It shouldn’t be hard to implement the APIs, the problem would be sourcing the models to sit behind them. You can’t just steal them off Windows or you will have Copyright Problems presumably. I guess you could try and train clones on Windows against the Windows model results?

So Copilot Runtime is… Windows bundling a bunch of models like an OCR model and an image generation model, and then giving your program an API to call them.

shit how do you clean the dispenser tubes

“Yeah this sounds like a Phil Nash sort of problem, I’ll just stick him in here.”

The rust compiler produces a flawless understanding of your code, and then quits out because understanding that code is a Nightly-only feature and you’re using the stable build.

lfg lfg lfg

I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn’t themselves Turing-complete.

Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user’s ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.

Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don’t actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.

We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.

The death of the device and the return of the system.

A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.

A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.

A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.

Alice is a pretty good 3D programming environment aimed at kids, with little programming blocks to snap together.

You might want to try going back into the archives and pulling out something like MS-DOS and QBasic, or Logo. You can find a good tutorial in book form, and you can get a system that was designed to be programmed offline, with things like local help in the editor instead of behind a Google search, so it should be 100% safe to leave the kid alone with the machine.

No, I think this is just a consequence of having heard about all the times we treated people like they weren’t actually people. If we want to avoid keeping doing that, we might sometimes have to treat things that might not be people or aren’t actually people as if they were people, just to be sure we’ve covered everybody.

That suggests they’re less likely to try to frantically monitize in a way that risks killing their brand’s reputation. Maybe they’ll stay nice indefinitely.

Pretty much everything deserves respect.

And while the bots don’t have our feelings, the characters they are made to portray are able to follow feeling physics in the same way that we can. Insult it, now it says it’s mad. Compliment it, it will claim to feel gratitude. And the claimed feelings influence what is said next, as if they were being felt.

Are those “real” feelings? Or just “fake” feelings we’ve yet to explain away? If you have no way of telling the difference, isn’t it better to be kind to the machine than to be mean to the alien from vector space?

Right now.

But everybody is also moving into their castle. Many for free.

They are not allowed to let people do that unless they have an argument that, somehow, this makes money for the owners of Cloudflare. Maybe that’s in the form of good publicity. Maybe they’re hoping to set up some tollbooths at the castle gate, once enough people are inside and the other options have withered for lack of customers.

We shouldn’t judge anyone with prejudice; that’s in the word. We must treat all people as humans; not doing that is a Nazi idea. We should treat signing up with the Nazis as evidence, and act accordingly to prevent Nazis from running around doing and saying Nazi things.

Dude, what the fuck. Fat people walk dogs.

Please try to cultivate one one thousandth of the love for your fellow humans that those people have for that dog.

The problem is they have no idea about the internal structure of the tokens they use, except what’s present in the data set. The model sees “Kenya” as 8473 299 = Ken ya or something, and how is it supposed to know token 8473, often used for the name of Barbie’s boyfriend, starts with K?

Also they love to make up Fun Facts.

Because you want to know if the first half of the code works at all before you write the whole second half.

Finding all the bits that will be used by the second half and changing the declarations to just expressions is a bunch of extra work. As is adding placeholder code to use the declared variables.