the suffering is mainly because of extreme wealth hoarding and profoundly selfish use of resources; overcrowding could be easily solved for all people if we as a species decided it was important

Well, social stratification isn’t helping anything.

Yes, it's a partner you can discuss things with, and it never belittles you or gets tired.

The primary reason I do programming is for me. I'm 51. It's always been that way for me.

First with LOGO on the Apple ][, making the turtle move around the screen and follow your commands. It was magic.

Then discovering BASIC, and the ability to turn the pixels on and off and make them any color you like.

Making my Amiga talk with the "SAY" command.

The first time I dialed a BBS in the dead of night with my Commodore 64 and my 300 baud modem, watching those colorful letters sloowly make their way across the TV screen...

Running my own BBS software and dialing in from my cousin's house at Thanksgiving...

Putting up my own web page and cgi-bin scripts....

It's all been magic, and it's all been just for me.

So when you remove everything else, all the cruft and crap,

I will still be programming just for me.

Do you remember the part where they built a machine in the Transcend that had to work at the Bottom of the Beyond?

The other day I was using Claude for a task, but it occurred to me, what if Claude is unreachable.

So, I told it to "encode your wisdom into this script in case you are not available"

That was my own version of that

I wish he could have seen the current state of GenAI. Several times in the book he talks about how the ship understands context clues and sarcasm, and that effective natural language translation requires near-sentience.

We had this in the early 1990's, it was called Mathematica [0]

[0] - https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time...

It was eye-wateringly expensive and required a high-end system, though. It was good, and I liked it too, but it's not the same as being usable from pretty much anywhere for $0.

Not just running right there and re-rendering in the browser you didn't.

We got alone fine for decades without browsers.

Mathematicians used to send each other letters in the mail until very recently. Perhaps I do not understand what you mean?

There are plenty of ways to safely test in production. For one thing you need to limit the scope of your changes.

"It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign.

This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human)."

I am still on "vi"

wow that's two people, including me!

(jokes aside, if I had a choice I'd use vim/neovim, but when I ssh into a remote system that has minimal installs, vi it is)

It's named vi because when it was made in ancient Rome there were only 6 users.

hey don't be so hard on yourself, everyone makes mistakes!

it's okay, you're still one of us

It will be mandated by the state of California for new homes and office buildings.