But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit).
The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
Mercurial and Git started around the same time. Linus worried BitMover could threaten Mercurial developers because Mercurial and BitKeeper were more similar.
When I tried both at that time hg was just really slow so I just adopted git for all my personal projects because it was fast and a lot better than cvs. I imagine others were the same.
We still have some repos in Subversion and most things in git. It’s still exciting for every repo we get migrated out of svn. That’s a high bar to cross if we’re talking further improvements compared to git though.
I'm old enough to have programmed C in IBM/PC with the book Turbo C/C++ [1] at my desk side as reference, around 1993.
I remember at that time, my "mentor" suggested to memorize all the "keywords" from C (which were few). But given my bad memory I had to constantly look at the book.
I wonder, how long until that certain CrowdStrike kernel level plugin that brought down a third of the world's Windows comptuers gets hijacked by a malicious actor.
A couple of days ago I was thinking about something related to this: How would the "computing" space look like once we get to the ultimate evolution/development of the AI/LLMs or whatever comes after it?
Say in 10 years, once we have things like a Claude Mythos (or better) model running on "real time" at the speed of how Taalas runs ollama now.
I have a feeling that "cyberspace" (however we want to call it) won't matter anymore. "Computing" won't matter anymore. Say, I want to implement a Massive Multiplayer Lemmings like game, it's done at the snap of my fingers. Say I want to find a way to "crack" X software? done. Say I want to find a vulnerability in Y website? easy peasy. Say I want to build a "Powerpoint" clone, done (not that it matters, as making a presentation will be as simple as saying "Mythos5, make a presentation about X,Y,Z with nice and meaningful transitions".
Same with music, video, images, etc. Once everything can be created automagically... what happens? (say, "Make me a film like the original John Wick but with the wit and style of Kingsman, make a young Sean Connery the main actor).
So, ultimately cyberspace will be so chaotic with the current "rails", that it will be completely different to what we know now.
At the risk of being booed here in HN, I also have a hunch that the more we go there, the more stuff like "trustless computing" or "proof of N" (having to SPEND something, some real life, finite effort, to do things online) will gain more force. Somehow, Hashcash was conceived to deal with spam/automation type of attacks, so I assume a version of that will have to be used to "structure" Cyberspace in the future.
My hypothesis is that this will take us back to "the real world" due to "surfeit": Kind of what happens once you add a "trainer" to a game and suddenly you have all the money/resources, and then it becomes boring. Once the "digital" stuff is solved, we will go back to the real world.
> Say I want to find a way to "crack" X software? done. Say I want to find a vulnerability in Y website? easy peasy.
OTOH, such a powerful model might be able to do formal verification practical, too. So your model might say "Can't get RCE on that software because the model that developed it also created a proof that that's impossible".
> Once everything can be created automagically... what happens?
The people who can come up with novel concepts would matter a lot more then than they do now. Like how image models can create pictures in the style of van Gogh, but they wouldn't if van Gogh hadn't existed. So we'd need "van Goghs" to come up with the new things that the models would create a thousand varieties of.
> Somehow, Hashcash was conceived to deal with spam/automation type of attacks, so I assume a version of that will have to be used to "structure" Cyberspace in the future.
"Proof of N" doesn't need to involve spending something. It could be "proof of citizenship" (or some other "proof of offline identity") combined with rate-limiting per identity. The right cryptographic protocols could do it without revealing your identity to the service you're interacting with.
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