I came here to say the same thing. It's basically _is_ Emacs. Heavily configurable tool, text-focused UI, primary interaction with a minibuffer ..er.. box to prompt at the bottom of the screen, package distribution mechanism, etc etc.
With Emacs modes like agent-shell.el available and growing, why not invest in learning a tool that is likely to survive and have mindshare beyond the next few months?
And in real life you'd get them to clarify a weird question like this before you answered. I wonder if LLMs have just been trained too much into always having to try and answer right away. Even for programming tasks, more clarifying questions would often be useful before diving in ("planning mode" does seem designed to help with this, but wouldn't be needed for a human partner).
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago.
For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.
Russia has been among the top sources of spam since the early 2000s, it's not like anything changed lately. Mail-order bride scams and similar peaked in like 2005. It doesn't take a lot of people to send spam, I don't think it's correlated with the general population's online presence. I'd actually say it's quite the opposite: in 2026, Russia has never been more disconnected from the Western parts of the Internet than it is now (the Russian Internet watchdog blocks like 30% of foreign resources since a few years ago, while Russian IPs are routinely banned on Western sites after 2022, I can barely open anything without a VPN).
For that reason, and because of limited English proficiency, Russian netizens rarely visit foreign resources these days, except for a few platforms without a good Russian replacement like Instagram and YouTube (both banned btw, only via a VPN), where they usually stay mostly within their Russian-speaking communities. I'm not sure why any of them would be the reason the Internet as a whole has supposedly become low-trust. The OP in question is some SEO company using an LLM to churn out sites with "unique content." We already had this stuff 20 years ago, except the "unique content" was generated by scripts that replaced words with synonyms. Nothing really new here.
Yeah blaming Russians and Chinese for the internet turning to shit is ludicrous.
Chinese have their own internet anyway- it was a shock to me at first just how little the average Chinese citizen really cares about Western culture or society. They have their own problems ofcourse but it has nothing to do with us
No it's the tens of billions of mostly American capital going into AI data centers and large bullshit models.
It's not completely unfounded. A lot of cyber crime adjacent stuff targeting the west is coming from China and Russia. This is a consequence of these countries not having functioning law enforcement cooperation with the west, as well as chilly bordering on hostile diplomatic relations. It's not (always) sanctioned by the governments of these countries, but it's not entirely unwelcome either.
Though all that stuff is a very different thing from what's being discussed in this thread.
Eh, you don't really need to trust any propaganda to see this. Set up an nginx on a public IP and tail its logs. Vulnerability scans will hit you literally non stop so long as it's a western IP. Block China and Russia IPs and it drops by like 90%.
Don't get me wrong the west isn't doing much to enforce Russian or Chinese complaints either. It's really just a messy diplomatic situation all around.
Right. The change has come from how willing the internet's gatekeepers (primarily, Google) have been willing play ball with SEO. Enshittification is just them becoming more amenable to it over time.
70% of the GDP of Laos comes from scamming people in the first world.
"A report by the Global Initiative on Transnational Organised Crime (based on United States Institute of Peace findings) estimated that revenues from “pig-butchering” cyber scams in Laos were around US $10.9 billion, which would be *equivalent to more than two-thirds (≈67–70 %) of formal Lao GDP in a recent year."
> Everything was good in the begining, as long as everyone submits their .proto to a centralized repo. Once the one team starts to host their own, things get broken quickly.
Is this an issue with protobufs per se though? It's a data schema. How are people supposed to develop to a shared schema if a team doesn't - you know - share their schema? That could happen with any other particular choice for how schemas are defined.
It's a problem with PB because it requires everything to be typed (unless you use Any), which requires all middleware to eagerly type check all data passing through. With JSON, validation will be typically done only by the endpoints, which allows for much faster development.
There was a blog a few years ago, where an engineer working on the Google Cloud console was complaining that simply adding a checkbox to one of the pages required modifying ~20 internal protos and 6 months of rollout. That's an obvious downside that I wish I knew how to fix.
It's possible in the story you mention that each of those ~20 internal protos were different messages, and each hop between backends was translating data between nearly identical schemas. In that case, they'd all need to be updated to transport that data. But that's different and the result of those engineers' choice for how to structure their service definitions.
The problem is different. Protobuf's unknown field support is useful if you want to forward a message in its entirety, and it allows you to copy an input message even though it has fields unknown to the middleware. The problem arises because at Google, in order to minimize payloads and storage sizes, they almost always create "intermediate" protobufs that are only used by middleware to talk to other middleware.
Example:
The service that manages the web frontend knows that the new checkbox is auth-related and therefore it has to go into the WebServiceAuthRequest PB message, but it doesn't have the new schema of the WebServiceAuthRequest message with the checkbox field, so it can't create a WebServiceAuthRequest message because it doesn't know which numeric ID to use for the value.
The "common wisdom" at Google was that you have to add a new field starting at the leaves (the storage backends) and work your way up to the middleware, then the web frontends and finally the JS code. And yes, in the worst case it can take two quarters and modifying 20 intermediate services (each with its own ServiceFooRequest protobuf) just to add a new checkbox in the UI.
And in writing this I came up with a way to avoid the problem, but it would require an incompatible change to the PB wire format. Hmmm...
I'd put "the exception that proves the rule" on the list too. It's a brilliant piece of rhetorical jiu jitsu though, somehow turning disproof of a 'rule' into confirmation. And it definitely is thought-terminating.
That's an interesting one, because it's misused more often than not, to mean what you are suggesting.
It's actually meant to say if someone provides an exception, e.g. "No parking on Wednesdays", then that proves the existence of another rule, e.g. "Parking is allowed". Since an exception, without a rule, makes no sense.
But, in my experience, people do use it to mean "Oh, this one thing is wrong, but that proves everything else is right", which does not track.
No it's not. It's because the meaning of the English word "prove" has changed. It used to mean "test", which could of course have a positive or negative outcome. The modern sense of "successfully demonstrating truth" has caused this phrase to have the opposite of its original meaning.
I think it's also appropriate to use it when the rule is so strong that exceptions are famous because they are exceptions. "Birds are capable of flight" is strong enough that penguins and ostriches are famous for being counterexamples.
But that's not following the saying - it's still not proving, it's modifying the rule. It shifts the rule from "birds can fly" to "most birds can fly". Pointing out that penguins can't fly doesn't make the case that birds can fly stronger in any way.
You're right in a strict sense. But in my experience such strictness is only useful in hard sciences and (maybe) legalese. There are exceedingly few things we can claim to apply everywhere, and even fewer we can "prove" to each other.
Give it a try if you don't believe me. Even categories we take for granted, like trees and fish, are not perfectly crisp, and "obvious" facts like "humans need a heart to live" have surprising exceptions.
> Pointing out that penguins can't fly doesn't make the case that birds can fly stronger in any way.
I disagree. It's such a common rule that there's a long Wikipedia page for the exceptions[1], and the first photo is of penguins, labelled "penguins are a well-known example of flightless birds.".
If I knew nothing else about the topic, I would take it as evidence that it's common for birds to fly, otherwise that fact would have been unremarkable. Not hard proof of a universal quantifier, but a useful rule nonetheless.
> There are exceedingly few things we can claim to apply everywhere, and even fewer we can "prove" to each other.
Yes, this is why hard and fast rules don't make sense, and why they should have "generally", "normally", or "mostly" attached to them.
If you have two categories of birds, one with those that fly and one that doesn't, having that second list doesn't make the first stronger. At some point that second list dilutes that first one so much that it doesn't make sense anymore.
If my rule is that "white guys are named Dave" does my building a list of every example of a Dave and non-Dave make my rule stronger? When does the "strong" nature of the rule get watered down sufficiently? Honestly, a list of hundreds of birds tells me that it's a weak rule and that the "birds fly" rule is wrong.
I hated that I heard that phrase for the time as a small child and instantly realized it made no sense. "What do you mean pointing out a counterexample demonstrates the truth of a statement??" It amazes me that adults say it uncritically.
It doesn't. There's seemingly no connection between the handful of examples of self-hosting software actually getting worse, and the earlier point about hardware costs.
With Emacs modes like agent-shell.el available and growing, why not invest in learning a tool that is likely to survive and have mindshare beyond the next few months?
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