I believe the author of gas town is very informed, having been a professional software developer for some time. And the premise of the above comment is that he did, despite this, go down the wrong path.
I know the original email was something like "Alert: you have a new thing: X Thing"
And the new emails are a prompt something like "we know all of this about the user and all of this about the X thing, write an email alerting them to the new thing with these particular goals".
I really don't know much about it so I'm being pretty vague and generic.
"But this is the same process that people go through as they go from coder to lead developer or architect or project manager - letting go of control."
In those circumstances, it's delegating control. And it's difficult to judge whether the authority you delegated is being misused if you lose touch with how to do the work itself. This comparison shouldn't be pushed too far, but it's not entirely unlike a compiler developer needing to retain the ability to understand machine code instructions.
"In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move!” with a wide-ranging plan to curb childhood obesity. The campaign took aim at processed foods, flagged concerns about sugary drinks, and called for children to spend more time playing outside and less time staring at screens. The campaign was roundly skewered by conservatives... But the strategy that Kennedy’s HHS is using to address the problem so far—pressuring food companies to alter their products instead of introducing new regulations—is the same one that Obama relied on, and will likely fall short for the same reason hers did a decade ago."
Similarly, I have had some success using Gemini to extract facts from plain text in the format of Souffle Datalog[1] facts. The resulting dataset can then be conveniently and efficiently queried with Datalog. In this way, LLMs allow for a partial return of the software development strategies of the semantic web[2]. I wrote up some thoughts along those lines earlier this year[3].
Thank you! I went with a Prolog base, because I was interested in what might be possible when combining its execution model with LLM-defined predicates. For anything related to modelling and querying data, a Datalog dialect might indeed be a better choice. I've also used Logica [0] as an intermediate layer in a text2sql system, but as models get better and better, I believe there is less need for these kinds of abstractions.
As an example of a use case, "Gerrit Code Review"[1] is written in Java and uses prolog for the submit rules.[2]
I haven't looked into the implementation. But taking a brief glance now, it looks interesting. They appear to be translating Prolog to Java via a WAM representation[3]. The compiler (prolog-cafe) is written in prolog and bootstrapped into Java via swi-prolog.
I don't know why compilation is necessary, it seems like an interpreter would be fast enough for that use case, but I'd love to take it apart and see how it works.
Embedded DSLs are libraries. They are the epitome of the advice to write a library. It just so happens that the library abstractions could map to a language if you wanted to add parsing and all of the other machinery.
References were Racket with the Racklog library¹. There's also Datalog² and MiniKanren, picat, flix. There were tons of good comments there which you should check out, but PySwip seemed like "the right thing" when I was looking at it: https://github.com/yuce/pyswip/
...documentation is extremely sparse, and assumes you already know prolog, but here's a slightly better example of kindof the utility of it:
# ya don't really care how this works
prolog.consult("diabetes_risk.pl")
# ...but you can query into it!
query = "at_risk_for_diabetes(Person)"
results = list(prolog.query(query))
...the point being there's sometimes some sort of "logic calculation that you wish could be some sort of regex", and I always think of prolog as "regexes for logic".
One time I wished I could use prolog was trying to figure the best match between video file, format, bitrate, browser, playback plugin... or if you've seen https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ ...being able to "just" encode all the constraints, and say something like:
...this is a terribly syntactically incorrect example, but you could imagine that this would be horrific code to maintain in python (and sqrt(horrific) to maintain in prolog), but _that's_ the benefit! You can take a well-defined portion and kindof sqrt(...) the maintenance cost, at the expense of 1.5x'ing the number of programming languages you need to expect people to know.
This post says: "For the first time, wind and solar supplied more power than coal worldwide, while plug-in vehicles accounted for more than a quarter of new car sales."
This does not mean that wind and solar are replacing coal, oil, or wood, all of which were produced and used in greater volumes in 2025, so far as I can tell.
All past price declines in energy commodities have lead to increased consumption of other energy (and raw materials) commodities. The production of whale oil declined, but only due to environmental regulation. For more, see: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/464145/more-and-more-and-mor...
> For 2025, global coal demand is projected to reach 8 845 Mt, setting a new record. The increase of around 40 Mt compared with 2024 is very similar to the forecast we made last year. While there were some unusual regional trends, they had the effect of cancelling each other out. The United States posted the largest absolute gain of about 37 Mt, supported by policy measures and higher gas prices.
So nearly the entire 2025 increase came from the US, where the federal government is ordering retiring coal plants to stay open and aggressively blocking all non fossil fuel development. Without this artificial and very temporary boost, I'm not convinced coal demand would have risen last year.
> The production of whale oil declined, but only due to environmental regulation.
I don't think this is an exception, it's an example of what needs to happen. Fossil fuels are bad for the environment and need to be regulated, just like whale oil.
RE: The total mass of wood burned by humans annually continued climbing through 2023. Not sure how to square that with the figures on your link for "traditional biomass".
That article says it was higher in 2023 compared to past years like 1961 and 1900, not that it as increased continuously during that time. See page 4 of the PDF at the bottom where "traditional biomass" ("wood, charcoal, agricultural residues and/or animal dung" - https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...) has been falling since 2000.
It does also say that forestry production, charcoal, and wood pellets have been rising, so I guess I don't know, this is difficult to measure and different sources disagree.
It means the replacement process is moving well along, though. Coal is persisting mostly because of the installed base, but new capacity is overwhelmingly renewables.
This text is based on a misreading of Karl Marx's position, but does effectively illustrate why attempts to coordinate economic life through labor time as a unit of account will not work.
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