Food for thought — Numeric Citizen Blog

Gruber’s reaction to Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose’s ‘The 49MB Web Page’:

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decision turned web pages — which were originally intended as documents — into embedded computer programs.

It’s hard to imagine the web without JavaScript, only as a collection of static, linked documents served by essentially passive file servers.

Just as streaming services helped lower the cost of music, AI is reducing the price of software even more than the subscription model does. The downside is that AI is driving hardware prices up, and it’s uncertain whether we will ever see the return of the always-cheaper hardware trend.

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools — The Register

The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks related to wiretapping and surveillance systems, marking a significant breach of law enforcement infrastructure.

The same FBI that demanded Apple build a backdoor for them in 2016?

‘The Window Chrome of Our Discontent’:

This entire idea that application window chrome should disappear is madness. Some people — at Apple, quite obviously — think it looks better, in the abstract, but I can’t see how it makes actually using these apps more productive. Artists don’t want to use invisible tools.

Well, if window chrome is absent, what’s left for Apple to differentiate itself from others than UI elements inside a window? Buttons!

A UI should step back and let user content come forward. But Apple often treats the UI itself as a key part of its identity and differentiation. That creates a tension: the more the UI disappears, the harder it becomes for Apple to stand apart from Microsoft or Google.

Claude hits #1 on the App Store as users rally behind Anthropic’s government standoff — 9to5Mac

While the long-term consequences of this disagreement are unclear, Anthropic appears to be winning in mindshare, at least for now, in terms of app downloads among iPhone users.

If Anthropic was a publicly traded company ten times their current valuation, would they still stand out against the US government? Asking for a fictional friend at Apple.

I have such a hard time explaining to people around me (family, friends and colleagues) that platforms like Meta are no good and that we should avoid them. 😔

We're Making a Big Mistake

I believe that IT workers who are also passionate about gen AI are making a major misjudgment. We wrongly assume that the advances we observe in our field, such as the autonomous or semi-autonomous development of applications, also translate to sectors like medicine or law. This is a false generalization.

The field of IT heavily relies on strict formalism: the raw material consumed by LLMs. In the legal field, for example, this is not the case: it is much more complex. Laws, regulations, and judgments are generally written and presented in standardized forms, but the content is far from being as digestible formalism as lines of code written in a programming language. In my opinion, we should remember that when we share our enthusiasm for gen AI. We must be lucid while also setting the right expectations for decision-makers and lawmakers.

Open source vs. open platforms — Manton Reece

Open source gives power to developers. An open platform gives power to everyone. The web needs business models that can sustain both.

Well balanced point of view, something we see less and less often these days.

In today’s world, with LLM, Claude Code, etc., is Apple’s Swift Playground still relevant, even for younger aspiring coders? A few years ago, it seems we were hearing much more about it than today.