Good old historical materialism. I don't think even staunch libertarians can argue with it - it's a pretty good mental model to understand societal/political change. After all, we have a tendency to name periods after their defining technology (stone, bronze, ..., steam, ..., information), and the inflection points tend to be pretty dramatic.
Was completely unaware of Decker before reading this, and wanted to say that it is unlike anything I had seen before. But then it reminded me of things like the Arduboy or PICO-8 in being a kind of alt-history tech by spawning an ecosystem around an old mac-style UI, instead of a handheld console UI like the former two.
I'm curious what OPs motivation for using it is. Is it a sort of "limitation bebreeds creativity" thing or something else?
Is there a name for this for of projects more broadly?
To be honest, never been a Mac user and HyperCard may have been a bit before my time. The Windows 95-98 er UX brings me more nostalgia.
But I can definitely relate to the yearning for older, clunkier, "quieter" tech, in this age of ubiquitous HTML, CSS, JS. These maybe seemingly naive assumptions like mixing code and presentation, suboptimal UX, and the fact that people still enjoy developing for them for fun rather than for some SaaS end, feels, I don't know, cozy?
HyperCard must be one of the most influential pieces of software ever written regardless of one's age or OS of choice. Ivan Zhao always seems to find an excuse to credit Bill Atkinson's creation for influencing what he wanted to achieve with Notion.
Qud is a gem of a game, same publisher too! I get what you are saying, and it's use of ASCII plus ASCII-like graphics makes the experience a lot friendlier imo.
I'm also doing something similar, as for over-explaining state and momentary decisions, I have yet to find good wording for it too. I had a bit of success by running a reviewer at the end to look over comments and docstrings and judge if it is "evergreen", but feels a bit like a rain-dance.
At a state level it's a pretty good defensive strategy against the American AI industry, as a whole, gaining a monopolistic advantage. This prevents the US from using this as a coercive leverage through things such as tarrifs, export bans etc.
In a world, that's increasingly dependant on the AI "opium" that the US is dealing, it's conceivable that the current administration could try to sabotage something like, say Chinese-European relationships, by threatening to cut access to Anthropic or OpenAI products for Europeans, if China cosies up to the EU.
The disadvantage of trying to use these leverages, is that once the genie's out of the bottle, the other party will divert their focus quickly, so it only works if the US truly has a choke-hold on frontier AI. Otherwise, you just scared the other party into never trusting American frontier AI ever, and you didn't even truly hurt them, because they already have a quick fix from China.
Unfortunately behind a paywall, but there's an article in the previous issue of Foreign Affairs about how the Trump administration has fumbled this coercion strategy repeatedly because they overestimated their advantage in different markets (tariffs on Canada, Iran, etc) and what an actually effective strategy can look like https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-fight-econo...
tl; dr: You need to have a monopoly, the enemy should not bounce back quickly, you shouldn't cripple your own economy doing it.
AI may just be the next economic offensive the Trump administration fumbles, because China planned ahead by incentivising development of close-second alternatives to their frontier models.
While consumer electronics companies have gone for wireless earbuds, the hi-fi, in ear monitor market is very much alive. Not to mention also relatively affordable these days.
That works under the assumption of the "wisdom of the markets", and we assume VC possesses that wisdom, but laid bare it's just as vulnerable to cronyism as any other institution.
I have the same feeling about the whole discussion. I know that colloquially we use terms like "protein" to refer to dietary protein rather than the class of mollecules.
But the way "peptide" is used by all the bro/gal-science influencers that push them online makes it blatantly obvious that they have next to no idea what they're talking about.
Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!
This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.
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