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The Five Levels: From spicy autocomplete to the dark factory

https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2026/01/the-five-levels-from...

January 23, 2026

72 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117

There are several other similar posts/videos. Steve Yegge also talks about it.


Don't forget the techniques, tactics, and procedures: https://factory.strongdm.ai

FP2 spec:

  00 -> 0.0
  01 -> 1.0
  10 -> Inf
  11 -> NaN
or

  00 -> 0.0
  01 -> 1.0
  10 -> Inf
  11 -> -Inf

  00 -> 0.0
  01 ->-0.0
  10 -> Inf
  11 -> -Inf

  00 ->  0.0
  01 -> +1.0
  10 ->  NaN
  11 -> -1.0
Arithmetic:

  0.0 + x = x
  NaN + x = NaN
  +1.0 + -1.0 = 0.0
  +1.0 + +1.0 = NaN
  -1.0 + -1.0 = NaN
  
  -0.0 = 0.0
  -(+1.0) = -1.0
  -(-1.0) = +1.0
  -NaN = NaN
  
  x - y = x + (-y)
  
  NaN * x = NaN
  +1.0 * x = x
  -1.0 * x = -x
  0.0 * 0.0 = 0.0
  
  /0.0 = NaN
  /+1.0 = +1.0
  /-1.0 = -1.0
  /NaN = NaN
  
  x / y = x * (/y)
More interestingly, how to implement in logic gates. Addition with a 2's complement full adder and NaN detector. Negation with a 2's complement negation circuit. Reciprocal with a 0.0 detector.

Multiplication with a unique logic circuit (use a Karnaugh map):

  (ab * cd) = (a&~b | c&~d | ~a&b&c | a&~c&d)(b & d)

What about comparison operators?

I guess my first car's four speed box was a bit like a FP2 float. Lever forward/back, right/left -> 3.65, 2.15, 1.42, 1.00 ratios.

The number of traditional public companies has been cut in half.

The number of alternative public and semi-public companies went up exponentially (Reg CF/Reg A, crypto ICOs).

After reaching some thresholds a Reg A company can become public and even trade on OTC markets.


Windows (arm 64), but no official Linux (x86) support?

There is only unofficial build:

Claude Desktop for Debian-based Linux distributions

https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian


statistics == lies

BTW: some early filesystems were more database-like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_Management_Services

They were more like BerkeleyDB and lacked Query Planner.

I think Oracle internally using something similar, i.e. a native filesystem optimized for an RDBMS.


“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization Without Atlantis?”


The slogan of the Russian Revolution of 1917 was: "Factories to the workers, land to the peasants."

If the factory is yours, then everything inside is yours ;)

But it's funny how low wages under the broken Soviet economic system turned such things into a semi-official, informal work perks, allowing people to make ends meet.


It was less the low wages and more the general unavailability of things (shortages). Lots of things you couldn't just buy but you had to know somebody who knew somebody.

I wouldn't call it "funny" though. It ws quite sad and I'm glad it's over.


As I mentioned in another commebt, I don't even consider anything related to that to be a viable government system.

That said, the general unavailability of everything was caused by an incompetent government rather the the system itself but the system itself caused the government. My point is that it was a succession of demagogueries hiding personal interests that caused the recurring and unrecoverable tragedies of that state. Being controlled and misguided is not exclusive to any particular government or political system.


System consistently produced an incompetent government that had lots of power.


The general unavailability of everything was caused by the system.

This is not false but totally an oversimplification.

I don't think communism is a good form of government and I don't think the soviet union was marching the right way.

But the biggest blunts came from other much more serious mistakes caused by politicians ignoring science, like the big famine and many others, including the Chernobyl connerie


1. The problem is with using HTTP for APIs, not with GraphQL. HTTP was designed for rich (hypertext) documents, not for APIs. So layering GraphQL or any other APIs over HTTP is a hack.

2. GraphQL is useful for small remote teams b/c of mandatory staticly-typed schema and built-in schema documentation. Otherwise it's lots of back-and-forth between backen, frontend, QA, etc. You forced to use external tools like Postman collections, and still having communication problems.


> After years of debate and confusion, the GraphQL Working Group has reached a historic decision: starting with the October 2027 spec release, all GraphQL responses will return random HTTP status codes between 100 and 599.

> Additionally in order to make GraphQL AI Agents friendly, the GraphQL response body will be switching from JSON to Markdown.


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