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Get the macOS Finder to Do Just About Anything by Typing Natural Language Commands

I'm genuinely not sure if large language models—often referred to as “AI” in shorthand—are the future of computing. But I also don't think chatbots are how people will use this technology in the years to come. Substage, an indie Mac application by developer Joseph Humfrey, is a simple app that points to a potential alternative—one that's useful right now. This application floats under every Finder window, meaning you see it only when you're browsing files in macOS. You can type English-languag

Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these a

Apple researchers taught an AI model to reason about app interfaces

A new Apple-backed study, in collaboration with Aalto University in Finland, introduces ILuvUI: a vision-language model trained to understand mobile app interfaces from screenshots and from natural language conversations. Here’s what that means, and how they did it. ILuvUI: an AI that outperformed the model it was based on In the paper, ILuvUI: Instruction-tuned LangUage-Vision modeling of UIs from Machine Conversations, the team tackles a long-standing challenge in human-computer interaction,

Most (ly Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much. Disclaimer: Yeah not all of these are dead and not all of these a

Finding value with AI automation

Today's opportunity: Significant automation gains When leaders respond to immediate panic, new business risks and mitigations often emerge. Two recent examples highlight the consequences of rushing to implement and publish positive results from AI adoption. The Wall Street Journal reported in April 2025 on companies struggling to realize returns on AI. Just weeks later, it covered MIT’s retraction of a technical paper about AI where the results that led to its publication could not be substanti

Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language

Ever wanted to text your foreign partner or chat with international friends but felt held back by missing vocabulary? Don't let language barriers stop you from connecting. No sign-ups, no subscriptions. Just open the app and start learning. Perfect for spontaneous moments when you need to express something important. Every correction is saved. Review your mistakes, practice pronunciation, and track your progress as you naturally improve. Hear how every correction should sound with high-qualit

You Are in a Box

This post is part 1 of a multi-part series called “the computer of the next 200 years”. You are trapped in a box. You have been for a long time. —D. R. MacIver Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. —Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment switching costs and growth most tools simultaneously think too small and too big. “i will let you do anything!”, they promise, “as long as you give up your other tools

Timekettle T1 Handheld Translator Review: Global Offline Translation

High-grade, real-time language translation is everywhere. Your cell phone can do it. Your Meta glasses can do it. Your earbuds will soon be able to do it. What was once a niche task that required tedious typing into a web browser or a pricey, stand-alone gadget is now ubiquitous. To my mild surprise, stand-alone translator gadgets have remained a thing, in part because they are often easier to use than an app, thanks to their single-minded design. For the Timekettle T1, an additional selling po

The jank programming language

The jank programming language jank is a general-purpose programming language which embraces the interactive, value-oriented nature of Clojure as well as the desire for native compilation and minimal runtimes. jank is strongly compatible with Clojure and considers itself a dialect of Clojure. Please note that jank is under heavy development; assume all features are planned or incomplete. Where jank differs from Clojure JVM is that its host is C++ on top of an LLVM-based JIT. This allows jank to

Jank Programming Language

The jank programming language jank is a general-purpose programming language which embraces the interactive, value-oriented nature of Clojure as well as the desire for native compilation and minimal runtimes. jank is strongly compatible with Clojure and considers itself a dialect of Clojure. Please note that jank is under heavy development; assume all features are planned or incomplete. Where jank differs from Clojure JVM is that its host is C++ on top of an LLVM-based JIT. This allows jank to

Introduction to Indian English

Content In less than 200 years since its formal introduction as part of a nascent and westernized education system, English has grown to be the medium through which the people of India communicate with the world, and often with one another. In large parts of a country with several major languages, it vies with Hindi—the most commonly used Indian language—as the spoken language of choice. There is a range of ability from a mere smattering of words, to some amount of rudimentary communication, to

Swahili on the Road

In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of Mankind. The topic was ‘Africa: A Revolution in Haste’. Although he found himself in a sympathetic circle of interlocutors, Nyerere was asked to defend the ‘readiness’ of African peoples for independence. Good-humoured but resolute, he replied: ‘If you come into my house and steal my jacket, don’t then a

How ChatGPT actually works (and why it's been so game-changing)

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Back in the day (and by "in the day," I mean late 2022, before AI chatbots exploded on the scene), tools like Google and Wolfram Alpha interacted with users via a single-line text entry field and provided text results. Google returned search results -- a list of web pages and articles that would (hopefully) provide information related to the search queries. Wolfram Alpha generally provided answers that were mathematical and data analysis-related. ChatGPT, by contra

ChatGPT Glossary: 53 AI Terms Everyone Should Know

AI is everywhere. From the massive popularity of ChatGPT to Google cramming AI summaries at the top of its search results, AI is completely taking over the internet. With AI, you can get instant answers to pretty much any question. It can feel like talking to someone who has a Ph.D. in everything. But that aspect of AI chatbots is only one part of the AI landscape. Sure, having ChatGPT help do your homework or having Midjourney create fascinating images of mechs based on country of origin is co

Why English doesn't use accents

Portrait of Jean Miélot (after 1456), Jean le Tavernier Canterbury, AD 1105 The cold of the stone floor in the scriptorium creeps up through Godwin’s boots. He pays it no mind. Before him lies a copy of the Chronicle, just arrived from the old capital of Winchester. In it is written the history of the English people. His people. Today, his job is to make another copy. No difficult task for Godwin, or any monk. But Abbot Robert will want to inspect the work before vespers. Abbot Robert. A No

Chasing Lost Languages

If humans have been talking for 200,000 years—for most of our species’ existence, that is—then an estimated half a million languages might have been spoken in all. To put that number in perspective, around 7,000 languages are spoken today. And because writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of those half a million languages are lost to us, having been spoken in a preliterate world and died before they could be recorded. That’s half a million distinct systems of knowled

Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality

Let’s start with the term “agent” itself. Right now, it’s being slapped on everything from simple scripts to sophisticated AI workflows. There’s no shared definition, which leaves plenty of room for companies to market basic automation as something much more advanced. That kind of “agentwashing” doesn’t just confuse customers; it invites disappointment. We don’t necessarily need a rigid standard, but we do need clearer expectations about what these systems are supposed to do, how autonomously th

BCPL (2022)

BCPL In recent years many people have kindly offer me links to translations of this web page into other languages. Unfortunately I am no longer permitted by the department to include these links so the link below has been disabled. BCPL is a simple typeless language that was designed in 1966 by Martin Richards and implemented for the first time at MIT in the Spring of 1967. A machine independent interpretive implementation of BCPL is available free of charge for private and academic purposes.

Many ransomware strains will abort if they detect a Russian keyboard installed (2021)

In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian. So many readers had questions in response to the tweet that I thought it was worth a blog post exploring this one weird cyber defense trick.

We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

how we accidentally solved robotics by watching 1 million hours of YouTube 29 Jun, 2025 the existential crisis we all share imagine this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide to call it "Behemoth". it can annoy you on whatsapp, try to solve calculus, and argue with you about anything with a sophistication of a philosophy PhD. but ask it to grab a coffee mug from your kitchen counter? ngmi turns out scaling LLMs forever still

LLMs Bring New Nature of Abstraction

Like most loudmouths in this field, I've been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. I think the appearance of LLMs will change software development to a similar degree as the change from assembler to the first high-level programming languages. The further development of languages and frameworks increased our abstraction level and productivity, but didn't have that kind of impact on the nature of programming. LLMs are making that degree

LLMs bring new nature of abstraction – up and sideways

Like most loudmouths in this field, I've been paying a lot of attention to the role that generative AI systems may play in software development. I think the appearance of LLMs will change software development to a similar degree as the change from assembler to the first high-level programming languages. The further development of languages and frameworks increased our abstraction level and productivity, but didn't have that kind of impact on the nature of programming. LLMs are making that degree

A Lisp adventure on the calm waters of the dead C (2021)

A Lisp adventure on the calm waters of the dead C I will use a C-like language throughout, with substantial liberties in its syntax, and I will try to answer "what if" and "how" questions regarding the implementation of some new features that actually cannot be implemented in C due to its limitations. I will examine and highlight those limitations. The scope of this exercise is to better understand Lisp and the power of the abstractions it offers over and above what most languages have, even th

Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor

Hey HN, we're Mariano and Anton from ISSEN ( https://issen.com ), a foreign language voice tutor app that adapts to your interests, goals, and needs. Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/a78e713d46934857a2dc88aed1bb100d?... We started this company after struggling to find great tools to practice speaking Japanese and French. Having a tutor can be awesome, but there are downsides: they can be expensive (since you pay by the hour), difficult to schedule, and have a high upfront cost (finding a tutor

The Website for Trump’s All-American Smartphone No Longer Promises It’s ‘MADE IN THE USA’

Earlier this month, the Trump Organization revealed its latest profit-making scheme: the T1, a golden iPhone knockoff that has aptly been dubbed the “Trump phone.” Alongside the new device, the Trumps launched a wireless mobile network called T1 Mobile, which purports to offer unlimited talk, text, and data. Given that Trump is the “America First” president, it was very on-brand for the company to promise that the devices would be manufactured domestically. Given that manufacturing a functioning

Trump Mobile drops its 'made in the USA' claims

The Trump Organization announced a cellular brand earlier this summer, and its main selling point for Trump Mobile was that its T1 smartphone was "made in the USA." It seemed highly unlikely that those claims about the phone were possible. Now, the website for the device has removed all language indicating that it was manufactured in the US. Instead, there is broader language such as "designed with American values in mind" and "Premium Performance. Proudly American." The Verge also noticed that

How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! [video] (2021)

InfoQ Homepage Presentations How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! Like Reading list View Presentation Vertical Horizontal Full Speed: 1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x Download MP3 Slides 01:09:36 Summary Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer’s job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms b

Rivulet: An esolang inspired by calligraphy && code [video]

Rivulet: an esolang inspired by calligraphy and other experiments in natural language && code Daniel Temkin 22 min 22 min 105 105 Fahrplan [Rivulet](https://github.com/rottytooth/Rivulet) eschews keywords entirely. This is not done to move *away* from natural language (as in APL's use of mathematical symbols) but instead to draw from an aspect of natural language usually ignored in prog language design: calligraphic writing. Rivulet code is written in flowing lines inspired by handwritten n

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst I recently submitted my PhD thesis, and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I'd write about something you (hopefully) wouldn't notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn't. Typst (https://typst.app/) is a modern take on a typesetting language that I think has a real shot at dethroning LaTeX. I would describe the language as a mix of markdown and dynamically t

Klong: A Simple Array Language

Klong A Simple Array Language The Klong Book Documentation | Download Klong is an array language, like K, but without the ambiguity. If you know K or APL, you may be disappointed by Klong. If you don't know any array languages, it might explode your brain. Use at your own risk! Programming in Klong A Klong program is a set of functions that use various pre-defined operators to manipulate lists (vectors) and (multi-dimensional) arrays. Here is a program that checks whether a number x is pri