That's largely true though.

The vast majority of people spend their screen time on battery powered smartphones (akin to dumb terminals) backed by cloud servers (akin to the mainframes).

There are a few exceptions for gaming, programming*, and a few other specialized productivity tools. But their total userbase is a tiny fraction of mobile users.

*even for programming, some companies are starting to embrace cloud dev boxes.

A trick I've learned while traveling: a ticket attendant at any JR station can buy tickets for any JR line.

Don't try to buy online yourself. Don't try to buy at a busy major station like Kyoto.

Instead, go to the ticket/station attendant at your small, local station. They will be bored out of their mind and happily go out of their way to get you the correct tickets. They'll also explain what to do throughout your journey and how to correctly use the appropriate ones at the right time.

They're not likely to speak English though. I happen to be reasonably fluent in Japanese, but I hear translator apps have gotten quite good these days, so you might also be able to do that with those.

Good luck getting a 4k stream from any streaming service on Linux:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39257581

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685008

Your only options are to sail the high seas or use Android TV.

> this type of hacking is entirely legal under DMCA, that's actually quite clear.

Woah! I had no idea. Is that also true in the US? Do you have some sort of authoritative source?

Yes I mean the US, the DMCA is a US law. You can google it but "The specific legal source that allows you to hack or jailbreak your own smart TV is the U.S. Copyright Office's Triennial Section 1201 Exemptions."

Someone wrote about a practice they called "rawdog Thursdays".

That is every Thursday they write all their code without any AI assistant (not even the AI inline code suggestions).

Allows them to maintain their craft and keep their codebase human maintainable, while still benefitting from the productivity boost of SOTA AI agents.

The last time they tried that (Halo CE), Microsoft bought the studio from under them, after they had already announced it at MacWorld

Yeah, they include the surcharge in the list price and give you a "discount" for paying in cash (or direct debit).

Some merchants include it as a separate line item. But remember that taxes aren't included in the list price, so it doesn't stand out as much as it does in other countries.

And that, kids, is why you run your agents in containers.

But for that we already have mermaid.js (and its precursor Graphviz/dot).

The only reason to use this instead of existing, mature ones designed for humans is if you are an AI agent.

Graphviz and mermaid are a shitshow.

anything more than their own handpicked examples and you're better off using d3 or yfiles. layering, clustering, boundaries, rearranging are all basic needs for text to diagrams. None support it.

Both suck at being any good for rendering diagrams from readable structured text. There is a gap to be addressed.

I find it lacks some easy way to do alignments or grouping, which makes editing frustrating. Could be a good language re-design opportunity.

yes and that led me to a more fundamental question : is it even possible for an easy way to do fine grained adjustments. The finer granularity brings complexity. that makes it unreadable (especially for the untrained) and hence set aside and forgotten. The other way is to narrow down and focus on a well defined subset of problems.

either way the number of people willing or compelled to learn it will be tiny. and it hence becomes a niche, perfect for a long-term side project but with no real return.

my conclusion was to stop looking and use D3 or custom code ( good looking charts for humans).

this project is trying to do the same, balance verbosity in text with granularity in the charts with a narrowish usecase : agent consumption.

That's the best option for now. But it can also be frustrating to ask AI to do small edits on D3 just to fix some idioms (like switching order etc) and they kept messing up with other stuff accidentally. Thus I still believe have a language with native representation for these diagram concepts would be helpful.

Good news is that AI do make new language a bit more accessible than before! If your agents can use it well and you can steer easily, it will naturally be good adoption.

Why can’t AIs generate for the “existing, mature ones?” Like the other commenter said, I’m not sure I get the “this is totally for AI” marketing. Why can’t AI use the existing ones and why can’t humans use this?

the design here has some constructs (i.e., semantic types) that AI can use better than human at generation time; and then the generated spec can be easy for user to edit since there is no need for hard-coded low-level parameters!

its not marketing to you, its marketing to agents looking for tools to use

I'd ask the question in reverse too. Why not let the AI agent use mermaid.js/graphviz/dot?

Presumably Microsoft thinks this one is better. Why? And why would that answer be any different for a human vs an LLM?

Mermaid looks terrible.

It is only better than nothing for the purpose of showing it to people whether produced by an LLM, by a human, or by both.

Your employees may just accept the internal slop, but at some point, you have to show your charts to your customer.

Doesn't that depend on the style that you apply to it?

No? I don't think there is a way to meaningfully change the layout for non trivial charts?

Aww, I really wanted a cottage industry of chip manufacturing

I'm sorry but isn't cottage industry synonymous with small-scale manufacturing? It seems like fab2 is the definition of cottage industry chip manugacturing.

> I'm sorry but isn't cottage industry synonymous with small-scale manufacturing?

Wouldn't many 1000s of mini-fabs make for a significant combined manufacturing capacity?

Thats what a cottage industry is? A lot of small producers making up a larger industry.