-front. On the other hand, that was 10 years ago and it's a LOT easier to throw together a usable config nowadays; with LSP + built-in tree-sitter modes, you no longer need 3 packages per language plus a bunch of configuration glue.
>>I've been doing my daily journaling and task management on Emacs for while now
Trust me, move to Google Docs.
This is simply a whole larger and easier universe compared to anything Org-mode will ever evolve to be. Its also backed up online, pictures are embedded in the document itself. And several other features come out of the box. You also don't have spend years learning to use it, and can get productive from minute 1.
A machine is not turing complete, but by running it recursively on its own output, turing completeness emerges.
Who knows at what stage of intricacy consciousness emerges?
Arguably, either it does at some point, or it never does and we requiere the supernatural soul.
So, if it does, we can't disregard the possibility that we've reached it already.