Ah yes that was a whole era of programming for me. It was really fast to ship features... and then came the web!

I think the world would be jumping into alignments like this if the US hadn't spent the last 80 years building a "nuclear umbrella" for the "western alliance" with itself in the centre.

I bet many countries would prefer to disassociate with US foreign policy right now if they weren't security dependent.

I expect after this destructive episode in history has played out, if we're all still alive and free in another decade then there will be alternative umbrellas.

Greetings professor Falcon.

I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.

Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.

Without the fraud prevention, it would be 99.9998%. Pushing it to 17% is impressive, even if not sufficient

Who benefits from the fraud, though?

Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.

Google is fleecing other megacorps.

We will all be happy with our local inference, but how will our overloards be able to surveil and control us en-masse without them?

> Async tool calls, having the agent wait indefinitely for a human response, and showing a form or questions to the user via a tool call are a few common capabilities that come up that a product manager might miss at first.

All of this is specified in the ACP spec, so if you build your agents from that - you don't end up skipping features.

Also vital is proper prompt caching, tool design and some connection retry mechanism.

> All of this is specified in the ACP spec

Oh good reminder. I need to do that.

> Also vital is proper prompt caching, tool design and some connection retry mechanism.

prompt caching is weirder than i originally thought, and so variable across providers. Retry is easy, but can you explain more on tool design?

The best advice is to use evals to improve any code that produces output that goes into the LLMs context.

except maybe Japan?

That's quite impressive!

that's also pretty much what happened in Brexit

And not just city versus countryside, but the people most likely to benefit voting against.

The EU needs to get better at marketing it self.

It's in an inherently awkward place. National politicians will tend to represent popular EU policies as "look what we did" and unpopular as "look what THEY did". It's really very difficult for the EU to deal with this.

I originally learned Java in 2000 from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java"

I learn Thinking in C++ from his book for my Master thesis work in 2004

I think I started in late 1990 but I did not like it.

Java has much improved though. Slow improvements, probably in part due to Kotlin, but it has gotten better since then. Even though I still think it is needlessly too verbose.

I felt the same it was too verbose. genuinely curious: what book do you suggest today, to someone who wants to learn Java afresh ?

Me too, one year before you. A classic.