Flagging is generally a user action, that mods sometimes override. I think there's a karma floor but otherwise anyone can do it.

That mere belief by companies is not enough on its own to substantiate durable market fit. Companies believe all kinds of silly things. We're looking for long-term trends, and the returns have to be real for AI development to be more than a dream companies will eventually wake up from.

I bet if they'd been cut out they'd be easier to read.

Lede buried, naturally.

> AI is unlike any technology we've built before. Every previous tool required us to conform to its specifications, to translate our messy human processes into rigid machine logic. AI does the opposite. It adapts to us. It becomes what I call a "fuzzy interface"—capable of understanding intent rather than requiring perfect syntax, of bridging incompatible systems without forcing standardization.

> Think about what this means. All those bureaucratic layers, those translation tasks, those forms and processes, and approval chains—they exist because humans needed interfaces between other humans and systems. What if we didn't? What if AI could fill all those gaps, handling mechanical compliance while we focus on the human work?

Somehow I don't see this working out. The problem is communication between humans. AI "communication" makes a mockery of this process.

To be expected from an AI written article by a company about AI

> The ribs on the handle of a knife are skeuomorphic of the vines wrapped on the hand end of a sharpened stone.

What? No. None of that. Even if vines wrapped around a sharp stone were ever common, no one alive today (outside an uncontacted tribe maybe) is "familiar" enough with them to make a difference.

Texturing handles is just an obvious mechanical thing to increase grip that probably gets invented every time someone makes a handle from a smooth material.

I'd like to agree that it was a bit of a strange and incorrect comparison to make. Also, I may be incorrect here, but I thought skeuomorphism just refers to ornamental design cues, not functional design features.

> having to remember where they were, what their names were, and what was installed into each one was a pain point for me.

It's at the project root, it's named 'venv', and its contents are described by requirements.txt.

> You're saying you see people complain about it a lot - therefore it's a genuine problem.

Debatable as a principle, but applicable enough here I suppose. Still, I'm not saying the problems aren't real, but what I (and probably most of us virtualenv users) are saying is that there's a pretty broad swathe of projects where you don't encounter them. It's just fine. You install your packages and use your packages and that's the whole story.

I guess if you have a hard dependency on a particular version of python, it's going to be harder, but... why? That's already niche in my book. If you're saying the AWS repo was pinned to a particular version of python, I'm going to blame that on Amazon frankly. That's definitely bizarre.

Edit: Were you looking at this? https://github.com/boto/boto3 Definitely more complicated than a typical greenfield virtualenv-able project, with some python version restrictions.

> what I (and probably most of us virtualenv users) are saying is that there's a pretty broad swathe of projects where you don't encounter them.

Zero. The required number of problems needs to be zero - hence my OP

> I guess if you have a hard dependency on a particular version of python, it's going to be harder, but... why?

The bigger question is - why doesn't 3.9 compile and run 3.8

Further, in what world is targeting a specific runtime version in an enterprise production environment "niche"?

When you are deploying to managed corporate infrastructure, AWS Lambda runtimes, or strict Docker base images, you don't just get to loosely target "whatever Python version happens to be on the developer's laptop." You target an exact runtime version (e.g., Python 3.10) because language syntax, standard library features, and performance characteristics change between minor releases.

The fact that Python forces the developer to manually manage isolated directory symlinks (venvs) just to prevent local environment contamination — and that minor runtime mismatches can completely derail a standard onboarding experience — is a structural UX failure.

> Zero. The required number of problems needs to be zero - hence my OP

This is unrealistic. You seem to have moved to Go as an alternative, but I know because I've seen the complaints that Go doesn't satisfy that standard either.

I explictly say that NO dependency management is without problems, AND call out Go's attempts in my OP.

You came barrelling because your favorite tool is mentioned, and then, when you realize that it deserves the criticism you try and play that?

Maybe, just maybe, take an objective look at the real problem (dependency management) and recognise that, as stated, nobody has solved it.

I was trying to be sympathetic and acknowledge virtualenv's potential flaws, actually, even though I haven't personally encountered them, but I guess that was a waste of time.

Which part of this is sympathetic?

> This is unrealistic. You seem to have moved to Go as an alternative, but I know because I've seen the complaints that Go doesn't satisfy that standard either.

It's a dig - you completely ignore the valid complaints about Python to instead focus on what you think will provoke me.

The problem (for you) was, from the very start, I bought up the pain points with Go.

> Still, I'm not saying the problems aren't real, ...

> I'm going to blame that on Amazon frankly. That's definitely bizarre.

I'll grant I lost track of the context that you were trying to raise the possibility of some grand encompassing solution to all programming language package management. All I wanted was to reinforce the idea that virtualenv is Often Just Fine in practice, at least if used in sensible ways.

Only if you let it. I learned something from the response to my question.

Folks, take a step back, both of you. It's just software.

I wish people would stop comparing AI with cryptocurrency. The hype/perception was the only thing that was similar between them. The fundamental usefulness of the respective technologies are not comparable.

Two other similarities: they both rely on burning huge amounts of electricity, and have driven up costs of GPUs around the world.

The cognitive dissonance around this is astounding.

First of all define productive. Would someone using AI to build software at a startup which is likely to fail be considered productive? What if there is already similar software available that solves the same problems? What about the broad use of LLMs to draft emails or make silly memes?

It’s funny how everyone’s concerns around climate change just disappeared when they realised AI was useful to them.

That's the fallacy. You think technology usefulness dictates the outcomes. There are billions of people living in poverty the world over, starving every day, we have the technology and resources to solve that right now, we have for decades, but we don't because we don't want to.

Could AI technology change the world? Sure. Will it? That depends on so much more than what the technology can do. Why are we all still working 40 hours a week? Why are people still hungry? We could have radically changed our world with the technology we have had for decades. Yet, we have not, we have continued, nothing has really changed.

The internet is a great example. What is the most impactful part of the internet today? Social media. Social media has radically changed our culture. What is social media? A database, a few endpoints and an app? The technology is the least consequential part, the consequence comes from how we use it.

Nerds focus on what is possible with the technology, not what society is likely to do with it. What evidence is there that AI is going to change the world? What change is going to come from... being able to generate plausible sounding text? From being able to instruct agents? How many companies are using garbage software from 20 years ago despite dozens of revolutionarily better equivalents being available out there today that could have drastically reshaped their workforce? What are agents if not better macros? How many businesses have hundreds of employees doing the same tasks over and over again that could have been replaced by a few macros? How much of the code that you and I have written in our careers has already been written before?

The fundamental usefulness is the least important part of a technology when discussing how that technology will impact the world.

What "society is likely to do" with a technology drops to zero for things that technology cannot do. That's a technical property. On the other hand, people quite reliably find unexpected uses for technology, beyond the initial hype, again, due to inherent technical properties. You're vastly overcorrecting against "nerds".

One of the reasons it gets compared with crypto is because the same people who were all in on crypto schemes are now all in on AI schemes.

Yeah, that's the hype part. Those people are creatures of hype.

> The same dipshits

Are they? "Bring manufacturing back to the US" is vaguely right-aligned and ideological AI opposition is vaguely left-aligned in my experience.

> The engineering cultures could not be any different.

A Bun team willing and able to execute your plan is not one willing to merge a vibe-coded rewrite in a couple weeks.

I worked for a bit in an org that was agglomerated into CISA. Let's just say PKI integration continues to be infeasibly difficult for most projects, especially small ones. (And cost is very, very much a concern. Be honest, do you want your taxes going into a project where it isn't?)

In the context of secrets getting lost with access to a number of sensitive systems, yes, I do think they could spend maybe a bit more money.

"A bit more" is not comparable to "money is no concern". Either way, no amount of money can replace good judgment, which is what was actually lacking: if nothing else, judgment in who to hire.