hahaha took me a bit to get what you meant.... Yep I've been reading LLM output a lot lately lol
2,263 karma · joined August 20, 2015
The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.
It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing?
The thing that gets me is, we are meant to fundamentally be social creatures, yet we have come to streamline away socialisation any chance we get.
I’m guilty of this too — I much prefer Doordash to having to call up the restaurant like in the old days, for example.
I’ve seen an insane drop in the quality of swipe typing recently as well. To the point where I’ll often go back to regular typing. I’ve made maybe six or more corrections just to this paragraph alone.
I’m low-vision and made great use of Microsoft Soundscape until it got discontinued. I’d been waiting for an alternative for ages and didn’t realise one actually got released and is on the app store!
VoiceVista:
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
I don’t remember seeing references to 32-bit until the 386/486 days on the home computer side and Sega 32X on the console side.
One of the interesting discussions at work (I’m in gamedev) has been about tooling and where AI fits in there.
Previously you’d spend sometimes significant time writing a tool, then polishing it up and giving it to the team (think things like editor extensions that make your workflow easier).
But AI can make this kind of bespoke tool dev so cheap now that it’s possible for every single dev to have their own tool that matches the way they work exactly. At that point, do you really need to spend the long 80% effort of polishing and getting it ready for mass consumption?
Stuff like that is interesting. I still can’t imagine never looking at the AI-generated code, but I’ve seen people take the approach of “I’m not interested in the code, only in what the thing does. If it’s wrong, I ask the agent to fix it”.
- Shills or people with a financial incentive
- Software devs that either never really liked the craft to begin with or who have become jaded over time and are kind of sick of it.
- New people that are actually experiencing real, maybe over-excitement about being able to build stuff for the first time.
Forgetting the first group as that one is obvious.
I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason. Software work has become a grind for them and vibe coding is actually a relief.
Group 3 I think are mostly the non-coders who are genuinely feeling that rush of being able to will their ideas into existence on a computer. I think AI-assisted coding could actually be a great on-ramp here and we should be careful not to shit on them for it.
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The closest thing I can think of is Tube Archivist, which seems made for archiving large YouTube collections, including things like comments on videos.
I’ve had mixed luck with it and it’s a bit too heavy for my fairly limited needs. Youtube-dl hasn’t worked for me for the last month or so on it —- oddly enough I have a MeTube instance on the same physical machine (different VM) which is a lighter web UI for yt-dlp and which is still working fine. That’s Youtube’s fault I assume and not the fault of Tube Archivist.
Almost like writing “Code was created with the help of IntelliSense”.
You reminded me of something I had forgotten though — remember when 100Hz / 120Hz TVs first became a thing? That I noticed!
I think most of my PC CRTs ran at 72Hz / 75Hz IIRC. At least with the monitor I had I remember pushing it to 90Hz but that would add bluriness / lose clarity so I never used it at that rate.
- The screen size. Going from a 17” or maybe 19” CRT at home to a 19” LCD but without the CRT bezel — the screen looked HUGE.
- The clarity and flatness. The lack of smudging on text, the consistent geometry, being able to see the screen edge right up to the bezel without any wasted space (which you often had on a CRT if you wanted an image without excessive pincushion / bulge).
- The relative lack of ghosting when compared to laptop LCD screens I’d used in the past.
- The colour gamut. Looking back I think those monitors I first saw were relatively wide gamut monitors being used with Windows XP and no colour profiles. The colour saturation was impressive (not accurate, but striking).
I never remember CRTs looking better than any desktop LCD from that point on overall, but I dare say I just didn’t have access to any high-end CRTs at the time.
I also never remember CRTs having true black levels close to OLED, which is another thing I hear people say sometimes. I mean you could get deep blacks, but you’d be sacrificing brightness and white/gray detail at the white end. Again though might have just been the CRTs I knew of at the time.
Used Midnight Commander within an SSH client…. on my iPhone lol
Being able to click in Midnight Commander makes this surprisingly usable for quick jobs!
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
It can seem that the majority of software in the world is about generating clicks and optimising engagement, but that’s just the very loud minority.
Everythink devolves from “cool that was a nice single video” to “here’s my schtick…. AGAIN”.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
Once you get used to flicking in and out of zoom instead of leaning into the monitor it’s great.
As an aside, Windows and Linux share this property too nowadays. Using the screen magnifiers is equally pleasant on any of these OSes. I game on Linux these days and the magnifier there even works within games.
Edge use case I know.