It's so fascinating to me that the graphite cores start out as long floppy strings of graphite. Looks kind of like cooked black spaghetti. I wasn't expecting that.
200 karma · joined August 25, 2013
It's also not about scale and breadth. Focused social networks around niches can be a breath of fresh air compared to the social behemoths. I joined a couple of more targeted social networks recently and it seems like there's a far more positive community when people have a shared interest. Fable[1] has a social network for reading and that has a generally positive and cosy vibe. Bryan Johnson's Don't Die[2] app is focused on health and longevity and it has a supportive atmosphere. You'd think that something like Reddit with its many niche subreddits would be able to replicate this. But it seems like Reddit has its own tone that permeates everywhere.
It seems like social networks that stay small and focused can maintain a fun and productive environment that degrades over time in larger networks.
But then it makes me ask if the agents will get so good that craftsmanship is a given? Then that concern goes away. When I use Go I don't worry too much about craftsmanship of the language because it was written by a lot of smart people and has proven itself to be good in production for thousands of orgs. Is there a point at which agents prove themselves capable enough that we start trusting in their craftsmanship? There's a long way to go, but I don't think that's impossible.
The inherent value of creating is something I was missing. Solving puzzles might be part of that, but not all. It's the classic Platonic question about how we value actions: for their own sake, for their results, or for both.
I think we agree that coding can be both, and it sounds like you feel the value for its own sake is lackluster in agentic coding -- It's just too easy. And I think that's the core sliding scale: Do you value creation more for its own sake or for its results? Where you land on that spectrum probably influences how people feel about agentic coding.
That being said, I also think that agentic coding can give enough of a challenge to scratch the itch of intrinsic value of creating. To a certain degree I think it's about moving up the abstraction chain to work more on architecture and product design. Those things can be fun and rewarding too. But fundamentally it's a preference.
1. Creating something
2. Solving puzzles
3. Learning new things
If you are primarily motivated by seeing a finished product of some sort, then I think agentic coding is transcendent. You can get an output so much quicker.
If your enjoyment comes from solving hard puzzles, digging into algorithms, how hardware works, weird machine quirks, language internals etc... then you're going to lose nearly all of that fun.
And learning new things is somewhere in the middle. I do think that you can use agentic coding to learn new technologies. I have found llms to be a phenomenal tool for teaching me things, exploring new concepts, and showing me where to go to read more from human authors. But I have to concede that the best way to learn is by doing so you will probably lose out on some depth and stickiness if you're not the one implementing something in a new technology.
Of course most people find joy in some mix of all three. And exactly what they're looking for might change from project to project. I'm curious if you were leaning more towards 2 and 3 in your recent project and that's why you were so unsatisfied with Claude Code.
There are definitely a lot of limitations with Claude Code, but it's fun to work through the issues, figure out Claude's behavior, and create guardrails and workarounds. I do think that a lot of the poor behavior that agents exhibit can be fixed with more guardrails and scaffolding... so I'm looking forward to the future.
I also like Will's "em-dash disclosure" on his about page:
> I like em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and hyphens (-), and I know how to type them. I also enjoy a well-placed ellipsis, but I didn’t know how to type one… until now. I believe that footnotes and sidenotes are superior to endnotes, appreciate the occasional fleuron, and at one point in my life, I knew what a colophon was.
> All of this is to say: the words, punctuation marks, misspellings, and opinions on this site are my own.
See most searched here: https://numberresearch.xyz/info
But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."
However, there are still some rough edges that have been annoying to work with. I think for my next project I will actually go back to electron. There are two issues that caused me pain:
1. I can't use Playwright to run e2e tests on the tauri app itself. That's because the webview doesn't expose the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and the tauri-driver [2] does not work on MacOS.
2. Security Scoped Resources aren't fully implemented which means if a user gets the app through the app store the app won't be able to remember file permissions between runs [3]. It's not too much of an issue since I probably won't release it on the app store, but still annoying.
But I hope Tauri continues to grow and we start seeing apps use it more.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlrATfBNZ98drHSOb-h2e...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
[2] https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/redundancy-pay
See the FAQ[1]:
> Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?
> A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
> 'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony
> 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios
> 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom
> 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB
> 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
I'm not sure what the question "What does it have to do with democracy?" is referring to. Some people find that no longer having access to video games they paid for isn't fair so are petitioning their governments for consumer protection against that.
I'm particularly excited for when the models are capable (and safe) enough to be more autonomous and persistent. A lot of these tools still have a human in the loop. It seems like we've gotten a taste of that with OpenClaw but there's so much more potential.
You mentioned transactions... I work for MongoDB so I just wanted to add that MongoDB does have ACID transactions since version 4.0. Distributed transactions will be included in the upcoming 4.2 release. There's more info on distributed transactions in the 4.2 release here if you're interested: https://docs.mongodb.com/master/core/transactions/
By the way, it's awesome to see you're using Go. I just got into it recently and it's such a nice language to work with.
Kind of in line with the article, I think that people should methodically check what works for them... particularly for something as serious as a database. It would be a shame if somebody decided against using something because they heard about an issue that has been fixed and/or improved in more recent versions.
(Disclaimer: I work for MongoDB)
> MongoDB 3.6.4’s sharded clusters offer comparable safety to non-sharded deployments.
These tests are now integrated into MongoDB's regular test suite. Maybe MongoDB wasn't the right choice for you at the time you were evaluating it, but I just want to point out that MongoDB has matured and improved a great deal.
(Disclaimer: I work for MongoDB)
I work at MongoDB, so I do want to mention that MongoDB has changed a lot over the past few years. MongoDB now has multi-document ACID transactions. Also, schema validation means you can enforce a strict data structure if you want. On top of that there have been improvements in data durability and consistency (the Jepsen tests are now integrated into the MongoDB test suite).
As mentioned in the article MongoDB has matured a great deal. It's far more mature and fully-featured in 2019 than it was in 2012.
I work for MongoDB so if you have any questions about storage, feel free to reach out.
http://chr13.com/2014/04/20/using-facebook-notes-to-ddos-any...