gyomu

Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges.

I became a programmer because I had many, many hours with nothing to do at my grandparents' house. I did have a programmable calculator and the reference programming manual that came with it, so I'd recreate (in extremely basic form) the games I read about in magazines/that my friends told me about and that I dreamt of playing but didn't have access to, such as Diablo/Sim City/etc. Later I learned assembly to make faster games (I'd print out z80 asm reference tutorials at the library, write code by hand on paper, and then type it out, compile it, and load it on my calculator from a library computer a week or so later).

Honestly, lots of respect for the kids these days that are so self driven that they'll spend hours on their projects and not watching mindless short form videos. I don't think I'd have had that self discipline if I had had a phone with unlimited internet/YouTube/TikTok/etc access.

The main page of his website now says New Hampshire

https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/

For anyone curious, the game dev is Jason Rohrer:

https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.h...

Things have changed since:

"In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis, CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner). Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door). After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid it)."

If you’ve spent any time around little kids, you’ve certainly seen that making shit up is a natural inclination of the human brain.

Ideally, as one’s intellect matures, one learns to stop doing that, and build coherent reasoning, only speak up when you know what you’re talking about.

Well, ideally. Many people never get to that stage.

And now that you’ve done it, you could probably reimplement it better in a fraction of the time.

> “boy, am I glad I didn't spend several weeks trying to code that up from scratch".

If your goal is several decades of a career as an independent developer (like OP), what is an investment of a few weeks for a) understanding a topic deeply and b) having source code that you deeply understand, 100% own, and can reuse across future projects?

I always wonder what are the forces at play in those situations.

Is that the fraudsters are so charismatic/well connected/etc that their past crimes just don’t hold them back?

Or is it a “all notoriety is good notoriety” kind of thing, where even if your fame is due to having been a criminal, that built up name recognition will keep propelling you forward?

Or is it more subtle than this - ie some people have the skills required to appear convincing to smart people, raise lots of money, inspire others to follow them in their ventures, etc - but it just so happens that they also suck at not getting caught up in their own narrative and they end up breaking a bunch of laws in that pursuit?

It’s fascinating.

As a photographer, I get the appeal of (this new incarnation of) HDR content, but the practical reality is that the photos I see posted in my feeds go from making my display looking normal to having photos searing my retinas, while other content that was uniform white a second prior now looks dull gray.

It's late night here so I was reading this article in dark mode, at a low display brightness - and when I got to the HDR photos I had to turn down my display even more to not strain my eyes, then back up again when I scrolled to the text.

For fullscreen content (games, movies) HDR is alright, but for everyday computing it's a pretty jarring experience as a user.

Very nice resource, pen plotters are so fun. One of my favorite subreddits is /r/plotterart - feels like one of the last few hobby-related subreddits I can go to that retained the feeling of early days subreddits, just people showing cool stuff they've made.

I live in Japan, and when you read English texts here (it doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant menu, a pamphlet at a touristic area, a flyer for local government services…) the same English word will often be written differently within the same document (eg for a recent one I saw: “curbside” was spelled “crubside” and “carbside”).

I always wonder how that happens, because the documents themselves often smell strongly of machine translation - but if they’re machine translated, how would those mistakes get in? My best guess is that there’s a human manually typing out a machine translation output, which kind of boggles the mind.

I think us computer nerds who are used to using computers to do work efficiently have a hard time imagining all the weird ways in which non-computer nerds actually use computers.

The reasoning in the article is interesting, but this struck me as a weird example to choose:

> “The real question is how can we predict when a new LLM will achieve some new capability X. For example, X = “Write a short story that resonates with the social mood of the present time and is a runaway hit”

Framing a capability as something that is objectively measurable (“able to perform math on the 12th grade level”, “able to write a coherent, novel text without spelling/grammar mistakes”) makes sense within the context of what the author is trying to demonstrate.

But the social proof aspect (“is a runaway hit”) feels orthogonal to it? Things can be runaway hits for social factors independently of the capability they actually represent.

Apple hardware quality is just orders of magnitude beyond what competitors do. The day this stops being true (whether because Apple slips too much, or because competitors step up in major ways - not sure which is likelier) I expect we’ll see a lot more Mac-to-Linux migrations, with the virtuous circle kind of benefits that this can bring.

The exercise of how one drops out of the first year of high school to “become a poet”, gets a GED, and then proceeds to enter one of the top universities in Korea (notorious for its particularly cutthroat academic culture) right on time at 19 is left to the reader.

In case you’re asking the question not rhetorically - this is the kind of thing you can afford to do when you have an extremely strong/privileged support system.

It’s myth-making, and shouldn’t be confused with “dropping out to take care of your sick parent” or “dropping out and going to work at McDonald’s”.

> Professors can basically do whatever they want

Maybe that was true at some point, but they certainly can't anymore.

Speaking with professors around me (at universities on different continents!), they all report that they basically have to give everyone passing grades, they can't tell students off/kick them out of the class for engaging in outwardly rude behavior (eg wearing headphones, obviously playing games/watching videos/etc. for the duration of the class), they have to accept pretty much any request for extension/makeup exams/etc, they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

If you want to go back to proper academic rigor and study, you have to return authority to the professors.

When I was in college (over 20 years ago now), what we called “hackathons” was a bunch of us (4-6 max) holing up in an apartment for the weekend, and working on our personal projects while ordering pizza and sleeping on couches.

It was really nice having a group of people you could demo what you were working on/ask for help or feedback within immediate range at all times. There was also something really peaceful about coding at 5a on Sunday while everyone else was fast asleep.

When I moved to SF, I was so surprised to find out that there were “professional” hackathons. I went to a couple and came to the same conclusion as you.

I do miss the vibe of the OG hackathons I did with my friends, but I was 19 and we had no commitments back then. Nowadays the best way for me to be productive is to have regular meal, disciplined working hours, and good nights of sleep - so no more sleeping on couches with half empty boxes of pizza by my side.

Yeah, the author here is as much a part of the problem. If you let students get away with submitting ChatGPT nonsense, of course they’re going to do that - they don’t care about the 3000 words appeal to emotion on your blog, they take the path of least resistance.

If you’re not willing to cross out an entire assignment and return it to the student who handed it in with “ChatGPT nonsense, 0” written in big red letters at the top of it, you should ask yourself what is the point of your assignments in the first place.

But I get it, university has become a pay-to-win-a-degree scheme for students, and professors have become powerless to enforce any standards or discipline in the face of administrators.

So all they can do is give the ChatGPT BS the minimum passing grade and then philosophize about it on their blog (which the students will never read).

Agreed - humans like participating in chats better (when you have a problem, you want live humans ready to answer you now), but the SO style archive is better for long term archiving & retrievability.

A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.

People are lazy. I’m enrolled in a language class in a foreign country right now - so presumably people taking that class want to actually get good at the language so they can actually live their life here - yet a significant portion of students just turn in ChatGPT essays.

And I don’t mean essays edited with chatGPT, but essays that are clearly verbatim output. When the teacher asks the students to read them out loud to the class, they will stumble upon words and grammar that are way obviously way beyond anything we’ve studied. The utter lack of self awareness is both funny but also really sad.

That’s cool.

Similar to how Pixar made their first movie about toys because CG made everything look plasticky back then and they realized they couldn’t get away with making a movie with humans or animals on screen for the whole movie.

The best creative people lean into the limitations of technology.

Feels like engaging with the logic and content of an argument is more in the spirit of this website than replying “stfu”.

As long as you report your earnings to the IRS, you should be good.

I guess you also need to make sure whether the crows are properly classified as employees or independent contractors.

Kids tend to want to partake of their own initiative in activities that are 1) physical, and 2) that they see adults themselves do.

Hunting in wilderness is a good example; so are sports, cooking, crafts, etc.

But unfortunately not all important activities that kids need to learn to become well adjusted adults in our modern societies fit those 2 criteria.

Point 2) can be hacked to an extent by modeling the behavior yourself - eg kids who see adults read books are more likely to want to read themselves.

> But still allowed for rapid iteration on dynamic UIs for applications.

This is the aspect that IMO was most harmed by the transition to Swift - and then later to a much deeper extent by SwiftUI, which makes quickly refactoring UI code very painful.

If you’re confused about what this is - it’s to prevent AI scraping.

> Anubis uses a proof-of-work challenge to ensure that clients are using a modern browser and are able to calculate SHA-256 checksums

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/design/how-anubis-works

This is pretty cool, I have a project or two that might benefit from it.

I could also see unscrupulous businesses swapping out original parts in machines sent for repair for cheaper ones as a way to drive their costs down. The vast majority of customers wouldn’t be able to tell/prove what happened.

There's this great article on the Optimus Maximus, and how it directly lead to the now popular Stream Deck (by Elgato, not the Steam Deck by Valve)

https://www.theverge.com/c/features/24191410/elgato-stream-d...

I once worked in a design research lab for a famous company. There was a fairly senior, respected guy there who was determined to kill the keyboard as an input mechanism.

I was there for about a decade and every year he'd have some new take on how he'd take down the keyboard. I eventually heard every argument and strategy against the keyboard you can come up with - the QWERTY layout is over a century old, surely we can do better now. We have touchscreens/voice input/etc., surely we can do better now. Keyboards lead to RSI, surely we can come up with input mechanisms that don't cause RSI. If we design an input mechanism that works really well for children, then they'll grow up not wanting to use keyboards, and that's how we kill the keyboard. Etc etc.

Every time his team would come up with some wacky input demos that were certainly interesting from an academic HCI point of view, and were theoretically so much better than a keyboard on a key dimension or two... but when you actually used them, they sucked way more than a keyboard.

My takeaway from that as an interface designer is that you have to be descriptivist, not prescriptivist, when it comes to interfaces. If people are using something, it's usually not because they're idiots who don't know any better or who haven't seen the Truth, it's because it works for them.

I think the keyboard is here to stay, just as touchscreens are here to stay and yes, even voice input is here to stay. People do lots of different things with computers, it makes sense that we'd have all these different modalities to do these things. Pro video editors want keyboard shortcuts, not voice commands. Illustrators want to draw on touch screens with styluses, not a mouse. People rushing on their way to work with a kid in tow want to quickly dictate a voice message, not type.

The last thing I'll add is that it's also super important, when you're designing interfaces, to actually design prototypes people can try and use to do things. I've encountered way too many "interface designers" in my career who are actually video editors (whether they realize it or not). They'll come up with really slick demo videos that look super cool, but make no sense as an interface because "looking cool in video form" and "being a good interface to use" are just 2 completely different things. This is why all those scifi movies and video commercials should not be used as starting points for interface design.

The statement of purpose on the website (https://open-ui.org) is much clearer with their actual goal than the wordy Github document:

> The purpose of the Open UI, a W3C Community Group, is to allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI components and controls, such as <select> dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and date/color pickers.

That'd be great. I hope they succeed.

Disclaimer: I am an interaction designer who cares deeply about this topic, but want to push on the boundary of the discourse rather than falling into easy clichés. The thoughts below are not meant in the spirit of being a takedown, but rather attempts at drawing a map to help answer the question "how can we go beyond?"

These kind of rants on interaction design come up very regularly; you can find some going back half a century ago (eg see the whole field of "tangible interfaces"). Or, another somewhat more recent classic (2011): https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

These visions are all rooted in a stereotypification and glorification of pre-computer work - keyboards, mice, and touchscreens are clunky, limited, unexpressive; while dirty paintbrushes, chunky buttons and levers, etc. take advantage of the whole human body and turn work into a transcendental kinetic experience.

Yet the demos that come out of these visions of interaction design somehow always to fall along the same lines. If digital, they usually involve infinite canvas, boxes and arrows, etc. If physical, they're about shuffling board game like cards and tokens that quickly get unwieldy. All the while they fail to capture what makes digital interfaces (which are at their core non spatial/non embodied) so powerful and why they have been so successful in most every discipline.

The illustrations in the article are unwittingly a great example of the foundational contradiction within the premise: did the author decide to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours hunched over with felt and knitting needles to produce the dozens of embedded images, or did they generate them all with AI in a few hours? If the tactility and creativity that comes with real world materials is so desirable, then why did they make that choice? The answer, I think, is quite obvious - because while messing with felt and needles is a fun way to relax, it's not something you want to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing when you have deadlines to worry about.