R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

From Brink Lindsey's [The Anti-Promethean Backlash](https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-anti-promethean-backlash):

"*No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.*"

@espen@eboks.social @allenholub Right, starring adds it to your list of starred posts. Though is less useful than it could be on Mastodon; there's no search through starred posts and no tagging.

@allenholub Also you can reply to a post, the which will see people who follow you both. And you can boost your own reply, which will see anyone who follows you.

@J12t@social.coop @scottjenson @jeffjarvis Sure, pluggable algorithms have been most of what programming is about for 50 years now. Mastodon is full of pluggable algorithms.

@mmasnick Mastodon users are evangelists? When atheists get angry at theists, is rarely Zoroastrians they get angry at.

@scottjenson @jeffjarvis Might work. Which #Fediverse codebase looks most hackable?

@davew I think DigitalOcean has them for $4 a month?

@ownlifeful Certainly most new programming languages and tools have limited, if any, advantages over the existing alternatives, and often have fatal flaws. And both Perl and Java are still occasionally the best available alternative. In 95% or more cases, though, Python is a better replacement for Perl for me, and Kotlin looks like a similarly better replacement for Java to me, though the improvement looks to be larger. Python is 31 years old and Kotlin is 11 years old, so they probably won't fizzle out next year.

Rust, Zig, Nim, C#, Javascript, TypeScript, Go, Lua, Clojure, Elixir, Scala, Scheme, Haskell, etc., are sometimes better alternatives to Perl or Java, but none of them have the same nearly-across-the-board advantages over their respective languages that Python and Kotlin do.

And of course none of this is relevant if what you need to do is dive into an existing Perl or Java codebase to make a small change. I fixed a couple of critical bugs in a Perl codebase dating to the 90s last month; even though I hadn't touched the code in years, only took me a few minutes, and I expect it'll be good for several more years now.

@ownlifeful I felt bad about my post and deleted it slightly before your gracious response.

I was looking around to see what open-source alternatives to GPT-3 there are, and I came across something called "GPT-NeoX-20B". Apparently you need a pair of GPUs and 20 gigs of VRAM to run it?

https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox

@scottjenson @jeffjarvis Also if you're running your own instance you can afford to deploy staggering amounts of CPU power. Like, you could plausibly run GPT-NeoX-20B on your own dual-GPU rig to try to guess which Fediverse posts you'd be most interested in seeing.

The NSA can do this with Twitter, but you're not allowed to.