This very much depends on your definition of ‘best’. While your criticisms of the environment are valid, smalltalk is flexible in tangible ways that Java couldn’t match. Java took the OO model of smalltalk and make a bunch compromises that had big negative impacts on the language that are still there today.

Smalltalk was (and still is in some places) successful because of its portability, flexibility, etc. while it hasn’t enjoyed the degree of success as Java, ruby, perl, python, C++, and friends it would be a mistake to call it just a you.

I think it was Kent Beck who described Java as “all the elegance of C++ with all the speed of Smalltalk”?

Best is often a tradeoff among many things, including (but not limited to): usability/ergonomics, productivity, effectiveness, licensing costs and many other things.

When you factor in all these things, no wonder that Java won.

I can’t be alone in this, but this seems like a supremely terrible idea. I reject whole heartedly the idea that any sizeable portion of one’s code base should specifically /not/ be human interpretable as a design choice.

There’s a chance this is a joke, but even if it is I don’t wanna give the AI tech bros more terrible ideas, they have enough. ;)

Some people are only capable of learning the hard way

It’s heartbreaking.

The US concentration camp industry is booming though.

That kind of feedback is also possible within this framework in theory. It depends on at what level the abstract interpreter is operating. If it’s the source level then it’s easy, but propagating that from an IR to source code is, shall we say, an open question.

The sheer amount of linear algebra number crunching vs some database lookups is monumental. I don’t see how an LLM could ever be as efficient as a search engine.

Search engines aren't just some database lookups, is the thing. There's actually quite a bit of linear alegbra involved in both, for page ranking especially

Anyways these sorts of comparisons make no sense to begin with, and quite obviously at the moment the worst actors cough xAI cough who are deploying massively polluting generators into residential neighborhoods are much worse than, say, Google Search

When I took linear algebra at uni in 2012, one of the examples to show practical applications in our text book was the PageRank algorithm!

HyperCard is one of my all time favourite memories of Mac OS.

What an utterly delightful itty bitty scheme. <3

You’re pulling a quote that disproves your point.

There must be something wrong with your reading skills, because it's literally the same point slightly rephrased.

As a native English speaker it likewise took me quite a while to figure out Andy kind of thread they are talking about. ;)

This is blatant misinformation. Firstly this has nothing to do with the patriot act, I’m pretty sure the patriot act expired years ago.

But more importantly it doesn’t seem like the government is trying to ban anything, they’re just extending the anti-fraud / anti-money laundering measures enjoyed by the ‘traditional’ financial institutions to the world of cryptocurrency.

Those measures don’t prevent people from doing ‘suspicious’ things, they just treat certain transaction types with more care because of the increased likelihood that they are evidence of a crime.