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That might just be from developers getting a Figma of a FAQ section without final copy, then Meta not doing adequate QA and shipping empty FAQ sections.

The most obvious tell is the "No this. No that." copy which you find everywhere.

This feels a bit hyperbolic to me. AI seems to me to be similar in "revolutionary" terms as the web, which made information widely available for free if you had an internet connection.

Like the author says, AI does help you get there via experimentation.

I wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before. I needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping.

Claude was able to get the specs mostly correct, implement it in my Claude created custom 3D modeling program, and then I was able to understand the modification process with Gemini.

All of which would have taken me months to do before AI (or LLMs for the HN intelligentsia) existed. I was able to get the project done in a few days.

Creativity is also never purely original ideas, creativity is the continuation and connection of many different ideas already existing in the world. We don't think about how we might innovate on the printing press because these aren't things we think about or interact with much in our modern society.

AI + creativity is the new moat. Creative prompting is important, too. Everything is creativity, LLMs are tools just like Flash was.

Margaret Mitchell got me to read a thousand pages of Gone With The Wind because she placed a juicy hook in the first chapter (Ashley) which gave me the motivation to read the entire book to see what happens.

Why more novels do not have central hooks I do not know. Hooks are usually what keep me reading, unless the book has some kind of reason for being interesting otherwise.

And how did we create the law against giving children crystal meth in the first place? At a certain point in time, there was no law against it.

I agree, I should be allowed to give children my amazing crystal meth, it's such an untapped market.

All those smart Stanford grads got to make the world a better place by psychologically damaging millions of children.

Mid 2000s I remember the -ify and -ly startups.

I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself.

Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.

I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.

If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.

I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?

Ah right, so it would be far better if the Ocean Cleanup did not exist, technology were to not have been tested for cleaning up ocean plastic, and people would not have known about plastic in the ocean via the Ocean Cleanup's social media?

Right, trust the experts, who appear to be more interested in their own expertise than people at least trying to do something, trying to create better technology, and trying to educate the public on plastic ocean waste.

What's the point of this article again?

Makes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.

We're developers, we can solve our own problems.

I have a userscript to make it so every click on a YouTube video from the home page requires a 30 second wait. Dramatically decreased my mindless YouTube consumption.

You can write one for all websites to trigger a wait period if you want, or only problematic websites like Reddit or YouTube or Hacker News.

The key is to introduce friction, not to disable it entirely. We're addicts, we need to ween off it or else we go straight back to our drugs.

Axios has had this style for years and years, before ChatGPT came out.

But how can I make Gemini stop using "It's not this, it's that" every other sentence?

I like this article because it feels so pre-AI. This is what people were arguing about on HackerNews back in the day! How so very nostalgic it makes me feel.

But in response to the article: no, vanilla JS is a nightmare to keep your code organized, and battle tested frameworks do quite a good job at that. It's otherwise mostly a waste of time, or an intellectual exercise at most, to build an app with vanilla JS

I've found my reading picked dramatically since I started using LLMs for programming. Waiting for a prompt to finish is a great time to read.

If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.

This is copying, not stealing. Stealing means taking someone else's ideas, not their final output.

Copying creates trends, where everything looks and feels the same. Stealing an idea and creating something of your own, AKA remixing, is a much more valuable skill.

I have been experimenting with methods of reading books and creating software for these methods.

For example, I was inspired by the activeness of typelit.io when reading - typing out an entire book helped keep my mind from wandering when reading. But typing the whole book is too tedious. I wrote a few scripts to mirror the words on an epub, which does help with focus but isn't quite good enough.

My current epub reader software I use requires you to press a button to reveal the next word. This has dramatically improved my reading comprehension, prevents inadvertent skimming, and keeps my mind from wandering.

I'm still experimenting but for those who have ADHD or are borderline ADHD, it's quite a revelation - I can finally read without my mind wandering.

If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.

If you use the broswer verison of apps you can also inject custom scripts. I have one for Instagram that completely removes the recommendation feed. Works great.

I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.

Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.

There is a difference between a run of the mill CRUD React app and solving specific, complex UI problems.

I have been a programmer for a long time and CSS is still the hardest language to master. There are countless quirks and APIs most people have never heard of that solve extremely specific problems.

For example, using @starting-style with allow-discrete to use display: none on CSS transitions. Knowing that you would need to use this API, what it does, and how to debug your CSS is a skill that will be hard to replace with an LLM because of the fine grained detail needed for CSS. If you do not know how this API works and you need to use it for whatever reason, and then need to adjust your transitions later, it's probably faster to have real CSS skills than to constantly have to prompt an LLM for you.

Funny how few companies are rebranding themselves as Blockchain companies anymore. Tech trends crack me up. Greed is shameless.

No. Nondeterministic output is not revolutionary. Technology forced down our throats by a few companies and executives who are licking their lips at the idea of laying off people, even if laying those people off means garbage products, is not revolutionary. Slop is not revolutionary.

Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.

I do this too. I generally skim PRs just to make sure the person isn't doing anything too crazy. I trust my team to write good code. Pulling a branch and testing the code is usually a waste of time unless it's a critical bug or feature.

What the author fails to understand is that merely consuming text is not the be-all-end-all of being an educated citizen. I am wary of trusting an author who is screaming from the rooftops about how the bad thing is coming, how the world sucks so much more now.

It's my opinion that writing is by far a more effective way to understand the world and the nuance in it. You could, theoretically, watch a video on YouTube, understand it, think about it, and then write out your thoughts and ideas and would be far more educated than someone merely reading a novel.

There is always a strange disconnect with egg head types where they fail to understand that information input is not the only way to become smart. And valuable information exists everywhere: a book, a blog entry, a podcast, a video, a movie, in the real world, etc. Thinking that text, which by the way is one of the most inefficient methods of information consumption, is the only way to be "smart" is incorrect. Critical thinking is what is desperately needed.

Any website that isn't some landing page or basic blog is going to need human intervention in the code (craftsmanship, essentially). And any website that's a landing page or basic blog already has a million tools for GUI design.

I would be surprised if this takes off as site builders are already an incredibly crowded space.