I’m usually not a big side project guy, but I successfully used AWK to solve a IRL problem last year. It really helped solidify my understanding of the language.
The problem was that the Garmin GPS data for a bike ride I had just completed had split into multiple rides. I used AWK to stitch together the data into one file. I also did some basic linear interpolation to fill in missing data points.
The GPS data is formatted as XML and I was able to parse it fairly robustly using AWK.
How did you parse XML with AWK? I would never think of using AWK for XML data. I'd even stear clear of CSV data unless I could guarantee no in field commas or newlines.
Commas are easy if it's quoted. I just first run an awk script that uses " as the field separator and substitutes or deletes commas in odd numbered fields (as long as that's acceptable for your use case). Then with `-F,` I always check that NF is the same for all lines in the csv before proceeding.
Depending on how the xml is structured, it can be possible to just pattern match on the tags if you have something simple to do.
The luddites lost their status, leisure time, and middle class incomes. Their descendants worked 12 hours a day in factories. They definitely had good reasons to push back.
Revolutions are never smooth and privileged groups threatened by new technologies or ideas always have reasons to push back and will do so fiercely, that's plain human nature. But if we block progress to protect the status quo of said people, are they going to give back value to society in the same magnitude as said progress in the long term? I don't think so really, at least when reviewing history, it always pays reasonably well in the long run*.
This discussion is very old, as it applies to many examples as monarchy/nobles in the French Revolution and other similar revolutions, to horses (and highly specialized humans profiting from them) when cars became cheap, to hunter-gatherers when agriculture developed, and a large etcetera.
The only difference I see in "advanced AIs" as a technology is that the individual immediate wellbeing of almost every human is probably threatened as there will be more jobs destroyed than created.**
PS*: Personal positions in these kinds of arguments depend on other personal opinions and predictions about an specific sociological/technological "advance" being of net positive value for all society. If your opinion is contrary to that, possibly staying as hunters-gatherers or being governed by kings and emperors (or something in between, just some extreme examples to make the point) were better courses of action.
PS2**: I'm talking about human-aligned AIs. Bring a rogue AI agent with misaligned objectives and with direct or indirect physical presence to the discussion and there are no net positives to talk about (for humans).
“I want to believe something is true so therefore it is true”. I actually respect the honesty here. Most people think this way but would never admit it.