Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success with their AI products.
They literally forced me and my company out of Antigravity by phasing out AI Ultra subscription without any proper product follow-up. Antigravity IDE cannot even have poweruser subscriptions now from Google Workspace an Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform cannot be attached to Antigravity IDE.
Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform has an incredibly abysmal setup process, and if I want to limit spending per-user I have to create projects per user. The fact that you cannot activate Anthropic models on it if the billing still has free credits is almost a joke.
I was a big proponent of Google and Gemini, but they left us reeling with their abrupt product decisions. Forced us to buy $200 subscriptions directly from Anthropic/OpenAI.
If the kid is bright they'll be bored anyway. This is something you cannot avoid, so teaching them to behave in a boring environment is more productive.
This is a good practice to reduce at least some amount of dependency to outside US. Also this is the definition of innovation; making high tech out of low tech.
VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons, which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has some other interesting implications too.
For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.
In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.
NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.
But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.
I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.
I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.
I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.
Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.
I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.
Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.
I think the idiosyncratic command names are rooted in the fact that git is designed as a peer to peer distributed system as opposed to how it is generally used right now, the server/client workflow. Github even follows and adds to this tradition with the always weird sounding "pull request", since the pull request is normally a mail to a mailgroup with the description of the changes and an actual request to pull that person's changes to the maintainers local repositories.
I'm not sure what is currently being done at developing git, but adapting/creating some porcelain commands accommodating a more centralized workflow even mainly on a semantic level could help with the UX friction.
Also, the obligatory joke "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space"
My motto is "Follow the Dread". If I dread public speaking I should do it, if I dread setting up IPsec VPNs I should do more of it, if I dread working with money and run a business as opposed to working solely as a technical person I should do it, so on and so forth.
"The Dread" is a good north star for discovering what to improve next, since most Dreads are somewhat common/shared among peers, communities and colleagues. Being able to do something nobody likes to do is a good edge against the world.
Exactly my experience. After 15 years, I became an apple fanboy in 15 days. I still do hate losing my muscle memory on some bash shortcuts, but I'd say it was very much worth it.
While Musk lost some credibility over cryptocurrency related topics, it is important that he manages to repackage these already "thought of" stuff in an almost Steve Jobs sort of fashion and insert into the public consciousness. Apart from the hiring, many companies start up just to get acquired by Tesla, or to compete with them. Which creates the much needed innovation by itself.
I think he uses his media power for a good purpose even if he himself or his company cannot reach such goals, he creates the stepping stones in a future that I really like to see happen.