bodge5000

Ladybird have a "no politics" stance by the looks of things, what that really means is kind of up to you. Here's an article about it further, I'm biased against it and so is this article so take that as you will:

https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/

Also I'm seeing comments suggesting that the lead behind it, Andreas Kling, is quite openly on the DHH side of things

Well you clearly do care about my judgement in this circumstance, perhaps that tells you something? Wanting to respect others and yet jumping to bad faith conclusions about people you know nothing about besides a line of text doesn't line up, and clearly you know that.

If everything you're saying is true, your moral compass is clearly not aligning with your actions here. That's fine, genuinely wanting to love and respect others and making a mistake in your actions on that moral compass is a one time mistake that can be easily remedied. The alternative is that you're actions align, the mistake was your conception of your moral compass, which would be a far bigger problem.

I don't think my friend is a sociopath. Perhaps 0 interest in justice is an exaggeration, or a matter of perspective, more like an average interest in it. At the end of the day, he took a career path for the same reason most people do. I can see why if you're deeply passionate about your field that can be annoying, but "sociopath" is really quite an extreme judgement

> People judge me for less all the time and I usually don't care.

Maybe its a case of "takes one to know one", but isn't this literally what a sociopath is? You act without caring what people think. I don't usually like to say that about a person I don't know but clearly you won't be affected by that.

I'll admit to having some bias against vibe coding, but trying to put that aside I think it depends on the purpose of the project. If it attempts to be an improvement over existing software then absolutely yes it would, things like speed, performance, security and reliability are not something I'd trust vibe coding for. If its for doing something novel where the previously mentioned is less of the focus, I can imagine myself looking past that, sure.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that I know him better than you would from half a paragraph. Would you like to think that someone would judge your character from so little?

is Work that much better than standard ChatGPT? I just tried standard for a relatively simple task; searching through the used market for a Macbook Pro and it alternated between ignoring my requirements (which was the whole reason I used it in the first place, as eBay does the same) and doing this weird thing where it'd suggest the "concept" of something (eg "X at Y price is a great choice" with no link to X at Y price).

So yeh, is Work much better for that kind of thing?

I wouldnt quite agree with that, gaming featured fairly prominently at least years WWDC, thats competing with a lot of other software and announcements for limited time. Pretending to care at an event where you can pretend to care about so many things is as close to caring as you get.

But I think it comes down to the wording a bit. At their core, the only single thing Apple cares about is making money. They only pretend to care about their computers, phones, everything they do is just an act, but we all know that so caring about something is relative, when we say they care about their computers its more that they put more resources into that than they do other things which we'd say they dont care about.

A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.

I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too

I don't want to speak for them, but perhaps this is a very real consequence of the "use ai or get left behind" talking point. Maybe they were effectively scared into it, and now are too far gone. They seem like a very reasonable person if they're admitting to being over reliant on LLMs, so I don't mean this as an insult

As others have said there are other conclusions going both ways (though I do think most settle on as you said), though one very fair conclusion I came across is that it's not allowed because the whole issue of copyright is still somewhat unresolved, and though its fine right now, that could (probably wont, but could) massively backfire later.

Ahh of course, yeh that makes sense

I havent used Windows in years so maybe somethings changed, and far be it from me to get in the way of someone taking them down a peg, but this bit confused me:

> The vendors do not remove the Windows license, and you must pay the entire price, even if you do not want to use this system.

Surely if you don't want Windows you just boot from a usb drive and install another OS without having to pay them anything. Its not like Windows can stop you from installing another OS, right?

Great to see Island of Dr Moreau mentioned, people often forget about that but its one of my favourite books

Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.

But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.

From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately

Absolutely not, sci-fi is just often a good vehicle for these kind of ideas (plus it gives me an excuse to talk about warhammer), but your right, theres plenty of real world examples to look at too.

Others have listed some great examples, but to be honest I was actually thinking of something somewhat more contemporary, specifically the eldar (or dark eldar perhaps) in Warhammer 40,000.

The long story short is that the Eldar once had paradise, and spent their time seeking greater and greater excess and pleasure, which eventually gave birth to an immensely powerful demon of excess. For the current-setting followers of this demon, their lives are spent in a desperate hunger for excess that can never be satiated, every greater excess they experience quickly becoming too dull to bare. As for the Eldar, their paradise is gone and their race is doomed, all they can do now is fight off the inevitable.

Obviously I don't think the rich have much to fear in terms of giving birth to a demon, but you get the point

There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go

For me, boomer editors (mostly nvim to be honest) join a long list of other things like tiling window managers as something I genuinely want to learn, but that I can never justify learning over either learning something else or doing "real work". I've been slowly introducing both and making gradual progress, but its extremely slow

That doesn't seem right, surely the gamer would still be you, since you interact with the agent through the harness. If the player is the LLM, what is the human in this analogy? I guess a harness doesn't necessarily need human input (most do of course, but thats not a technical limitation), but then again neither does a game for the same reasons

Regardless though, this is what I mean, we now have 3 definitions for an agent; an instance of a model (which is how I think of it), a model configuration for a given task (from another commenter) and your definition which appears to be somewhere between the two, though it seems we agree with what a harness is.

I get that, but wouldn't that make the agent and the harness two very different things, with the agent being closer to a model (the source of the agent) than a harness? Somebody else mentioned a console/game analogy, with the model being the disc, the agent being the running game, and the harness being the console OS, wouldn't it be like me describing Windows as a game, because games run on it?

Wouldn't the disc in that analogy be the model? Thats the source of the instance. The harness I guess would be the OS of the console running the game

It does looks really interesting and definitely something I'll check out, but (genuine question), should "agent" and "agent harness" be used interchangeably as it is on here? It describes itself as an agent harness, but the tagline is "tiny, open, native coding agent".

I'm not sure harness is the right word either, but that seems to be what the industry has settled on so I'll concede on that, but surely the agent is the thing doing the work (which I guess is the model, or an instance of the model which is why agent is different?), whereas the harness is how the user interacts with the agent. We've had ways to describe that relationship before; client and server, frontend and backend, but again, I'll concede that the shiny new thing doesn't want to use boring old terminology, but I think some consistency and logic in the shiny new terminology is pretty important

That isn't specifically about fx of course, more of a general industry complaint

After months of waiting on preorder (in which time I could've cancelled it), my Framework 16 finally arrived just yesterday, so this is a very unfortunately timed article for me.

Mine is using the AI 300 chip and is presumably on the latest bios so this specifically wouldn't be a problem for me, but it doesn't fill me with future confidence either, though I suppose if you look hard enough you can find similar stories about any manufacturer

Not all new technology is made equal and can't be compared as such. The electric motor was a new technology we now know did indeed pan out, but there are a string of others which never did and are forgotten about when talking about this. More recently, you could point to NFT's and crypto, both of which people also compared to things like the electric motor.

Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell

Very true, though this is something thats pretty difficult to get to by tiny increments, which is usually how these nefarious means are accomplished. One tiny thing is asked after another, each one too small to put up a fight against, and then suddenly they've crossed your line and you didn't even notice. Thats not particularly easy to do here, so the line will remain just as strong.

Maybe next they'll ask maintainers to go from a bracket to a specific age, and then next ask for verification, but the jump from specific age to verification is big enough that there'll be just as much resistance to it.

I like to think, or hope, that its just a vocal minority and that the majority of engineers are at least more considerate with their AI use than going all in. It kind of makes sense too, "I programmed X entirely using AI" is a more compelling proposition for an article than "I programmed X the same way people have been doing for decades", so of course you're going to hear more from them.

> An experienced engineer can now build in an hour what would have taken them a week.

From what I've seen, I don't think so if we're talking about like-for-like quality. Maybe as an absolute best case scenario, but more typically it's more like you can build in an hour with AI whereas without AI it might take you 2 or 3.

Even thats highly task dependant, and doesn't scale as you'd expect (eg 1 hour == 2 hours, but 1 month =/= 2 months), and at times even using AI can slow things down, at its worst case more severely than at it'd speed you up at it's best.

Now if you're willing to throw like-for-like out the window, that 1h==1w could be achieved easily, maybe even more. But then again, I feel like I could do a lot more in an hour if I didn't care about quality either, not as fast as AI but much faster than I am currently.

Absolutely, I've been stuck on one problem for years now (why I haven't just abandoned it is another matter, the long story short is that I just can't) and yeh, like you say, I've been in some deep pits I can attribute to that, and I do find myself, especially but not always in those times, looking at others in the same field doing so much better seemingly effortlessly. But those times I get a glint of a solution, even if it doesnt end up becoming anything, are incomparable to any other hobby I've ever had. Whether thats worth it is up to the individual I guess, but I think for most people, when they find "their thing", it usually is, or at least isn't something they can choose not to do.

Can't have the rainbow without the rain as they say

Aside from the human side of it which is often nothing to do with programming itself, I'd say anything that is captivating is only so because its agonizing. If you have a problem to solve and instantly know the solution, there was no problem, just manual labour left not done (using that in the most technical sense). Solving problems is captivating, but it has to be hard or there'd be no problem at all.