bandoti

What about macOS being derived from BSD? Isn’t that where containers came from: BSD jails?

I know the container ecosystem largely targets Linux just curious what people’s thoughts are on that.

Funny I just entered “feather” into Merriam-Webster dictionary and there’s your word “barb”. Point being, people should use a dictionary/thesaurus before burning fuel on an AI.

1 a : any of the light, horny, epidermal outgrowths that form the external covering of the body of birds

NOTE: Feathers include the smaller down feathers and the larger contour and flight feathers. Larger feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) bearing branches (barbs) which bear smaller branches (barbules). These smaller branches bear tiny hook-bearing processes (barbicels) which interlock with the barbules of an adjacent barb to link the barbs into a continuous stiff vane. Down feathers lack barbules, resulting in fluffy feathers which provide insulation below the contour feathers.

Just as alchemists searched for the Philosopher’s stone, we search for Artificial General Intelligence.

There’s a lot more to it actually. When given the knowledge of today, a lot can actually be done with vintage computers. I would say it’s an artistic medium.

Take a look at the Commodore 64 developer manual and quickly realize that without much difficulty, one can learn the full assembly instruction set along with all BASIC commands.

https://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c...

The machine is completely open to experimentation. You can write to memory anywhere including the active display terminal. The chips are easy to mix, match, swap. Hardware and software is malleable, not a locked-down black box of complexity and TPIM modules!

I’d be worried about a lawsuit naming any tech product Chef. ;)

The problem, however, is these tools can maybe help build the initial prototype but that’s a far-cry from building and maintaining a product over the years.

I would like to see these companies demonstrate how their little-magic-tools can perform long-term, because people can already start with a Laravel template and have a full backend with Auth to boot.

Honestly, new code always has bugs though. That’s pretty much a guarantee—especially if it’s somewhat complex.

That’s why companies go for things that are “battle tested” like vibe coding. ;)

Joke aside—I like how Anthropic is using their own product in a pragmatic fashion. I’m wondering if they’ll use it for their MCP authentication API.

I’m not sure over time people will continue to accept sloppy art.

The “glitchiness” of the AI sprites can be quite unsettling because one can feel the something-quite-wrong that is difficult to place.

This is a worse state than using even rough illustrations by actual artists.

If one must use AI for this I would recommend having an artist in the pipeline who uses AI to create assets but then makes sure they are seamless.

The thing that pops in my mind on misplaced AI integrations is: Copilot on Microsoft Word—infusing the caret with that God-Awful, purple Copilot “call to action.” Intuitively it makes sense to add AI capabilities to a writing program, but enough is enough. At this point it’s an insult on our collective intelligence.

If you ask me, keep the AI in a new, separate program.

Generative AI has a distinct workflow that is unique and the UX patterns will likely be different than traditional workflows. For instance: the generate, reject-or-accept loop.

I’m wondering how many people just copy and paste from their chat agent and simply ignore the other integrations (with respect to consumer products).

Haha—yeah, for me the approach is always visual. I have to draw a picture to really wrap my brain around things! Other people I’d imagine have their own human, non-AI way to organize a problem space. :)

I have been drawing all my life and studied traditional animation though, so it’s probably a little bit of nature and nurture.

My take is that AI is very one-dimensional (within its many dimensions). For instance, I might close my eyes and imagine an image of a tree structure, or a hash table, or a list-of-trees, or whatever else; then I might imagine grabbing and moving the pieces around, expanding or compressing them like a magician; my brain connects sight and sound, or texture, to an algorithm. However people think about problems is grounded in how we perceive the world in its infinite complexity.

Another example: saying out loud the colors red, blue, yellow, purple, orange, green—each color creates a feeling that goes beyond its physical properties into the emotions and experiences. AI image-generation might know the binary arrangement of an RGBA image but actually, it has NO IDEA what it is to experience colour. No idea how to use the experience of colour to teach a peer of an algorithm. It regurgitates a binary representation.

At some point we’ll get there though—no doubt. It would be foolish to say never! For those who want to get there before everyone else probably should focus on the organoids—because most powerful things come from some Faustian monstrosity.

Lua is much lighter but the key is that it’s probably one of the easiest things to integrate (just copy the sources/includes and add them to build it’ll work)—like a “header only” kind of vibe.

But, you can strip down a minimal Python build and statically compile it without too much difficulty.

I tend to prefer Tcl because it has what I feel the perfect amount of functionality by default with a relatively small size. Tcl also has the better C APIs of the bunch if you’re working more in C.

Lua is very “pushy” and “poppy” due to its stack-based approach, but that can be fun too if you enjoy programming RPN calculators haha :)

Or if you have to use it because you’re self-hosting PostHog :)

My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll. Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using iPhone 13 I’ve got like two text lines visible!

Something I noticed for myself—doing a live webinar series over a couple days and taking notes with pen/paper in realtime—I really struggled to keep up at first, but over a few days I started to notice my ability to do a listen-and-write context shift improved and it felt like I was able to retain auditory information better.

Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop.

People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”

They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”

I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.

People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.

Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...

https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...

I picked up a Commodore 64 that came with the guidebook/developer manual and it’s honestly inspiring.

The fact that it comes with the complete assembly language, circuit diagrams, and BASIC language reference is something you just don’t see today.

Being able to write whatever in whichever places in memory makes it more of a tool fostering creative expression.

Honestly, before reading through those manuals I never really needed to consider having to implement multiplication in terms of addition instructions.

Even though those are basic properties of arithmetic, it’s easy to take for granted.

Well, unfortunately for us, untrue and bad ideas are used by sadistic individuals to gain power over others. So, it actually is subjective.

Capitalism is neck-deep in bad ideas: “buy THIS product, it will add years to your life expectancy!”

To the people selling the product it’s a good idea even if it’s a load of garbage—a quick buck to be made; to the person buying it, terrible idea in fact. :)

> Google and Meta also boast publicly +30% of new lines of code are AI-generated in their companies today.

You realize that Google and Meta sell AI products, right? So what you cited is effectively an ad campaign. Also the 30% NEW code is likely whittled down to 5-10% added to production after heavy edits. The devil is in the omitted details. :)

> In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a shit about things OP says are important.

People put too much stock in “engineers” and “managers”. What we’re really talking about here is in the realm of sociology and psychology.

I think there’s a lot of evidence (just ask anyone in academia) that AI is already diminishing people’s ability to think for themselves.

There’s a lot of power in AI it’s true—but let’s not get blinded by the gold and leave everyone bloodied in the muck.

From my experience so far it is helpful for me to get another opinion on how to solve a problem—and I do the work in the end. Or, I am extremely specific, and give it a relatively small problem to solve, and it solves it—writes the code for me—and then I code review it, and make changes to uphold my standards.

In other words, AI is my assistant, but it is MY responsibility to turn up quality, maintainable work.

However, to put things in perspective for the masses: just consider the humble calculator. It has ruined people’s ability to do mental math. AI is going to do that for writing and communication skills, problem solving skills, etc.

Yikes. Pretty soon we’ll have to go back to newsprint.

It’s important to consider that JWT is a series of specs and folks can choose to use any of them to suit their needs.

In fact, it can be used to create simple tokens—even if you store them in a database in a traditional authentication sense.

But it is also helpful to be able to use OIDC, for example, with continuous delivery workflows to authenticate code for deployment. These use JWT and it works quite well I think.

Note: technically JWT is only one of the specs so it’s not exactly correct how I’m referring to it, but I think of them collectively as JWT. :)

And the point of Bitcoin was a means of transacting, yet people are just mining them and holding as an investment asset!

Once AI takes over and these digital currencies are “smart” and tightly integrated, we’re going to be living in a Black Mirror episode.

Might not even need to store the token itself just a piece of data that is contained in the claims to say the account is in a good state. Any number of tokens then can be issued and the validation step would ensure the claims is correct.

I agree I mean what about all the teachers and the long term impact they have on society? A “little hundred mil” could go a long way.

But, that aside, since I’m just getting into the Lean Startup:

In chapter 12—startups typically need Scarce but Secure Resources:

“too much budget is as harmful as too little—as countless dot-com failures can attest—…”

I suppose this falls under case-and-point. They had too much money and blurring the lines between real customers and early adopters. This whole thing could have probably been figured out for a couple mil I’d imagine (though I’m no expert).

This is great! Reading the docs tickles my brain. Nice way to package up LLM functionality in a declarative way!

But the host application does much more than just connect to MCP servers, as the host is one-to-many client connections. The host application also has OTHER client connections to AI agents and so-forth.

I think it can be confusing in general it’s like understanding X11 where the client-server relationship is conceptually flipped. :)

I find the opposite after reading the spec. Did you read the spec? I mean the actual spec. not Python API documentation and such. :)

It’s just JSON RPC between a client, one or more servers. The AI agent interaction is not part of what the protocol is designed for except for re-prompting requests made by tools. It has to be AI agnostic.

For tool call workflow: (a) client requests the list of tools from the known servers, then it forwards those (possibly after translating to API calls like OpenAI toolcall API) to any AI agents it wants; when the AI then wants to call a tool (b) it returns a request that needs to be forwarded to the MCP server for handling; and (c) return the result back to the AI.

The spec is actually so simple no SDK is even necessary you could just write a script in anything with an HTTP client library.

For my workflow a lot of the benefit is in the smaller tasks. For example, get a medium size diff from two change-sets, paste it in, and ask to summarize the “what” and “why”. You have to learn how to give AI the right amount of context to get the right result back.

For code changes I prefer to paste a single function in, or a small file, or error output from a compile failure. It’s pretty good at helping you narrow things down.

So, for me, it’s a pile of small gains where the value is—because ultimately I know what I generally want to get done and it helps me get there.

It could work but there is still a bit of developer overhead: (1) Use iron-clad schema validation in the database; (2) Provide some forms over top the Excel data like old Access applications.

The benefit would be that you have a fixed set of UI components available in Excel and don’t need to worry about styling and whatnot.

Emacs diff tools alone is a reason to use the editor. I switch between macOS, Linux, and Windows frequently so settled on Emacs and happy with that choice as well.