iainctduncan

I can't take anyone seriously who says an AI edge will be a "superpower".

Which part of "commodity" is confusing???

Every blue tooth audio thing I've had sucked... and then stopped working altogether.

nice... ;-)

Funny how we don't hear that movement much...

The real story here is "how the hell did Dick's Sporting Goods get to #3 and how can I get me some of their magic dust?"

Oh come on, that is complete nonsense. I can reunderstand complicated code I wrote a year ago far, far faster than complicated code someone else wrote. Especially if I also wrote tests, accompanying notes, and docs. If you can't understand your old code when you come back to it... including looking through your comments and docs and tests... I'm going to say you're doing it wrong. Maybe it takes a while, but it shouldn't be that hard.

Anyone pretending gen-ai code is understood as well as pre-gen-ai, handwritten code is totally kidding themselves.

Now, whether the trade off is still worth it is debatable, but that's a different question.

Did anyone ever doubt sama would just follow the money?

weasels gonna weasel

Finally silicon valley is being shown who they sucked up to.

I think the worse situation is the bad AI summaries from search on health issues.

We had a potential pet poisoning, so was naturally searching for resources. Google had a summary with a "dose of concern" that was an order of magnitude off. Someone could have read that and thought all was fine and had a dead cat.

(BTW cat is fine, turned out to be a false alarm, but public service announcement: cats are alergic to aspirin and peptobismal has aspirin. don't leave demented plastic chewing cats around those bottles, in case you too have a lovely but demented cat)

The thing that makes me crazy about this article, others like it (and so many of the comments in response to them ) is the naive assumption that whatever the author is used to is always the case.

It's just not. I've been a developer for 25+ years, and in technical diligence looking at companies getting investments for seven, and have done diligence on 100+ companies. It's ALL OVER THE PLACE. It depends on the product, the company, the team, the way the company is managed, the business domain, etc.

For some companies, products, and teams.. the code absolutely is the hard part, and building that insanely sophisticated software is worth millions. I've seen scientific software that sold for millions of dollars per copy.

For others, the code is essentially commodity plumbing around some operational knowledge of a domain that makes nice dough with minimal code complexity. I've also seen founders who were going to spend the rest of their days floating around the bahamas because they wrote the right PHP-ball-of-mud in the right domain at the right time, sigh.

The world of software is vastly broader than the vast majority of programmers think. And there are a lot of very, very different ways to make money in it.

Would this be the same place that Coalton came out of? (just curious)

Regardless of the sleep effect (or lack of) they absolutely do work for reducing eye strain for migraineurs.

It's noticeable to me all the time, but if I'm borderline migraining, or recovering from a migraine, the difference between shifted and not is something I can feel instantly. Shifting all the way over enables me to eek out some work after a migraine without it flaring back up again.

gatekeeping is just a synonym for curration by people who don't like the currators choice.

And we are going to need more curration so goddamned badly....

The easy way to do this is to hide them with custom CSS

- Install Stylebot extension for your browser

- make an entry for youtube.com

- enter this css: .shortsLockupViewModelHost { display: none}

Bam, no more shorts.

This. This is what people aren't talking about. LLMs are like slot machines for developers, and slot machines are fucking awful for your brain.

At the risk of sending you down a giant rabbit hole, the book Designing Sound is all about making programmatic sounds with Pure Data, and open source low-code programming environment available for all platforms. From what I've read, the book is considered a classic in the video game sound world. It's really good. Combine that with the Cipriani book on PD and learning Ardour would give you a very good learning path.

Nice, I was going to mention that there had been several game devs on the mailing list, thanks for sharing.

The single C file convenience really is helpful. When I was figuring out the byzantine build process for incorporating s7 into a mixed JS, C, Scheme app, it was great to not have any additional foot guns there. On my eventual todo list is porting some of the same work to incorporate into JUCE apps for mobile, so good to know that worked for you.

Fennel is another language I have been watching, good to hear that worked out well.

yes, it really is. In my music pedagogy project I use it as the domain layer via WASM sitting between JS and C/C++ audio workers. It's been great that way.

That I don't know, but the s7 author, Bill Schottstaedt (who I will ping about this) is very helpful on the email list and is deeply, deeply knowledgeable about Lisp, so you could definitely ask there!

https://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/cmdist

In my context, I have rigged up a REPL in Max, so I wind up using that instead. (Which is freaking awesome, because I can script all of Max from my vim buffers.)

Hmm, it's been a while. It was partly the fact that it was not as simple as s7, and also was complicated a bit by the compiled-to-C nature of Chicken. I did really like what I saw in Chicken though.

Oh right, that was a thing too. LGPL would have complicated some plans. Forgot that details.

Author here! Funny to see this arise now, I shared links to the project a number of times but never got much interest here. For what it's worth, I would (and should!) update that page, but the choice of s7 has worked out really well. I now also use it in a WASM context, which is great. The fact that I can easily use the same scheme implementation anywhere I can run ANSI C has proven to be a real advantage.

Happy to answer other questions.

For people interested, I will update that page today with thoughts five years on.

TLDR: still really happy with the choice!

OP: it was a two factor decision.

The first is that it seemed at the time that Scheme was going to be easier to work with, and that has proven true. It's a lot easier to do music theory hacking and integrate with Max using a lisp 1. Being able to seamlessly change whatever the first form is (function, hash-table, list, vector) with no change to the code has turned out to be really really nice in my work.

The second was that when I started I knew little about Schemes and Lisps and it seemed when going through the docs like ECL at that time was going to be a bigger lift to get going.

Cat added.

Best HN site today, IMHO.

Mmm, good point!

"If you believe the AI researchers–who have been spot-on accurate for literally"

I do not understand what has happened to him here... there was an entire "AI winter" in the 90's to 2000's because of how wrong researchers were. Has he gone completely delusional? My PhD supervisor has been in AI for 30 years and talks about how it was impossible to get any grant money then because of catastrophically wrong predictions had been.

Like, honest question. I know he's super smart, but this reads like the kind of ramblings you get from religious zealots or scientologists, just complete revisions of known, documented history, and bizarre beliefs in the inevitably of their vision.

It really makes me wonder what such heavy LLM coding use does to one's brain. Is this going to be like the 90's crack wave?

I wound up going back to C in a big way about five years ago when I embarked on Scheme for Max, an extension to Max/MSP that lets you use s7 Scheme in the Max environment. Max has a C SDK, and s7 is written in 100% ANSI C. (Max also has C++ SKD, but is far less comprehensive with far fewer examples and docs).

I was, coming from being mostly a highlevel language coder, suprised at how much I like working in this combo.

Low level stuff -> raw C. High level stuff -> Scheme, but written such that I can drop into C or move functions into C very easily. (The s7 FFI is dead simple).

It's just really nice in ways that are hard to articulate. They are both so minimal that I know what's going on all the time. I now use the combo in other places too (ie WASM). It really forces one to think about architecture in what I think is a good way. YMMV of course!

No, it suggests the sarcasm that is the Registers in house style. See the page tagline.... "Biting the hand that feeds IT"

One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. Maybe they can't play off charts unless they've heard it, or aren't used to following instructions/cues/being the lead, etc. And unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too.

Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.

People into this sort of stuff might be interested to know that s7 Scheme also runs really well in WASM. It's 100% ansi C and uses its own GC, so getting it compiled and running in WASM is very simple. I use it in both my audio project (Scheme for Max, an s7 interpreter in Max/MSP) and in a browser based set of music practice tools I am working on as a solopreneur. It's fantastic to be able to write the music theory engine in Scheme instead of JS.

An example page (not mine) of it running in the browser is here: https://actondev.github.io/s7-playground/

I really hope the racket effort gains traction too! Excited to see this. In comparison, s7 is much more minimal. Though this also means the FFI is dead simple too, so extending it and bridging to js functions is much easier, and everything in s7 is available now in WASM - CL macros, keywords, hashtables, first class environments, continuations, etc

Almost like some strange new technology is increasing the number of people making low quality projects they want to show off....