arnvald

I used Oh My Zsh for years, but there were literally 3-4 features I relied on: autocompletion, git plugin, history search, and one theme.

For some reason it was slow to load which I found annoying, so I used Claude Code to optimize it. In the end I ended up removing Oh My ZSH entirely, now I have a single .zshrc file that contains everything, and it became much faster.

Similarly I moved from Packer to Lazy.nvim and updated a number of libraries, and from iTerm to Ghostty, Claude Code essentially converted my configs in a matter of minutes

The difference is that jQuery was replaced by other libraries, while Tailwind grows in popularity, but due to AI its creator doesn’t benefit from this popularity as much as before

I don’t think the language itself is Japanese centric. In the past the discussions among the language development often happened in Japanese, but I don’t think it’s the case anymore (though I don’t follow it closely) since there are a lot of international core language contributors now

A lot of bootcamps taught Ruby and Rails in the mid-2010s, so it hasn’t been stagnant for 15 years, maybe since 2017-2018. Then Python (with DS and ML domains exploding) and JS/TS (with Node and React) left Ruby far behind.

You can’t have it all at once. Hopefully one day there’s an alternative OS that’s not owned by and American company, but that shouldn’t stop us from building other things in the meantime

Years ago I wrote article on this topic: https://www.notonlycode.org/why-python-has-won/

In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.

Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.

I had a Roomba+Braava Jet for a few years and I constantly had some issues with both devices, but the worst part was that in theory they should be working well together. There's this function "linked cleaning" where Braava mops the floor right after Roomba finishes vacuuming. But in practice it often didn't work, either the automation didn't trigger, or Roomba got stuck somewhere, cancelled the cleaning, and then Braava started mopping floor that hadn't been vacuumed.

Eventually I moved to Roborock with vacuum+mop in a single device. It still has its issues, but it is ten times better. It's able to lift the mop on the carpet, the mop is self-cleaning, and it has a large tank so that I only have to refill the water once a week instead of every other day. Day and night. Roomba eventually introduced a similar model, but it's been years after competitors had them.

I’m old enough to remember when GitHub was on main page due to a cool feature they added, now they just end up here when it stops working

This is actually an interesting space, and I think there's a room for such products. Large companies struggle a lot with their knowledge bases, and discoverability is part of the problem (especially when using multiple tools: Confluence, Docs, Chat app, etc.)

The problem here is that there are companies that focus on this area and keep improving their products, while for OpenAI it's one of dozens of tools they launch, so it's hard to believe they'll keep dedicating adequate resources to make this a mature tool that's worth the investment (in form of time and money) for the clients

Unfortunately there's simply no way this is going to happen:

* advertising is profitable for advertisers — they buy ad slots because it brings revenue

* advertising is profitable for publishers — some of the biggest companies in the world (Google, Meta) make most of their revenue from ads

* most people are reluctant to spend money, but they're ok to "spend" their attention and their data

There were multiple attempts with micro-payments and nothing has worked so far. Monthly subscription is preferred by customers and companies, but there are only so many outlets that anyone will subscribe to.

Thanks for recommendation, I'll give it a try

I really appreciate that there's a company trying to reimagine browsers. Arc was an interesting idea, I used it for a few months, but in the end I switched back to Firefox. I haven't tried Dia yet, and now I'm not sure if I should.

I do think that selling a browser is going to be an extremely difficult task, so having an enterprise software machine with huge customer base might help it, but Atlassian strikes me as a company that will eventually just kill the project and turn this into a de facto acquihire.

This is why small companies still stand a chance. They can build something that would fail the corpo test of metrics and surveys.

Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t

Not to defend Mozilla (they have lots of issues), but it feels they're in an impossible position:

* their revenue comes mostly from Google, they need to diversify

* but nobody will pay for a browser, so they need to offer other services

* then everyone criticises that they shill their other services and should instead focus on the browser

Realistically, what should they do to stop relying on money from their competitor and be continue their mission?

I think the article suggests both - you need to consistently produce high quality output to get a chance at success. Low quality stuff has no chance to succeed (or very low), while high quality work has some, though low, chance.

IMO it's the other way around – because OpenAI doesn't focus on any particular market, they'll be launching stuff that later will be easily reproduced by market leaders that have not only know-how, but they have the whole platform where the AI can be easily added.

What kind of big company will abandon Marketo because OpenAI launched an agent? OpenAI misses everything else that Marketo has, so they'll just wait a few months until Marketo adds the same feature

Does it mean they didn’t want to invest more in OpenAI as they’re struggling to see a positive return? Or OpenAI tries to become more independent? Either way it looks like their relationship is pretty tense right now

Interestingly with chat groups that people can sign up, IMs like Telegram fill that one-to-many short-form niche

To me the worst part is not even the feed (I can use “following” tab) but the replies. I often used to look at single threads to see replies there. Since they started prioritizing replies from premium users it turned into cesspool and I eventually stopped using X altogether

If I remember correctly, Dropbox was one of the first big tech companies to publish its career framework openly, a lot of organizations (especially smaller ones) based their careers on the Dropbox’s one

I tried that with Cody (from Sourcegraph) using probably o1 model and I struggled. I had a long function with a number of conditions and early returns.

At first Cody generated a single test case, then I asked if to consider all possible scenarios in that function (around 10), it generated 5 cases, 3 of which were correct and 2 scenarios were made up (it tried to use nonexistent enum values).

In the end I used it to generate some mocks and a few minor things but then I copy pasted the test myself a few times and changed the values manually.

Did it save me some time in the end? Possibly, but also it caused a lot of frustration. I still hope it gets better because generating tests should be a great use case for LLMs

Which one? Is it Harris?

I should have said “false” rather than “anti-intellectual”. I know the role of the host is not to be a fact-checker, but when a guest makes a false claim and then they speak about it without questioning it makes it sound like both people believe it’s true.

I don’t remember exact examples, but one was something to the tune of:

Guest: man the crime in America is crazy these days

Host: yeah, totally

Guest: I left city X because I couldn’t handle the crime there

Host: yeah, it’s the worst

Guest: it’s like New York in the 80s

Host: and the mayor and the governor do nothing about it!

Then of course the crime is not only nowhere near the 80s NY level, but also lower than in previous years when the guest apparently lived there.

Again, I don’t expect the host to say “you’re wrong” every time a guest makes a wrong claim, but saying “come on, NY in the 80s was brutal, we’re nowhere near that” at least limits the exaggeration

> I kept asking young people about the public intellectual landscape in China - who are their equivalents of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, and Sam Harris? The sense I got is that this kind of popular intellectual ecosystem just doesn't exist there

I have never heard of Sam Harris, but are the other 3 the prominent examples of American intellectual ecosystem? I haven’t listened to them a lot, but in the couple examples of Friedman’s or Rogan’s podcast episodes I listened to, they let their guests say whatever anti-intellectual bs they wanted, without trying to correct the guests. Maybe I chose the wrong episodes?

I’ve been thinking about it and if there had to be a common rule for all these cases, I would say “yes”.

However, if it was possible, I would set a threshold maybe based on an annual revenue. Let’s say I run a small board game store, where I sell games from other producers, but also my own games that I published. I’m a small entrepreneur, should I be prohibited from exposing my products more?

Amazon, Spotify and some supermarket chains have such a dominant position in some markets they can abuse their position, they should be under scrutiny, but not small retail companies that want to try to create something on their own

Discovery matters. Google doesn’t decide which websites you visit, but how often do you go to the 2nd page of search results? Supermarkets don’t decide what you buy, but there is a reason why everyone wants their product in middle shelf and not a bottom one. And Spotify doesn’t decide what you listen to, but a playlist on main page will get an order of magnitude more listens than a playlist you need to search for

The way I understand it is that the 14th song is not a banger, but a song put between well known, good songs, to boost its number of streams.

I’ve noticed it a few times, I was listening to something like “best of 80s” and a few tracks were from the same band that I couldn’t find any info about. So my guess was that the creator of the list put some of the songs they (or their friends) made, then those songs got millions of streams just because they were on that playlist even though they had nothing to do with the expected content. It’s either for the money or maybe PR to make an impression that the band is popular

> 20% increase in electricity bills for the town's residents

> residents are now faced with paying several hundred dollars more per year for electricity

> The company estimates bills could rise by up to $300 monthly

This doesn’t seem right, electricity in Norway is generally cheap, how can 20% raise cause hundreds of dollars difference for residential customers? Also I’d be totally willing to pay 20% more if that meant removing some annoying noise in my area.

Edit: maybe instead of dollars they meant Norwegian Krone? 10 NOK = 1 USD, that would make more sense

I agree, I’ve been working with other languages and frameworks and in my opinion nothing comes close. People often mention Laravel as comparable or even superior, but having worked with it for a year I struggled a lot with how messed up PHP is (even with all the improvements done over the years.)

JavaScript doesn’t have anything comparable either, although I haven’t worked much with NextJS with server-side rendering, maybe this brings it closer to DX of Rails