And if not for the rise of AI it's possible that WASM as a machine-level compilation target for all languages might have happened. As much as Gary predicted he didn't see AI coming.
I believe the idea is that you don't care what language is being used if you aren't going to look at it anyway. Given that premise, the AI can write JavaScript instead of something you need to compile separately.
WASM is hard enough to use that I would say the number of people using it just because they don't like JS/TS is fairly small.
At least that's always been my impression. If you're willing to go through the effort to use it, it's probably because you need the performance gains, and AI hasn't changed that.
Not really: ASM.js became WASM. What killed the possibility of WASM being The One Way to run everything is AI... the one wildcard that Gard Bernhardt didn't predict.
Not op, but I only know it as the 32-bit single-threaded binary replacement for JavaScript that can't interact with anything naturally yet people get all excited about when they manage to turn their LLVM slop output into it.
Maybe we've been reading different HN submissions.
I re-watch that presentation two or three times a year because it's a great example of how to give a presentation, how to structure your slide deck to complement your presentation, and a surprisingly educational tour of the permission rings architecture of operating systems.
And at some point we're going to have a period or war and our psychological attachments to old programming paradigms will be released so that we can move on to a more advanced way of doing things (but that won't stop your bank from running YavaScript for at least another 85 years).
Why though? That could be true of any economic condition. Imagine if any time there was a race or competition in which one group is winning you had to just say "for now".
Michael Phelps is winning the race! ... for now
China is winning the EV race ... for now
It doesn't seem to add value to me, aside from being an opportunity to, as is the time-honored tradition of the haters, to sow doubt and create negative energy to anything related to American success.
Of course US has a huge head start, but if AI keeps growing, what matters is how the market's gonna look like years from now.
Most of my clients using AI in the business workflows (in products) use Chinese LLMs, because after benchmarking for a specific use case you nearly always end up finding that you pay half or a tenth.
That's not a new phenomenon. I've adapted Gemini Flash 2.5 years and years ago when people were dissing it as "crap", yet it was the best budget and quality fit for the task I had at hand back then (translating and summarizing tons of documents). It was both faster and around 100 times cheaper than the best GPT 4 model available.
Needless to say, medium-sized Chinese models are far better than those LLMs and a perfect fit for countless applications.
Even with all the Qwens and Kimis and GLMs etc, the latest Gemini Flash models are still an insane value! I recently settled on 3.1 Flash Lite after testing basically everything on offer on OpenRouter, and it was not a close call - cheaper, faster, and better (for translation and visual understanding tasks).
Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.
Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.
Practically everything we do is a local ecological disaster.
Pumped storage hydro electricity is one of our least ecologically devastating options and we are not even remotely close to exhausting locations we can put them.
Most of South America has worked like this for decades. Hydropower is king even in Venezuela. It's altruistic on their part, but it may have reduced their long-term economic growth. Viewed in terms of GDP per capita, South America is a laggard. But if you change the denominator and look at GDP per kWh (energy intensity) they are surprisingly close to the rich world.
There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.
Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.
The launch of Proton Meet officially eliminates the lazy excuse that securing real-time WebRTC media at scale is "too hard" for modern enterprise platforms. Hopefully this forces the hands of Slack, Teams, and Google to stop treating E2EE as a premium afterthought and start offering it as a standard option for the modern web.
Slack, Teams and Google are meaningfully making this choice and that's because customers rarely care and yes, many of customers do prefer the server side transcriptions, recording and AI note taking.
You can add the server to the call even if it is E2EE. You don't need to physically show it as a separate user and the client can hide that information and make it seamless.
Sure, you COULD or you could just encrypt between client and server and be done with it.
Business users are their focus and outside select industries, vast majority of businesses don't care if government is spying or not. Heck, most businesses would turn over information to government without any fight. It's just not something they worry about.
Who still believes that anyway given that WhatsApp, Facetime, and even Google Meet (formerly Duo) (formerly Hangouts) (the one that was not Google Meet 1.0) (not for Woरkspaces) have been supporting E2E multi-party video calls for a long time now?
unrelated but was using र a stylistic choice of some kind or a mistake? I thought my screen had a speck of dust or something on it (also what language do you speak if it was a mistake, linguistics are fun)
Just a typographic approximation of my mental state when thinking about Google's instant messaging product naming and strategy, or rather the lack of both :)
For command line you won't go wrong with abcde ("A Better CD Encoder") or cdparanoia if you don't need all the bells and whistles. For GUI take a look at asunder.
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