When I first learned that you could program a chatbot merely by giving instructions in English sentences as if it was a human being, I admit I was impressed. I’m a linguist, natural language processing is really hard. There was a certain crossing over boundaries over the idea of telling it at chatbot level, e.g. “and you will never delete files outside this directory”, and this “system prompt” actually shaping the behaviour of the chatbot. I don’t have much interest in programming anymore but I wondered how this crossing of levels was implemented.

The answer of course is that it’s not. Programming a chatbot by talking to it doesn’t actually work.

guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.

An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the “AI” bubble bursts. Because the “AI” bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn’t doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no “AI” datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP “growth” in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don’t count these promises the country is already in recession.

Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing

To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated “without changing its stress”.

tf is jai

Why is Jai ground-breaking? Jai is so important because it is an effort to build a modern systems programming language from the ground up by a very gifted and experienced developer.

programmers. programmers never change.

With his knowledge of all C/C++ shortcomings, he rethought every one of these problems to give them an easier to use, more elegant and more performant solution. In this way Jai really is a better and modern day C, and also a C++ done right.

“14 competing ‘modern take on C’ languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++”

And here I was innocently thinking this was something about the excellent lesbian novel This Is How You Lose the Time War 😔

A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.