greedo

Wow! What state is this in?

Can you provide some examples from this time period? I'm having trouble squaring your statement with things like the Red Ring of Death with the X-Box etc.

Oil is fungible, so the cost will find an equilibrium regardless of source (excluding quality differences).

ncdu is a lifesaver...

And you can find stuff in perfect condition for reasonable prices! I have a ton of Stanley planes that are amazing.

When The Force Awakens, I spent $99 on a toy version of BB8 that you could control from your iPhone. It was a cool toy. Then after a while the app was no longer supported... Sad times.

I also owned every iPhone from the first through iPhone 7 and kept each as I replaced the old one. After a while, none were usable due to changes in cellphone tech. And I realized keeping LiO batteries around was a huge fire hazard...

I don't agree. Older tech was simpler, and often more reliable. They didn't depend on being able to connect to a networked time clock for sync, didn't need networking period. Today's systems are inherently fragile.

I grew up in the 70's. About the only thing I would say is less fragile are cars. Today's cars are just better in so many ways but are unmaintainable by the average user.

And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how. But that's changing as self-repair movements have taught millions. For example, the Kitchen Aid mixer. The original, built by Hobart and acquired by KitchenAid was a tank. However it had a sacrificial gear and people said that was a flaw because they didn't understand the purpose of sheer pins or sacrificial gears. Now it's pretty well understood thanks to YouTubers like Mr. Mixer that repairing these is easy peezy.

My dad once told me that just because he had a phone (landline), that he was under no obligation to answer it. I thought it was funny at the time but I wish he was still around for me to tell him he was right.

When iPhones became common, my ex-wife would get upset when I wouldn't reply to a text message. Sometimes I was busy and missed the notification, or couldn't answer (like in a meeting, driving, etc). Or I knew that the message would be better answered in person.

The social expectations part is hard to overcome. Societal contracts, whether implicit or explicit are very hard to ignore.

Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.

IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...

I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...

I (like many on HN I'm sure) have been continually pestered by management to use AI like it's some cure for polio. They just want to tell their VP that "my team is accelerating its use of AI!" so that the VP can pass that up the food chain. Same with when we started to migrate (unnecessarily imho) to the cloud. Just another checkbox and an attaboy from senior management.

There's really not much of a place for AI in my work. We're not cutting edge, we're just a large, safe business protected by a regulatory moat. We don't want to be on the cutting edge, since the bleeding is bad for profits and reputation. But the incentives our IT execs operate under is all about resume/credential building and moving on to bigger things. Our C level officers are not even slightly technical, so they defer to the CIO. Nothing new at all in this company, it's a story told a thousand times.

So I was just very curious how it would be to approach vibe coding as if I was my VP. You don't know what you don't know, right? And the ease at creating a simple app that would be beyond 99% of the people in my company gives way too much confidence. And with misplaced confidence comes poor decision-making.

I can see where someone who currently is an Excel jockey would benefit from some of this stuff. As long as they can compare and test the outputs. But the danger from false confidence has to be an institutional risk that's being ignored.

I get what you're saying, but imagine a CTO/CIO who's never been very technical. The world is full of them. They vibe up an app, and think it's easy. They don't have the developer experience to know the things they're missing.

While I downplayed my job experience, I'm very in touch with developers and their workflows; the challenges they face. And I'm scared because they won't be making these decisions about LLM usage; their bosses, the guy who vibe coded a dumb app over the weekend will.

I've been a skeptic about LLMs in general since I first heard of them. And I'm a sysadmin type, more comfortable with python scripts than writing "real" software. No formal education in coding at all other than taking Harvard's free online python course a few years ago.

So I set out to build an app with CC just to see what it's like. I currently use Copilot (copilot.money) to track my expenditures, but I've become enamored with sankey diagrams. Copilot doesn't have this charting feature, so I've been manually exporting all my transactions and massaging them in the sankey format. It's a pain in the butt, error prone, and my python skills are just not good enough to create a conversion script. So I had CC do it. After a few minutes of back and forth, it was working fine. I didn't care about spaghetti code at all.

So next I thought, how about having it generate the sankey diagrams (instead of me using sankeymatic's website). 30 minutes later, it had a local website running that was doing what I had been manually doing for months.

Now I was hooked. I started asking it to build a native GUI version (for macOS) and it dutifully cranked out a version using pyobjC etc. After ironing out a few bugs it was usable in less than 30 min. Feature adds consumed all my tokens for the day and the next day I was brimming with changes. Burned through that days tokens as well and after 3 days (I'm on the el cheapo plan), I have an app that basically does what I want in a reasonable attractive, and accurate manner.

I have no desire to look at the code. The size is relatively small, and resource usage is small as well. But it solved this one niche problem that I never had the time or skill to solve.

Is this a good thing? Will I be downvoted to oblivion? I don't know. I'm very very concerned about the long term impact of LLMs on society, technology and science. But it's very interesting to see the other side of what people are claiming.

Or in places where network effects make it impossible to compete.

If you read the article, it covers much of this. It's not just gathering evidence, but evaluating the data you've collected.

Funny thing about that. Knowing what science is important is the hard part, and you often don't know for years or even decades.

Yes? At least in the US, the GOP has been working relentlessly for most of my life to reduce welfare, to reduce Medicaid, to make unionization difficult and to neuter existing unions, and most of all, cut taxes on the rich.

There have been no legitimate reports of NATO providing real time AWACs feeds to Ukraine.

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Good lessons. Like ignoring previous military plans that showed how tough a nut Iran would be to crack.

Lessons like the value of AWACs. Now we're down to 15 and the availability rate is like 50%. So 8 or so WORLDWIDE. Yeah, that's a good lesson. And we've cancelled its replacement after someone (probably Elon) whispered BS into Trump's ear about space based sensors.

I'm sure China is watching with a notepad out about all these lessons. Thucydides is rolling in his grave.

They sell them. Military gear (at least aircraft and missiles) aren't cheap like an AK47. They have enjoyed watching India and Pakistan in their latest air battles. Lots of operational intel gleaned from that.

You're conflating the Viet Cong with North Vietnam.

Well you can say the same about COBOL...

Just because things hung around didn't mean that Sun/Solaris/Java were long for this world. Linux/x86 was just too cheap compared to SPARC gear. Even if it wasn't as robust as the Sun gear, it just made too much sense especially if you didn't have any legacy baggage.

Well we were a small startup, and the idea of using AIX was a non-starter. Solaris was lovely, but our E250 was only for mail, and in hindsight we should have stood up a FreeBSD server with dovecot or something instead of a system that we migrated off of a year later.

We did use NT/2K internally but that was because we had some who insisted on using SMB via Windows.

Such fun times. The nix and nix-like OSes were spreading like fire. I never would have thought I'd ever wrangle them for the majority of my career.

There's no reason the tankers need to be reusable. They can probably lift more fuel without all the cruft needed for controlled re-entry.

Sun was dying in 2000. I was busy deploying BSD and a bit later Linux for all our x86 gear.

Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.

Like putting glue on your pizza?

They also use this camera system when creating implants. After the implant post was installed, they scan your mouth to determine the optimum shape for your crown (that goes on the post).

The Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry CSP. And the boutique gun system is really a complex thing, it's not like packing in a bunch of VLS containers.