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Academics' primary external recompense is in credit, attribution, and recognition. AI has effectively ended attribution, so I'm not at all surprised people are less interested in sharing and publishing. Especially when anything you publish will just be used to train the next iteration that still won't credit you.


Your three examples historically were successful in achieving widespread usage, and in the case of SQL, shows no sign of disappearing.


They are widespread, but not among "normies", but professional programmers. That's what I call a failure, since they were initially designed to be used by non-programmers.


Because we call someone using a programming language a programmer. But certainly many professionals who arent full-time programmers write Excel formulas or queries.

The intention of SQL was to be used by domain experts rather than computer scientists. I’d say it have been successful at that.


I'm not sure "normies" is the right grouping. I think that is too broad some people are artists and some people just aren't that curious to try. I think a better group to target is "makers" I think that's anyone with enough ambition to at least try and fix a plug or change a lightbulb.


I am quite sure that plenty of Excel users know BASIC and SQL.


I think this has less to do with design flaws of SQL and more to do with normie users historically not touching databases and query engines directly


I would love having the capability of just writing json-esque SQL that has the most basic type checks, alas we live in purgatory with weird build systems to validate queries.


What is json-esque SQL?


I'd say BASIC might have been common among non-developers, if it hadn't been deliberately killed (or at least severely mis-handled).


SQL is a real programming language with a super high ceiling if you need to write scalable queries.


I think this is a point I should make more clearly. And there are more examples of programmable environments. Excel being one.


Not just Eastern European stores, they do it in France (it's a a French company) and India too. First time I saw it was in India, it was very impressive.

They also have a lot of vertical integration, they manufacture many of the products they sell.


Can confirm they do this in Canada too. Though I'm not sure they have much of a presence outside of Quebec.

It was very cool to try, and very much a "why doesn't everyone do this?" feature. I've never seen it anywhere else.


Is there somewhere they don't do this?


> they manufacture many of the products they sell

If you're familiar with labor disputes around Decathlon, i think a more fair representation is they get other people to manufacture it for them, in what some NGOs call human trafficking / modern slavery.


Having actually worked with industrial machinery, the proper UI for this is 1) unimpeded view of machine and 2) big red physical emergency stop button.

If you're relying on focus stealing or popups or notifications to tell you when your equipment is on fire, you're doing it wrong.


Are you not aware that remote monitoring software exists?

Your option is also not mutually exclusive, you can have your red buttons for local workers. Is redundancy not "proper UI"?

(I'm amazed how people stubbornly refuse to imagine the most trivial of use cases in this discussion.)


In the US at least, many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors who promise fantastical returns that will help dig them out of their funding ratio hole. Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund for their equity component instead of getting wined and dined into an illiquid, opaque private equity investment.

Telling that among OECD countries, the US is an outlier in having a much lower average funding ratio, and this despite the fantastic performance of the US stock market over the last 15 years.


> many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors

Who tend to come up with bumfuck benchmarks other than the common ones. Sometimes for good reasons. Often to justify their own comp.

> Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund

Maybe. They would probably be better off with some total-market funds (instead of biasing towards large caps, especially if they're small). But my point stands: pension funds don't tend to automatically follow any major index, much less the S&P 500 proper.


It’s true that S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider - and they will include SpaceX 5 days after the IPO.


> S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider

Where are you getting this from? Basically zero pension funds automatically track any single index. (There seems to be a misconception equating pension funds with retirement funds in general. Pension funds are, on the whole, remarkably sophisticated investors. Many pensions funds were private shareholders of these companies already.)

> Russell is the preferred provider - and they will include SpaceX 5 days after the IPO

Russell has loads of indices. Their total market index will quickly incorporate SpaceX. Same with S&P. There are also IPO indices that will incorporate it on day one, because that's what they're designed to represent.


>> S&P 500 is not the most popular US equities benchmark for pension funds. Russell is the preferred provider

> Where are you getting this from?

At least it seems correct for a subset that may or may not be representative: “This report intends to provide insights into the overall and asset class benchmarks selected by the 50 largest U.S. public defined benefit plans. [.. ] the Russell 3000 index was most frequently cited to measure U.S. equity performance.”

https://www.nasra.org/Files/Topical%20Reports/Investment/P&I...


You’re right but this chain of reasoning is irrelevant/missing the important point.

You don’t need to track index X to be affected by changes in X. You only need to hold something related to X. Almost all pension funds, heck almost every investment account in the world holds something affected by some index.


I find that Chinese manufacturing offers the complete range of quality for every price point. At reasonable prices, the quality meets or exceeds that of other countries. But if you want something cheap and cheaply made, you can find that as well. And at the extreme, you still have counterfeit parts and products.


Probably true, but Trello just had a major multi-day outage that prevented commenting on or moving cards, so I would be hard pressed to recommended it to anyone at this point.


A few years ago I wrote a workforce scheduling program designed to be used by non-programmers. I worked in a restricted environment so couldn't install anything. The whole thing ran on SWIPL's web offering.

Users simply had to change the basic "facts" (who was available on what days, how many people were needed), and the program solved for the various constraints and offered solutions.

It was maybe about 300 lines of Prolog, no complex dependencies. It replaced a pile of Python scripts that required a lot of state, didn't really work, and could only run on a few specific computers.

For regular users, it was relatively easy to understand and change the facts. SWIPL for web also offers a nice "notebook" interface that lets you mix data, code, and markdown / output blocks so the documentation was inline.


> Vibe-coding makes you feel like you have infinite implementation budget. You don't. You have infinite LINE budget (the AI will generate as much code as you want). But you have the same finite complexity budget as always.

This is a special case of a general fundamental point I'm struggling with.

Let's assume AI has reduced the marginal cost of code to zero. So our supply of code is now infinite.

Meanwhile, other critical factors continue to be finite: time in a day, attention, interest, goodwill, paying customers, money, energy.

So how do you choose what to build?

Like a genie, the tools give us the power to ask for whatever we want. And like a genie, it turns out we often don't really know what we want.


Right - knowing what to actually build always has been and always will be the limiting factor to actual success. I could spend months and hundreds of dollars generating the absolute BEST todo list that's out there but nobody wants that.


I have vibe coded 3 applications I never had time to code but always wanted.

Now it is different in a way where now I don’t have time to use those apps.

That’s a joke.

But I do believe it answers the question of “what to build?”. If you didn’t have time before LLM assisted coding you still don’t have time for it. You most likely know what is used and what not already by heart or by some measurements.


I get irritated by Zoom saying I need to update right when I open the app and want to join a call. Or even worse, sometimes I'll have had the app open (checking video and sound) and it won't notify about a required update until I actually go to join a call.

Never understood why they don't propose the update when the call has ended.


Bitwarden also does this, with a big modal popup - and I only use my password manager in the middle of a flow. I'm either in the middle of signing up for some thing to accomplish a goal (like checking out on a website), or logging in to something to do the same.

I'd much rather it prompt on app close (when I don't care how long the update will take), or just have a button in the UI that I can click at my leisure.


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