allenu

It must be a nod to Freud (i.e. id, ego, and super ego)

Watering plants is also super easy once you do it regularly. You get a sense of how much water a plant needs just by looking at it and testing the soil (via moisture meter or just by touch). It's quite rewarding realizing how each plant differs.

Just a guess, but it looks like an IBM Model M but with a German layout, or at least something from that era.

I was being a little facetious, but there are things that most people would find tedious today that we would put up with in the past. Writing anything long by hand (letters, essays), doing accounting without a spreadsheet, writing a game in only assembly language, using punch cards, typesetting newspapers and books manually...

I think you're spot on. It feels like parts were edited with AI and parts were left alone.

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

The statement this is making is presumably the crux of the problem (Digg cannot survive without trust!) but it's worded so poorly that it's hard to imagine someone sat down and figured these three sentences were the best way to make the point.

I was thinking about that recently. Maybe decades from now people will look at things like the Linux kernel or Doom and be shocked that mere humans were able to program large codebases by hand.

I've noticed that too and it's not too different from political discussions. At the end of the day, I think the split is really about different values people have, their identity, and justice.

A lot of developers' identities is tied to their ability to create quality solutions as well as having control over the means of production (for lack of a better term). An employer mandating that they start using AI more and change their quality standards is naturally going to lead to a sense of injustice about it all.

> I think the real divide is over quality and standards.

I think there are multiple dimensions that people fall on regarding the issue and it's leading to a divide based on where everyone falls on those dimensions.

Quality and standards are probably in there but I think risk-tolerance/aversion could be behind some how you look at quality and standards. If you're high on risk-taking, you might be more likely to forego verifying all LLM-generated code, whereas if you're very risk-averse, you're going to want to go over every line of code to make sure it works just right for fear of anything blowing up.

Desire for control is probably related, too. If you desire more control in how something is achieved, you probably aren't going to like a machine doing a lot of the thinking for you.

I was using a M1 Mac Mini and only 8GB of RAM on it to build iOS apps for maybe a year. It's absolutely doable, though it very noticeably gets a little less snappy when building projects. When building in Xcode and then switching to Firefox to browse for instance, I could tell it took slightly longer to switch tabs and YouTube playback would occasionally stutter if too much was happening.

I also was using an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB at the time. Doing the same thing there was much smoother and snappier. On the whole, it actually made me want to just the laptop instead since it "felt" nicer. (This isn't measuring build times or anything like that, just snappiness of the OS.)

I definitely encountered this second-system effect recently. I have an app that works well because it was written to target a specific use case. User (and I) wanted some additional features, but the original architecture just couldn't handle these new features, so I had to do a rewrite from the ground up.

As I rewrote it, I started pulling in more "nice to haves" or else opening up the design for the potential to support more and more future features. I eventually got to a point where it became unwieldy as it had too many open-ended architectural decisions and a lot of bloat.

I ended up scrapping this v2 before releasing it and worked on a v3 but with a more focused architecture, having some things open-ended but choosing not to pursue them yet as I knew that would just introduce unneeded bloat.

I was quite aware of the second-system effect when doing all this, but I still succumbed to it. Thankfully, the v3 rewrite didn't take as long since I was able to incorporate a lot of the v2 design decisions but scaled some of them back.

I wrote some BBS door games back in the day and was thinking of making a new one today, although not multi-player. It would be in the style of the old games (ANSI-style art and text) but for a single-player and with a daily play limitation as well. You'd only play a few minutes each day and if you died, you'd have to come back the next day. Nothing concrete yet, but I definitely would like to make one just for old time's sake.

You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.

Yup. AI can't automate long-term responsibility and ownership of a product. It can produce output quicker but somebody still has to be responsible to the customer using said product. The hard limit is still the willingness of the human producing the code to back what's been output.

It would be so much easier just to see the three or four bullet points given to the LLM than to read it.

I really don't know why this idea still persists that going through App Store review is this awful thing that takes forever and eats up all of your time. It really doesn't nowadays. I've shipped several apps in the last few years and the longest one of my apps has been in review has been maybe 3 days, and the average is between 1-2 days. That's usually for new apps. For updates, it's usually half a day to 1.5 days to get it reviewed.

It takes barely any time to manage the review process. I have had apps and updates rejected but it was easy enough to make some changes and re-submit.

In the clip, I thought he was playing a prank by reading the script of NotebookLM as the third voice (after the woman). Was that really NotebookLM? I've only heard the first two voices and the first voice didn't sound like him to me, but the last one definitely sounded like him.

I think before Friendster, Myspace, then Facebook, there was a period where there were discussion forums for local communities. I think it was useful for meeting people. I remember friends in the late '90s used them frequently for chatting and some made new friends in real life that way. It was a short period, though, as more established companies came along that had a wider reach.

I agree. It's not that the web was high-trust. It was more that if you landed on a niche web page, you knew whoever put it together probably had at least a little expertise (and care) since it wouldn't be worth writing about something that very few people would find and read anyway. Now that it's super cheap to produce niche content, even if very few people find a page, it's "worth it" to produce said garbage as it gives you some easy SEO for very little time investment.

The motivation for content online has changed over the last 20 years from people wanting to share things they're interested in to one where the primary goal is to collect eyeballs to make a profit in some way.

I agree that framing and scoping tasks is becoming a real joy. The great thing about this strategy is there's a point at which you can scope something small enough that it's hard for the AI to get it wrong and it's easy enough for you as a human to comprehend what it's done and verify that it's correct.

I'm starting to think of projects now as a tree structure where the overall architecture of the system is the main trunk and from there you have the sub-modules, and eventually you get to implementations of functions and classes. The goal of the human in working with the coding agent is to have full editorial control of the main trunk and main sub-modules and delegate as much of the smaller branches as possible.

Sometimes you're still working out the higher-level architecture, too, and you can use the agent to prototype the smaller bits and pieces which will inform the decisions you make about how the higher-level stuff should operate.

I agree the language itself has gotten more complex, but for day-to-day productivity in terms of actually using it to write code, I don't think it makes a difference.

I've found writing Swift code very pleasant, but I've been doing it for ten years, so that helps I suppose. The biggest productivity impact for day-to-day use for me in the last few years has been the new concurrency model.

I don't think it necessarily scales that way. Larger organizations need more communication channels and coordination. If anything, assuming AI does give you 10x ability, there's probably a sweet spot where you have just enough developers that churn out code at a good pace but not too many that it gets too chaotic.

If you compare one developer to 10, for instance, one developer doesn't have to deal with communicating with 9 other people to make sure they're working on things that align with the work everyone else is doing. There is no consensus that has to be reached. No meetings, no messages that have to be relayed, no delays because someone wasn't around to get approval. That one developer just makes a decision and does it.

There are lots of big companies out there and in the past, small startups have been able to create successful products that never would have been created at the big company even though the big company hired way more developers.

I don't really use "second brain" style notes and links for taking action. I use them to record something I think I might find interesting later, like a bookmark. I tag it and move on and later when enough time has passed, I search the notes by particular tag to see what things I recorded. Usually in that scenario, I actually will be in some mode where I'm trying take action. I'll often be looking for inspiration (say interesting UX design) and will have a ton of saved links and ideas to draw on. But I wouldn't say I'm writing these notes for particular action items.

On the other hand, for work that I do day to day, I do take notes and those are a different type. Those are tied to actions I'm taking and I'll sprinkle them with actual to-do lists that I check off in the notes. I'll link ideas that are related and document things, but for my own projects, I don't try to make it too formal or strict. The notes aren't the goal, they're sort of a scratchpad for day to day operations.

Like an RSS feed reader or messenger client? I would definitely prefer that.

>I noticed something: most of the irritation came from a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.

This is one of those funny things about internet forums and social media: it favors people who have the time and inclination to post a lot, and obviously in some cases you get cranks occupying a space and flaming regulars. People who don't have energy or time to fight back eventually give up on debating these people and may end up leaving a space, which leaves just the cranks or the crank-adjacent.

I often think about how even with social media, you're free to follow whoever you want, but over time you'll find some people you follow post a whole lot more than others. They have time and inclination to post a lot and as a result, you end up hearing their opinions more than others, so they kind of have a subtle power. Obviously you can unfollow them if you like, but it makes you think about how online spaces can easily be dominated by people who can and want to be online all the time.

Comparing the two, you can really see how minimalist the modern stuff is. It has less texture, fewer details (buttons, collars), no patterns (at least from the blog post screenshots).

I think you could argue that some of this is just modern sensibilities and aesthetics, but I think a lot of it is probably just the modern movie industry. Like decisions with modern lighting and how flat things looks in modern movies (to make production more efficient and making adding CGI easier), they probably go with minimalist costumes since they're easier to capture on film, cheaper, and easier to make.

I agree that this is a component of it, but there are some other things at play here which I think is what makes the debate so furious.

For one, I think there's a sense of unfairness that people are expressing as well. A skill that took considerable time to learn and build up can be reproduced with a machine and that just feels unfair. Another, is obviously companies mandating employees use AI in their work. And then there's the environmental cost in training. Then there are the cases where it's being just for slop or submitting PRs that have not even been reviewed by their creator.

In my opinion, all of these factors make people refuse to see that some of us actually do find use for these tools and that we're not vibe-coding everything in some mad rush to ship trash.

The effect reminds me of the classic Fishtro demo by Future Crew from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUjRpLn2qWo

That brings back memories. They were definitely popular. In the early 2000s, I worked at a small company and one coworker had a bunch of Dilbert strips all over one of her cubicle walls. It wasn't an insane amount, but her cube was on the way to the break room, so it was visible to everyone passing by. Apparently the owners of the company did not like that and had her take them down.

It's really a great way to train your ear, and fun, too. I can play ukulele, but mostly just to strum and play songs to, but a few years ago I just started picking notes to try to recreate melodies of songs I knew or heard recently. At first it was slow-going with lots of searching on the fret for the right note, but over time I worked up the skill to mostly get the melody on the first few tries. It was the most amazing feeling to realize I could listen to a song and then reproduce it by ear.

I found that it's also an excellent way to "feel" the structure of a melody as well since you're essentially building it up again. Of course you could read music to see the actual melody, but working it out this way feels a bit more intimate.

It's a very cool little game! One suggestion: could you make it so you can noodle around on the keyboard without submitting the answer and then once you've worked it out, have a submission mode? Right now, it's frustrating that if you enter a wrong note, it shows a message, so you can't experiment on the keyboard to try to work it out.