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This post is refreshing - smells of the pre AI discussions on the internet. A new language, a new syntax, heavy debate with people who have spent years writing code. I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.
> I think someone should start a community online where AI isnt allowed.

In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.

[1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now.

[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two...

I suspect real ways to keep AI out of a community, or really to have an online community at all, are going to be structurally incompatible with making anyone rich. The possibility of getting rich poisons the incentives.
> In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]

Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs

We've already got models that can handle it - eg web of trust. We don't want to use them.

Plus "AI" is a spectrum, with "the AI fixed a typo for me" at one end, and "the AI writes my posts for me" at the other.

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> Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.

I believe it’s the opposite: You have to pay competent human moderators. Like here on HN.

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Perhaps requiring webauthn credential for any post/comment with a whitelist of permitted webauthn hardware devices which must have touch/interaction enabled.

I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.

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Altman’s orb is as terrifying as it is because businesses might see it as a solution to a real problem—a problem he helped to create.
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Pay per interaction model? 1 cent per post.
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Age verification with facial ID? ;)
lobste.rs uses a web-of-trust referral system. I guess it still involves a moderator killing off bad nodes, but it seems to scale well
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yeah but I can't post there because I don't know anyone with an account and frankly CBA traipsing around looking for someone who has an account.

does seem like more things will have to go this way though

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Isn’t the solution high-quality identity verification? There are piles of digital identity companies out there. They make money selling to banks for KYC compliance. Heck, there are background check as a service companies designed to add trust to gig economy platforms.

I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version.

The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website.

If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try:

1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look.

2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum.

3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them.

That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.

Blizzard's Real ID system would fix all of this. It was ahead of it's time /s
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The amazing thing about AI is that you don’t even need AI superfans to shoehorn it into a conversation that doesn’t even touch on AI. Detractors will do it for them.
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> a new syntax

How is the syntax new?

It looks like lispy - see the outer parens in the examples given.

Heh, every time you show a average developer lisp for the first time the reaction is the same. Little do they know conditionals, GC, REPLs, macros and more comes from the syntax and language dreamed up in the 50s/60s.
I don't see why Lisp's history would necessarily imply the family is worth learning in 2026. What (other than macros) do lisps offer that other modern languages don't?
You don’t program in Lisp, do you? I used to be confused by the smug Lisp weenies. Now I am one. And the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable. You either “get it” or you don’t. Yes, it has macros, but macros are a bit overrated. I’ve been programming in Lisp for decades and I rarely write macros. I think the thing that is difficult to convey is how powerful Lisp’s core execution environment is while at the same time being just a page of code that a CS undergraduate can understand. Literally everything else is a library. And those libraries can create syntax, generate code on the fly, and do many other powerful things. But most people won’t “get it” until they take the plunge. I didn’t. Until I did. And now, I don’t feel a need to defend Lisp at all. It won’t go away. You can’t kill it. The folks that “get it” will always have it, and those that don’t “get it” will reach for their Blub language again and again. Such is the way of the world.
Getting lisp is analogous to spiritual enlightenment. If someone doesn't have the eyes to see and ears to hear, there's little you can do for them, except pray.
Yeah, I didn't get it either until I implemented my own lisp.

> the difficult thing I’ve found over the years is that Lisp is sort of unexplainable

I've found that getting rid of the parentheses helps.

  f(x)
  (f x)
  ["f", "x"]

  (print (< 10 20))
  ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]
Lisp code is just normal Python lists which get evaluated by an interpreter function. Like this:

  code = ["print", ["<", 10, 20]]

  def eval(code):
      # magic

  eval(code)
  True
Filling out that eval function is a great way to learn lisp.

These articles are very good and accessible:

https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html

https://norvig.com/lispy2.html

> You don’t program in Lisp, do you?

Not anymore. I started with Racket and went through the Little Schemer. I did Clojure for a while. I even used Babashka to write all my scripts, then later rewrote them in other languages.

I gave it a good try. Maybe it wasn't enough to properly "get it"?

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There are reasons why not that many programmers “get it”, and it’s not because the others are uninformed. It’s a matter of valuing different things.
Hmm, that'd be weird, how do you know you "value something different" if you haven't "got it"? You'd need to "get it" first, then you can understand if you value something different or not, otherwise how would you know?
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Absolutely! But it’s also because they don’t really understand one of the things. It’s the Blub Paradox.
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Honestly... it's entirely possible to "get" Lisp and at the same time not really see anything that compelling about it for doing your own work.

I "get" Lisp just fine, have made my own hobby Lisp interpreters, have written programs in Lisp, am an emacs user, etc. etc.

And yet if you handed me a terminal and an editor and asked me to write a program, I would never reach for Lisp to do it. My eyes don't like it. (Also I like static types).

this is incredibly smug, but fun to read :) I briefly "got" Clojure but forgot again. Maybe I'll give this Janet thing a try.
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S-expressions. Defining data in JSON or XML is way worse than S-expressions.
Just saying "macros" is a bit reductive: in CL, you have access to the full language at (read) parse time, compile time and runtime. Said macros also mean that logical OR/AND short-circuiting isn't a compiler black box, you can implement such behaviour easily yourself.

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The syntax is actually a big pro for a lot of people. I love its streamlined look that basically reads like Python once you let your IDE indent properly and learn to see "through" the parentheses (CL, Scheme).

The original language where everything is an expression and it shows. Where Python still needs an ugly ternary and made match a statement, Lisp has had the perfect IF and COND since the dawn of time.

Symbols are still a cool and useful concept that almost no other language I know of got.

The numerical tower - despite some holes - is amazing. Built-in rationals and "correct math" as sane default (i.e. 1/2 not returning 0) never get old.

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And if you let me rave about CL specifically (e.g. DECLARATIONs as "#pragma done well", restarts, CLOS/MOP, runtime READ/COMPILE, etc...), there are a lot of cool features barely copied anywhere that'd improve other languages, but these aren't part of "what make Lisp Lisp".

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It’s been a few months, but I built a tool by Janet lang to communicate with an LLM via HTTP. Of course, I probably had Claude Code write it for me. It turned out better than I expected.

I was really impressed by how small the executable file was. I’d only ever done web development with Node.js up until then.