dejawu

If vibe-coding is hopping into a self-driving car and telling it to take you anywhere you can get a coffee, then I use coding agents more like a bicycle - they let me get further faster than if I'd walked, but I still have to decide where to go and how to get there, and I still have to pedal.

I don't vibe-code, but I do decide what to implement and what patterns to use (perhaps asking the model to analyze and give advice on this first), then I have it handle the nitty-gritty of the implementation itself. For this usage style, the latest local models are as good as having Claude at home.

I won't say it's been _easy_ (I ended up implementing my own harness to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of local models), but I will say that for the effort, having a coding agent that's essentially free to query as much as I want has been life-changing as a dev, especially when it comes to working on side projects. Knowing that my agent will never get worse in quality, suddenly cost more than it does now, or be suddenly made unavailable by external factors, was absolutely worth the trouble. And on top of all that, I can't believe it's as good as it is.

It's strange to me that Apple would choose to disadvantage themselves by selecting Google as their provider as opposed to, say, Anthropic or even OpenAI. Doesn't this mean they'll struggle more to differentiate themselves from the assistant on Android phones? Thinking more cynically, couldn't Google, if they wanted, feed Apple an inferior version of Gemini, ensuring they stay ahead?

As the consumer, this just sucks because it means no matter which phone platform you choose, you're getting the same thing underneath, and there's no way to avoid it (besides not using an assistant entirely, which I recognize a lot of people do, myself included).

My Computer Engineering degree had an "ethics" course (really a course on "engineering communications", but it was considered to satisfy the ethics requirement for graduation). It was a semester on how to file memos, cargo-cult your resume, and tell recruiters what they wanted to hear. Not a word was said about considering the implications of the things you're hired to build. When defense contractors took over the entire ground floor of the engineering building to hold a recruiting fair, we were encouraged to go.

The only time ethics in engineering was ever mentioned to me was in a class on applied number theory (cryptography), taught by a professor who had previously worked for the EFF. He went off-topic to tell us that many problems, like how to hit a target with a missile, may fascinate and compel us as engineers, but we shouldn't let that distract us into building instruments of death.

That course was an elective, and it was entirely possible to complete my degree without hearing a single mention of ethics.

There are many reasons I look back on my academic experience with disdain, but this one stands out to me.

This is exactly why, as someone who thought I'd be an IC with my head buried in code my whole life, I accepted a role as a tech lead last year. Humans will always need other humans to be human for them. I love working with computers, but supporting, teaching, and mentoring junior engineers has been rewarding for me in ways that writing code never could be. There is no social substitute for concrete relationships with specific people that grow in visible ways. Maybe they can automate away the part of me that's good with logic and reason, but empathy can't be simulated.

I've similarly thought about building a language that compiles to Rust, but handles everything around references and borrowing and abstracts that away from the user. Then you get a language where you don't have to think about memory at all, but the resulting code "should" still be fairly fast because Rust is fast (kind of ending up in the same place as Go).

I haven't written a ton of Rust so maybe my assumptions of what's possible are wrong, but it is an idea I've come back to a few times.

Every so often, YouTube changes something on their site that causes NewPipe to stop working. Usually within a few days, NewPipe pushes an update that fixes this, and we're back in business. Every time this happens, I donate to their Liberapay.

https://newpipe.net/donate/

A similar exploration by Matthew Rayfield using the URL bar instead of tab favicons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7GtCLwTmV4

It's astonishing just how awful Spotify's software is. Everything it does, it does poorly, even down to things like playback and playlists that were figured out by other media players decades ago. Just this week, it started randomly playing music on its own when I open it. The fact that this thread has over a hundred comments within an hour speaks to just how despised it is.

Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.

Looks like one of them is Pyne Pod: https://www.pynepod.com/uploads/bd58c18e.png

The Geek Bar Pulse has the custom multi-segment on the side: https://oss.geekbar.com/products/meloso-ultra/2/Orange%20Cre...

An ex of mine used disposable vapes and I was shocked by how beautifully designed some of them are - transparent covers with visible inner workings reminiscent of the Nothing phones; custom multi-segment displays for battery and temperature status; original artwork printed in vibrant color on the side. It made me even angrier that these things are meant to just be used once and then thrown out. Of course putting all this e-waste into the environment is a disaster, but to then also treat art and design as similarly disposable feels heartbreakingly cynical on another level entirely.

I collected a few that she was going to throw out, someday™ I'll build some driver boards for the displays and make a little art piece out of them.

The worst toast I've seen is on Android Auto (itself already a veritable petri dish of awful UX) where, when the on-screen keyboard appears, a toast helpfully pops up informing you that a keyboard is also available on your phone... Thus blocking the on-screen keyboard from being used until the toast fades (and no, tapping it does not dismiss it).

Add to that list QMK VIA, which allows reprogramming a keyboard running the QMK firmware from the browser!

https://www.caniusevia.com/

This almost reads like a deconstruction of my favorite explanation of Lisp: https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

The explanation basically uses an AST that's apparent to the user to explain the language - and this is a language built on an AST whose structure is apparent to the user. I love it and will definitely be turning the idea over in my head for the next few days.

I had the pleasure of encountering them in-person at Strange Loop 2023! They gave us an impromptu demo of some of their experiments in the hallway after the last talks had ended and we were cheering wildly with everything they showed us. It was a delight!

Re: your edit - I've always thought it'd make for a fun pet project to take the hyper-engagement-driven approach that social media apps take but apply it to Wikipedia. Like a Tiktok-style vertical feed of articles that tries to find the ones you'll engage with most (WikiScroll [0] is already part of the way there). Or a chatroom corresponding to each article that people can banter in, kind of like you described. Or a DM feature but you can only send Wikipedia links. The idea of Wikipedia as a social catalyst is super interesting to me.

[0]: https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io/

I wonder how it must feel to be on a team at Microsoft working on actually useful features like WSL and then having all your work be thrown away by shit like this driving users off your platform anyway.

It's also possible to see the names, topics, and timestamp of the last message of hidden channels through their API. The channels are only hidden on the client-side. (To be clear, it's still not possible to view the contents of these channels.)

I'm quite fond of this library for pattern matching; it's a staple in all my new projects.

https://github.com/gvergnaud/ts-pattern

> We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right.

What's the evidence for this? Not asking rhetorically, I'm curious and want to read more.

I feel like it's worth comparing Reddit to another thing that went from being free to paid - Dwarf Fortress. They built up a great rapport and trust with their user base, and in return their user base happily paid for a product they'd been using for decades for free. They made millions over the span of a few days. Someone asked in the forums if people really want to pay for this and the replies are just thousands of people saying "yes".

Compare that to Reddit's adversarial history with its user base and the backlash they're getting now. It's completely possible to make money off Reddit without resorting to measures like these. I'm a better person today because of Reddit, which is something I can't say about any other social media. It deeply hurts my heart to see such a valuable and meaningful space possibly die due to just simple greed. That, to me, is a far greater loss than anything else mentioned in the threads about this impending disaster.

A lot has been written about how Reddit should/deserves to die, but not much has been said about what a loss of a community it will be. Besides providing amusement, Reddit is the reason I'm a better programmer, partner, and person today. Reddit taught me things that my school never did but should have. It's the only social media I can say that about. I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there with this kind of story. I fully believe people will be worse off without Reddit to go to, if it really does die off.

Give the MacBook (12-inch, 2015-2019) a look. They're Intel based and you can find a top end model for a few hundred bucks on ebay. I love mine - the weight and size make it incredibly easy to move with. They're also great to have as a second laptop, which never made sense given their price when new, but now that they're cheaper they're perfect for the role.

And its counterpart quote by Bill Gates, "Bicycles are like a computer for our legs."

While this seems awesome (and I do hope to make use of it) I do find it a little funny that an application for a visa for remote work must be submitted by snail mail.

The most infuriating thing about Twitch ads is that it insists on running a thirty-second pre-roll ad. This is a platform where the focus is on liveness and immediacy, where you're very likely to open a stream because what's happening right this moment is interesting (e.g. a speedrunner on world-record pace), and then that same platform forces you to miss out on that live moment.

Literally any other form of advertising would fit Twitch better than pre-roll ads. Even a shorter pre-roll ad would be better (and probably lead to better retention). Gating people for a whole half-minute from a live event like that implies, at least to me, a company that doesn't understand their own platform.

A similar idea that resonated with me is CGP Grey's suggestion to replace resolutions with themes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE

Rather than set a lofty goal you're more likely to give up on (leaving you having accomplished nothing), simply look for ways in which you can do/be better than you were before.

I mean, I for one can't wait to be free of my meat prison, and a future where all of us can be sure seems nice. But we have no guarantee that all of us are going to be brought along for the ride. Who's to say that the rich (who are going to be the ones in control of who gets uploaded) won't just upload the people who can pay them and leave the rest of us behind to suffer?

As it happens, a friend recommended me the Manna story almost a decade ago! It's been on my mind for the last couple weeks, and I definitely think if we're not careful and deliberate about how we shape our future, we will definitely end up like the first half of that story. Unfortunately, it seems to me like that is exactly what the powerful want. When capital doesn't need labor anymore, they will happily let the rest of us starve.

I don't know if a government would use it, but 4chan has tripcodes that can uniquely identify an anonymous user across multiple posts without the user ever needing to create a permanent identity.

I love this feature and it's since become indispensable to me. I find it pretty funny that my #1 favorite desktop UI feature is from Linux. One of the first things I'll put on a fresh install of Windows or MacOS is a utility that re-creates this behavior.

I use AltDrag on Windows (requires a quick tweak for HiDPI): https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

And Easy Move + Resize on MacOS: https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize