Your comment makes the timeline seem very different from the way I remember it. Yahoo was dominant much earlier than Google, and was one of a handful of big search engines. Google was a relative newcomer at the time, which had the benefit of being way better at search, which is why it eventually dominated the competition.
The halting problem is NP hard, technically speaking, but it's much harder than that - it's uncomputable. I don't think it's common to refer to it as NP-hard because it's confusing.
Right. To be clear: the halting problem is not in the class NP. Any problem in NP can trivially be reduced to the halting problem and so the latter is NP-hard.
(Disclaimer: I'm nowhere near truly knowledgeable about any of this)
Quantum computing was explicitly proposed as a way to prove the truth of many worlds. As far as we can tell, quantum computing appears to work.
I don't think most people believe QC truly proves many-worlds, but I think it is considered some evidence in its favor, and historically it was I think one of the reasons for the development of QC originally.
I've heard this claim, but I don't think it holds up. The idea is that supposedly the calculation is done in parallel across the different universes which allows you to see an exponential speedup in some calculations. But the whole point of many-worlds is that after a branch event the various branched portions of the wavefunction no longer interact. Even if it were true that quantum computing was really a bunch of parallel classical computations (which it is not), there would be no way for any of the other universes to communicate the result back to the universe you observe it in.
Many worlds doesn't really feature 'hard branches'. In fact the interpretation is pretty specific that quantum interactions becoming de-correlated and stopping to react is the mechanism by which you get the 'many worlds', and this is a soft and messy process not some global hard split.
OTOH, I don't think any of the other interpretations really struggle to explain quantum computing so I agree it's not much of a distinguishing factor.
"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It's about promoting science and art, not "paying authors". Paying authors is of course the mechanism by which art is promoted.
That clause is the basis for both copyright and patents.
Note that not all Arts are "useful" and not all Arts are "Writings".
Most art is not intended to be an open-ended product to be further collaborated upon and extended in order to drive progress.
Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. There is still art if they don't get paid.
Copyright somewhat stifles that activity in art which consists of imitation; imitate too closely and you invite accusations of infringement.
A work of art being copyrighted is not what motivates and encourages activity revolving around copying that work's style. That's what it would mean for the work to promote Art as such: the work gets studied and it style becomes part of the artistic vocabulary. This will happen copyright or not; the only difference is the conditions for compensation.
> Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape.
That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted.
Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying:
"The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..."
— Federalist No. 43 (1788)
Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself.
"I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose."
— Letter to James Madison (August 1789)
They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.
I wonder if that was part of the reason that some programming languages use constructs like "if / fi" "do / od" etc.
(Note: After writing the above, I checked with ChatGPT, it claims that the main motivation was to make it unambiguous which which "opening word" a "closing word" belonged to.)
This tracks with an old convention in languages like Pascal, which uses begin / end keywords for all blocks, where people would add "end (* if *)" as a comment to make it more explicit which block is being closed.
> On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.
This seems to not coincide with the reality of some very skilled programmers saying exactly the opposite.
Just to quote the latest one, here's Linus Torvalds, who I think we can agree is a good programmer:
> AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
> It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.
> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it.
How much of the source code of the compiler you use did you read? How much of the source code of the standard library of your chosen language did you read? What about the dependencies?
How much of the source code of a huge codebase does the average developer read? I don't think any human alive has read the majority of code in huge codebases like Word, Windows, Linux, etc.
For almost every developer, the majority of the code you use every day, whether in software you use or actual code you're shipping, is not code you've ever read. And no one seems to have a problem with it, because we've built lots of processes around this. It's only when the code is written by an AI and not a coworker or random library author that people seem to have a problem.
And I get it! AI wasn't very good at writing code two years ago. Maybe even a year ago. I think it's good now, but maybe you don't - ok, that's fine, maybe it'll only live up to your standards in a year or two or ten. But that doesn't seem to be what people are arguing, it's not "AI isn't good enough", it's "how can we possibly ship code we never read", and my point is that we've all been doing this for our entire careers.
The idea is that -someone- reviewed the lines of code they modified, leading to the sum of code being looked at by many human eyes. Using someone else's code has always been a system of trust in this way.
AI/Vibecoding breaks this social trust, hence the general aversion to using those codebases or bringing LLM code in. It's not really about the general quality of the agents. It's about the code no longer being reviewed and understood by a human. How can one place trust in that? Unit tests don't replace careful review and considerate design.
The code we've shipped throughout our careers certainly wasn't reviewed only by us. It was reviewed by programmers with more expertise in the relevant area. That's a healthy and efficient division of labor, expertise, and responsibility.
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