Corollary: If a computer makes a business decision, the person who delegated the decision to the computer must be held accountable.
Consequence: All business decisions will eventually be delegated to computers via sufficiently convoluted and untraceable processes such that no manager can ever be held accountable.
I did most of Advent of Code last year code golfing in MUMPS (running on Caché), with the additional challenge on up to and including day 7 doing without literals - that's to say no numbers and no strings. It was good fun - https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day03p... for day three part 1 for example. Or day 7 part 2 where the alphanumeric chars spell a story with only two nonsense words, with almost all the chars being on their own: https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day07p... It is a neat language but even more so a neat overall system and bag of concepts that I feel annoyed we haven't seen more of...
Not having literal strings in the source code, I do need to get a capital “R” somewhere and the name of the system being “IRIS” in system variable $ZV makes that easy and terse. Apart from that one trick I think it’ll be more or less just fine.
That's cool; amazing you indeed coded in MUMPS and not in ObjectScript ;-) Caché is (was) a great technology; ironically they tried to look like a relational database in the nineties, and then eventually came the NoSql boom. How did you get to MUMPS?
First job out of university and stuck around with it for the next dozen years, probably longer than sensible... in the context of maintaining a bag of software that got put together in the mid-80s, a substantial module of which continued to enjoy some moderate success to this day.
Also, the marketing term was post-relational if I recall correctly, the funny thing about that being that it was really pre-relational at first. Also, I forgot, it was IRIS this AOC stuff runs on - the $ZV actually needs that "R" in IRIS so it knows what label to jump to... and what file mode to use... it's wonderfully cursed ;P
One thing I miss about Caché/Ensemble/IRIS is the three different paradigms for manipulating the same bits of data - the whole object layer, SQL (with pre-compiled embedded SQL an option), and the raw global access.
The 888 in the top right corner back in the day: https://youtu.be/rAk94cq23HQ?si=JLJMSqbUjKUsFcdQ just amazing that teletext was understood and ubiquitous to such an extent that just putting three numbers was important and clear enough to share in these very sparse idents.
Asking them to maximise roadway capacity (that’s to say just one more lane bro) in order to solve congestion, at the explicit request to have other modes of transport minimised. “recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving” because that’ll solve congestion. Deeply, deeply unserious.
Thats nice but that doesnt work for vast majority of the United States. Cars are here to stay. People live in the suburbs you aren't going to mass migrate hundreds of millions of people.
It feels also this speech was not really in any way related to AI per se.
It was the Ayn Rand-esque hero, an Übermensch, who of course formed Google out of nothing proclaiming that individualism and egoism are the way to go, that they have a small alcove at best in between the productive assets of the factory owner who wields the materials to his will and creates his perfect city of perfect design that needs none of your contribution. That these graduates aren't be be valued by their creativity or self-worth but by the marginal contribution they may have towards his empire, to be discarded once they don't have anything to give. He's the ultimate factory owner, the owner of the factory that makes everything and brings light to all, and the masses just don't appreciate his brilliance and the brilliance of the other tech bros.
None if it is particular to AI, it's just that AI is the latest tool with which the workers of the world are deprived of the means of production. They know that capitalism is healthiest when the wealth is distributed, and here the Randian hero tells them not that the wealth will be distributed, but only the labour and the AI will do most of the labour, and that the human contribution is a penny for themselves and 99 cents to those that already have a hundred billion, and excited with an incomparable glee Eric expresses that the datacenter that powers the AI will be the panopticon through which the factory owner will judge the productivity of his workers.
It is such a horrifyingly dismal picture he painted right on their faces and if they would just allow that data center and stop booing him they'd understand, surely they must understand that he's the hero, that he and his Rearden Steel will make them the shining city that the unwashed masses for their utter collective incompetence cannot.
It is of course, one step between this view and them being punished for having that view. One small step between being declared a luddite and the powers that be deciding that luddites aren't a thing we're to have.
