Thinking About How AI Can Make Better Programmers, ...

I got a bit side-tracked by Bret Victor's new talk. This is a good one, presented at the Screenless Cities conference at La Sorbonne on November 12, 2024. It shows how the programs are actually written. It seems they have a domain-specific language that compiles the underlying code.


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This doesn't sound to me like the sort of thing you could do easily with AI! See Level1 Links With Friends, Jeri Ellsworth and Tilt Five and Bret Victor's Dynamicland. The kinds of work that people who get replaced by AI do are not like this! See Level1 Links Weekly Recap.

What I was going to write about when I started this post was the problem of playing physical CDs on a computer. It seems there's no decent software to do it if the music is continuous, like most  classical tracks and also tracks like Pink Floyd's or compositions by Jean Michel Jarre. The problem is that players like Gnome Rhythmbox glitch in the transition between tracks. In principle this is an easy problem to solve. You just write a program which reads the Table of Contents from the CD drive and streams the audio data to an appropriate sound device. So I was thinking of asking Claude AI this one, ...

At 29:41 on the problem of doing public work in a private space: the problem comes when you are geographically separated from the people you work with, just because what you are trying to do is a minority interest (like trying to solve this problem of how hard it is to do public work in a private space, for example!) The idea I had was that you could share your virtual desktop and your data storage. This also changes the way to think about issues like data privacy, because it isn't simply that private data should be private. Rather there are various domains with respect to which personal data is public. In the context of financial transactions, for example, there is private data that needs to be shared between the individuals involved in the transaction.

The last functioning electro-mechanical central office telephone switching equipment in the United States is being turned off. It's all WhatsApp from now on, ... He has "a 600 Line Western Electric SXS, 200 Line Stromberg Carlson X-Y, 400 Line WE #3 Crossbar switch, 200 Line Automatic Electric SXS, 200 Line Itec Ems 1 and 2, also 80 Line North Electric C-X 100 and toll equipment such as switchboards and carrier equipment." It's all going to the Connections Museum in Denver, CO.

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