Agree.

I only keep a Chromium based browser around because of Mozilla's asinine decision not to support Web Bluetooth and Web USB that are needed to interact with devices, microcontrollers, etc.

They recently added web serial so here's hoping they might also do BT and USB.

If they’re not in it for the money, they’ll be happy to pay more tax

Taxes are money that they lose control of.

There is a reason Bill Gates didn't just write the IRS a check for $175B and created the Gates foundation instead.

That's kind of the opposite of your original claim then.

They're in it for the money as it allows them to exert control. That's still being in it for the money.

They are in it for manually appreciating their own assets, which has the intrinsic effect of generating wealth.

A better way to frame it that doesn't hinge on the colloquial vs literal meaning of "in it for the money".

Okay, so they are in it to grow their assets, so they can leverage them in their life in this world. And those assets probably get evaluated or assessed at some point, and get assigned some numerical value. And the unit of measurement used for that evaluation may be referencing something like a currency, that other people can understand for its use as a medium of exchange. I see that is very different than money.

Money, property, limited companies, intellectual property laws, patents, contract law, etc. etc. are things on which all successful businesses depend. These are social constructs - societal "technologies" if you like. They work because as a society we agree that they should and enforce them through the rule of law.

The assertion that it should be "impossible" to be a billionaire (or trillionaire, gazillionaire, whatever) is really an assertion that a just and moral society would design all of these things to prevent that outcome.

And I think it's pretty reasonable to say that we ought to set society up such that as someone gets wealthier we take money away from them at faster rates, so that beyond some level of wealth it is very difficult to continue to get richer.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are captured by rather libertarian ideas about government, money, property, etc. that seem to prevent many people (at least in the US, UK, et al.) from behaving in anything but the most selfish, individualistic, and antisocial of ways.

Yeah I agree. I’m “vibe engineering” an entire (non-trivial) programming language, toolchain, and standard library, as well as some smaller side projects. I leave OpenCode implementing entire milestones unattended for long periods regularly.

I feel like I’d need to not have a job or a life if I wanted to exhaust the OpenAI $100 plan using GPT 5.5 xhigh, and I’ve found it insanely capable.

That said, while I don’t read the code much (if at all), I do discuss each milestone up front to make a plan, and use/dogfood the results to direct any follow-ups and refinements, which puts a natural cap on the ratio of LLM contributions to my input for these side projects. I believe these human parts are still necessary not to eventually end up with a mess.

Who is the consumer of the new language?

Me, to scratch an itch and because LLMs make it possible.

I'll probably throw it out on the internet someday if it gets far enough, but there are no attention/adoption related goals attached to the project.

It's currently useful for trivial scripting and iterating as and when I have time.

That seems like a logical contradiction. What use is a programming language for a human to program a computer after you have already decided it's reasonable to have ais do the programming?

What use is knitting as a hobby after you have already decided it’s reasonable to buy clothes from a shop?

…and countless other examples

Not to mention the fact that AIs do the programming in a programming language and it’s quite possible to have ideas about what would be a better language for that.

And that I’m not certain how much of the programming it’s actually reasonable to fully delegate to AIs, and this is both an experiment in seeing how far I can push it (further than expected!) and in building a language I’d rather use than anything that exists today for the stuff the AIs shouldn’t be doing (also going better than expected!)

Indeed, but the weights they release are valuable in a way that precisely counteracts the fact that none of these companies are your friend.

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.

Yes, there are things like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.

Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.

So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.

I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

> I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

Are you thinking about emacs?

WaveTerminal which I use on and off is sort of a graphical terminal like that. Has gui widgets that tile inside the terminal doing alot of the things you might open another pane for IE:file manager resources etc. Probably not as extensive as you mean but its sort of a stepping stone.

https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm

Abusive business models should be illegal. Nobody is entitled to harass their customers because their business would fall apart otherwise.

Get a new business model or close the site. Nobody has the right to do whatever they feel like to make money, no matter the impact on other people.

Running the website isn’t necessary. These people should try not running any websites for a bit.

It was just fine when most websites were academic or hobby content, not businesses.

Hobby and academic sites without popups are still there. By quantity there’s likely more of them than ever.

The problem is that financially motivated websites are incentivized to make sure you land on them instead of hobby and academic sites.

Tracking people around the web (especially without asking) is a big deal though.

Right the intention was to stop unchecked surveillance capitalism, now they use the normalcy of annoyance to wear you down such that you auto accept terms that you probably wouldn’t agree to if you read them. That’s what they want now.

This and other bad behavior will only go away when government says, “no this is predatory and you can’t do it” instead of saying “everything is OK if the user consents to it”.

I do this to a ~/git-sync/<project>.git directory that's synced over Syncthing for all my personal projects it's great.