No. This is not what I meant. I absolutely agree that std::indirect is an improvement. My point is that when dealing with C++ code, now there is yet another way of doing the same thing. I will have to remember both ways, because people will still keep using the old way.
Because I will still encounter people who use the old of writing pimpl. So I now I'm forced to remember the old way + new way. People aren't magically switching to use std::indirect. I bet that even in 10 years, half of projects will still be using the old way.
This is actually useful, but despite it is another extra thing you will have to remember when reading C++ code. I guess with LLMs things aren't so bad.
> Novel mathematical methods precede their application by at least a decade and widespread use by about a century.
This isn't really a good argument. The assumption here is that the "applications" were possible because of the math itself, but it leaves out the possibility if the math didn't exist somehow it will be discovered/invented because the applications demand so.
> There is a lot of mathematics created but we don’t yet know how to use it.
The vast majority of mathematical work is complete useless. Only a small percentage finds use in the real world (even if you consider the maths from centuries back).
For beginners that's irrelevant. WebGPU has more than enough features for beginners to learn about graphics programming. Not just that, once you're used to WebGPU, going to Vulkan will be much easier than the transition from OpenGL.
Honestly, in 2026 I would not really bother with OpenGL. Just start with WebGPU, it's much nicer. You can use it easily on most modern browsers or better can even use native libraries like Dawn or WGPU.
> It might then seem reasonable to think that writing with a stylus on an iPad or similar would be best, since no force is needed and friction is minimized. I don’t think this is true. A small amount of friction is actually desirable.
I find digital handwriting quite pleasant and almost better than writing on paper. Friction is indeed an issue, but you can just buy a dedicated screen protector to address this problem.
> Has anything really important been solved by AI yet
Alphafold essentially solved the protein folding problem and it's arguably one of the biggest (if not the biggest) scientific achievements of the 21st century.
I disagree. Not all skills are useless. For example, I sometime use Qt for GUI projects and I have found their skills [0] very useful to improve the quality and performance of my projects. I their absence, I would each time have to direct the agents to find the docs or specific tools, wasting tokens and thus decreasing the quality of the output.
I use AI mostly to prototype features in my existing projects. If I have an idea, I use the AI to implement it and try out different ways in which it could be implemented. Then I throw away the code and mostly write the code manually, with AI used primarily for review or docs.
While I agree that shared pointer are problematic (I almost never use them in C++), I don't think they're ever really the reason for performance issues in GUI apps. I've been doing GUI programming for more than a decade now and the overwhelming majority GUI performance issues come down to issues like poor use of concurrency (blocking GUI thread), unoptimised algorithms (e.g. for layouts), overdrawing, GPU/CPU sync issues or inefficient input handling.
I have never encountered a performance issue that was to due to reference counting (in fact I'm a big user of the CoW idiom when it comes to UI).
I have to give it to Apple though in this case. Waves or warps are ridiculously uninformative, while simdgroups at least convey some useful information.
While the linked study is interesting, using standardised tests is a terrible way to judge if someone is "intelligent".
Also imo is very difficult to come up with a universal definition of intelligence. For example, I hold Lionel Messi to be a very "intelligent" footballer, but I would judge his intelligence to be of vastly different nature to that of Albert Einstein.
> I feel like an average human wouldn't pass some of these metrics yet they are "generally intelligent". On the other hand they also wouldn't pass a lot of the expert questions that AI is good at.
I think this approach is intentional. The philosophy is simply "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". What you're saying is true, but producing a system that exhibits all human cognitive capabilities is a better threshold for the (absolutely wild) claim of the existence of AGI.