I’m literally fed up with half-minded techbros throwing around such overhyped writings. They’re absolutely detached from reality and talk about something that doesn't pass any fact checks.
After reading this writing, I was really curious "are we really got a breakthrough" so I subscribed to a Claude to personally check the state of the matter. As my personal test, I'm using a task that must be relatively simple for an experienced programmer: write an SSH agent that manages keys. The protocol is very simple, and the agents exist for decades now. I already tested that a year ago with Claude, and I was curious how it would do this time.
I installed up the Claude Code CLI tool, created CLAUDE.md with instructions that sounded like "this project is to build a fully functional SSH agent application that listens on a UNIX socket and implements the SSH agent protocol according to RFC specification <link> and all functionality must be covered with tests, create a plan, track progress, etc. The ultimate goal is to have a fully functional application with all SSH agent features." There were more details, of course, but you got it.
Opus 4.6 model worked autonomously for 30 minutes or so. During the process, it had been producing non-compilable code, which it had to fix. Then it stopped at a half-baked project that wasn't working as an SSH agent even closely and had zero tests pretending the job was done.
The truly intelligent technology should finish the project. Why did it stop? How is it intelligent if it makes mistakes that it needs to fix? Why can’t it finish the project while it understands a goal? How much must I push it to finish a project? How someone can claim that "this" is going to replace us?
I can't buy someone's claims that “we are one step before replacing everyone’s jobs" when the facts are saying that nothing has changed for the last year and LLMs are literally not capable of finishing things or concentrating on small important details. They always miss something important. What are we talking about here? Snake oil. This is not intelligence; the technology is a world's blurred snapshot compressed into a couple of gigabytes blob and acts as a dumb parrot.
Why this site has such abnormally slow scrolling in Safari, but is smooth in Chrome? There's nothing special about this site. It's like going back in time when the internet was optimized only for a single browser. It's kind of like "I'm a Chrome dev and I don't care about other browsers"?
It’s no longer funny to see how developers again and again are trying to fix problems of real world by creating digital hideouts because this is the only thing developers do the best - programming. Whenever we see a problem with banks, governments, corporations, we immediately try to fix the problem with “own digital alternative”. But hiding from the real problem in a new network doesn’t fix remaining initial problem for the rest of the world. Complex socio-economic problems shall be fixed with socio-economical instruments. No new network could solve problems of monopolies and profit-greedy corporations.
I was searching something for a web page preservation and also considered Safari web-archives, but decided this is a “no go” for me because of private format which is basically a vendor lock. Thus I ended up with a Chrome extension named SingleFile which does a pretty decent job by saving the whole page (or its part) as a single self sufficient html file viewable by any browser. Also html files are easily indexed by Spotlight or other search engines. The extension has no command line though but personally I don’t need that.
Ironically by killing Google you highly likely will put Mozilla into a surviving. I doubt they will figure out how to deliver any new “big” features without being able paying their talented devs without a such funding.
> It’s also fast and efficient to type on the keyboard. Plus it feels very natural.
If you are solely an English writer then yes. Using md with some languages will quickly turn you into its hater. Certain formatting symbols aren’t easily accessible in some layouts, like backticks for code or ^ for superscript. Some symbols require extra keystrokes like ~ in german. Some layouts will require finger yoga exercises. Basically, any other text markups based on English (including LaTeX) are unfriendly to other languages. Thus an abnormal popularity of md across the apps makes them much less friendly for non-English users. Mobile typing pushes this pain to another level.
> Almost 80% of the population enjoying freedom of movement, minus expenses, still seems reasonable.
That's not how a math working in a communist country: it doesn't mean that the rest 80% were able to do so freely.
If you think that you was able to move freely from one city to another "because I wish to try luck at a new place", then think about: how can you move to another city if you can't sell/buy apartments as they almost all owned by the state? You only can move if you got a job at a new place. Given that by the law you can't be unemployed (you could even face a criminal case if not), so you can't just go to "somewhere".
If you are usual worker that somehow managed out to get a new job in another city, then you highly likely (not always) will get an apartment from a factory/state for free, but… What was a chance for you to get a something good by being from another city? Provided apartments almost always were tiny, usually no amenities, and overall living conditions were terrible. Often people were getting just rooms in communes. To get a normal apartment you had to "get into a queue" and wait for 10-20 years. Thus in every city was a huge amount of people waiting for their apartment. When in the city a lot of people are waiting their apartments for years, why someone will give something decent to a newcomer? Yeah, highly skilled/experienced managers or scientists were a bit more privileged, so they could expect of getting something good without queueing.
Some people were trying to swap apartments with those who wanted to move into their city. Needless to say about chances of getting something in this way.
International tourism. It was available mainly to party management and leaders. From time to time a best "workers of socialistic labor" were able to visit other "friendly" (from socialistic block) countries as a "reward", but only after party's approval and only in groups. Never individually. Also such tourism had a strict rules for travelers (what you can bring back with you or what you can visit there). Thus more than 90% of people never were abroad.
The only 100% freedom to move was an inner tourism. You was able to visit almost 100% of territory inside the country as a tourist. You also can't travel across the country for a year like modern bloggers because (as I said above) you can't be unemployed.
> During the USSR era you were able to travel freely. Even more freeer than today - you didn't even needed any passport to travel to huge distances, to Moscow or from it. You need one now.
NO! This is a HUGE fallacy (if not a lie). A "kolkhoz people" (kolkhoz stands for "collective farm") had no passports at all till 1974 and they had NO right to leave their living territories without identity documents. Sort of a slavery. As of 1970 the "kolkhoz people" were ≈20% (or ≈50 millions) of the population.
> Most of my childhood friends were children of Moscow newcomers.
This explains. Moscow always was a sort of "another world" than the rest of USSR.
Sorry, but plombir isn’t USSR’s achievement at all. The “plombir” in USSR first appeared in 1937 produced by using US equipment after Stalin has visited USA and tasted the ice cream there. No ice cream was there prior to that. Next, the plombir’s name and recipe were “borrowed” (as many things in USSR) from French dessert “glace plombières”.
So he puts polymorphic function calls into enormous loops to simulate a heavy load with a huge amount of data to conclude "we have 20x loss in performance everywhere"? He is either a huge troll or he has a typical fallacy of premature optimization: if we would call this virtual method 1 billion times we will lose hours per day, but if we optimize it will take less than a second! The real situation: a virtual method is called only a few hundred times and is barely visible in profiling tools.
No one is working with a huge amount of data in big loops using virtual methods to take every element out of a huge dataset like he is showing. That's a false pre-position he is trying to debunk. Polymorphic classes/structs are used to represent some business logic of applications or structured data with a few hundred such objects that keep some states and a small amount of other data so they are never involved in intensive computations as he shows. In real projects, such "horrible" polymorphic calls never pop up under profiling and usually occupy a fraction of a percent overall.
I’m not a crypto expert at all but I wouldn’t use Enigma as it exposes file structure which could be a potential vector for an attack afaik. Not sure how Enigma differs from CryFS[1] but at the glimpse the latter does the same across all major platforms but doesn’t expose a folder structure, has a security analysis, and in development for years.
The world is extremely diverse. You are in a group of lucky/happy users but I’m not there as I regularly unzip hundreds and hundreds generated files we are using in our project — they immediately making the Syncthing stuck for hour or two.
For me it’s terrible situation as it blocks syncs when you need to get them fast. If the app which main function is to “sync files” can’t do that efficiently because they are small — it’s unacceptable for me. Somehow borg, git, resilio are working with them fine but for Syncthing this is unliftable task. I’m not alone here as Syncthing’s forum regularly gets this topic up. Also I don’t want to work around this somehow as I don’t need another one workaround in my daily routines.
PS: it’s my personal opinion/case and I cannot blame somehow authors of the free and open source tool that they didn’t design it as I would expect — I just use another sync tool which works fine.
PS: btw, given by what you are saying I assume you haven't seen russia's state tv channels last years which airing in a prime-time shows how they would like to strike EU countries with missiles...