pocketarc

> Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing

Does this ever feel like a waste? Are there good thoughts, ideas, and quips you've written and shared, that were then essentially lost to time? Since those thoughts are not archived on your website, when (if ever) do you (or anyone else) ever get to see them again?

> I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD and don’t feel that I have it, but there’s a little sparkle at starting a new project and a certain amount of slog in following certain ones through to their logical end.

Every now and then (usually after reading something on here that brings it up) I wonder about this for myself as well.

I don't think it's ADHD, it's just... normal life, surely? New projects are always more exciting than the last, boring, grindy bits of a side project.

Are those migrations still editable, out of curiosity? Oftentimes I'll want to have migrations add things that simply aren't possible with some ORMs (e.g. generated columns, which can't be schema'd in most ORMs).

The main thing holding me back from Prisma is precisely what you like about it - if the migrations are auto-generated and I can't edit them afterward, I won't be able to do what I need to.

It's a shame as well because this stuff -is- important. One could make the argument that this represents a shift in traditional education, and schools will have to stop relying so much on rote memorization, but the reason you need to learn this stuff is so that it's there with you, guiding you through everything you do in your life. Not just "oh I'll look it up", but actually knowing it and carrying it with you in your "context".

The standard education system is incredible for raising the baseline level of knowledge of everyone in a society. I can talk about concepts like "atoms" or "bacteria" or "black holes" with anyone, and they'll know what they are - even if their knowledge of those subjects isn't in depth. Things that 100 years ago would've been cutting edge research, are base education today that virtually the entire population has studied.

That comes from schooling, and it's so important to commit to memory. Without that background knowledge, your understanding of everything around you will be limited in ways you won't even be aware of.

> I'm not entirely cynical on the value of LLMs, but I've yet to see one say "I dont know", or "I'm not sure, but here's my best guess".

I've used LLMs to build form autofilling based on unstructured documents. It correctly does not answer fields that it doesn't know, and does not try to guess anything. It has been pretty much error-free.

It's all about your prompting. Without explicitly being given guidance on how not to answer, you're right, they will never say they don't know.

If you've never actually seen that happen, I encourage you to experiment more with LLMs; there's lots that can be achieved with the right prompting.

I think the main problem with AI sustainability is that all this VC investment is burning through ungodly amounts of money to produce something that provides no moat.

Even if all AI investment froze tomorrow, I'd still have my 405B Llama 3.1 model, along with countless other smaller models, and I'd run them to do whatever the heck I felt like doing, with no commitment to any provider.

Writing code with AI? I could swap to a local model. Costs nothing. Provides no revenue to any VC-backed company.

Yes, bigger models will always command a premium for the highest end of reasoning. But you don't always need the best possible reasoning. GPT-3 and early GPT-4 were more than good enough for a ton of use cases last year.

And we've seen the pace of development in the open source world these past two years. The open source community (Meta in particular) has completely obliterated the commercial value of these models.

If there were no "weights available" models, OpenAI would have an incredible, unbeatable moat, and they would be worth truly astounding amounts of money. But as it stands, we all have free, unfettered access to local models far better and cheaper than models that were flagship 18 months ago, and close enough to the performance of current flagship models that it won't make a difference for a ton of use cases.

There is no way to justify the current level of investment, with local models being freely available.

The assumption I'm making, of course, is that this transformer technology won't ever lead to AGI - it will just be another tool in our ever-expanding tool-belt.

I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".

In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.

That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.

It's amusing; your 2nd paragraph drives at the core of the programmer experience - having to disclaim everything you do and say with "yes, I know there are better ways, I'm not dumb, I'm just working within constraints, and this does the job".

I think one would use Twitter not for being 'reachable', but for the broadcasting/promotion side of it. Social media is still incredibly useful for that, and Twitter especially.

As for the 1 hour a day - he does say it's not -just- sex. It is not unreasonable to spend an hour a day cuddling/hugging/whatever with your partner, while, say, watching a TV show. That would count.

I started writing this comment by saying:

Exactly - the whole point of a cloud provider is scalability. If you're doing a personal hobby project, get off big scalable clouds and get yourself one (or multiple!) fixed-price VPS or dedicated servers.

But as I think of it, I think what people really want, for hobby projects, is not so much the scalability, but the managed offerings. They want zero-ops, zero-maintenance, zero-server-updates hosting, with a fixed price and hard limits. It won't be infinitely scalable, but it doesn't need to be - it's a hobby project.

They just don't wanna sysadmin a server of their own. Which is completely understandable.

There's room in the market for something like this.

> Or maybe these are just products we don't need?

That's exactly it, they're products we don't -need-. If you already have a smartphone, that's good enough. This is the same problem that plagues the AI assistant devices - it doesn't matter what they can do, they won't replace your smartphone. Which means you're asking someone to carry (and pay for) a smartphone + an extra device. That's a big ask.

It's also the reason why you see these stories of people living smartphone-only lives, doing everything on their smartphones without needing or even having a desktop/laptop. Smartphones are good enough for everything, for a lot of people.

For the record: I -love- the Vision Pro. Tried it out, loved it. But I fall into the `Tech nerds like it because it's "cool"` part. I recognize that that's not going to be the popular opinion. Not now, not ever. There's just not enough value in VR/AR to really change societal norms to the point that everyone's going to want to wear these devices.

Ultimately: Just because a product is a cool idea, doesn't mean it's society-altering. Some products just aren't that valuable.

That's a great idea, but I think the main problem is that the generated endpoints/properties will be affected quite heavily by whatever the prompt/context was.

AI isn't necessarily saying "this is the one endpoint that will always be generated". Unless it is - if the customer generated code is always the same endpoints/properties then it'd definitely make sense to also support those.

That honestly just makes me think: Is there a distro where this isn't the case? Where the defaults are set up for performance in a modern server context, with the expectation that the system will be admin'd by someone technical who knows the tradeoffs? Heck, the decisions + tradeoffs can all be documented in docs.

Is there a reason I'm missing why this wouldn't be worth jumping on?

> This assumption comes about because in the majority of cases it is the truth.

Are we saying that if you can show you have enough income / assets, it'll be that much more likely that you'll be fine in those cases?

As with everything, there's nuance.

> Organize yourselves to vote with your wallet? Illegal!

Individuals voting with their wallet together? Legal. Companies voting with their wallet together? Illegal.

Companies are not individuals. Companies have lots of restrictions on working together, so that they keep competing.

It makes sense especially for tech; what difference does it -really- make if your engineers are working in an office cubicle or at their home office? It's all just sitting at a computer.

I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls).

But I do understand it.

While I think there may be something to that, I think there's a simpler, more "it's just normal capitalism" explanation:

Making deals with every local small-time producer would be a big pain. Why do that when you can make a single deal with a giant monster of a tomato producer, and sell their tomatoes (especially since as the sibling comment points out, local tomatoes won't be as pretty and as uniform in quality)? There's economies of scale, prices are lower, the supply chain will be simpler, it's all better for the supermarket chain.

Something that might be worth pondering is: When was that ever not the case? Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!) to work in mines and farms, were in a better situation?

The discussion around cost is a red herring. If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton. Most of us here on HN would have 10 children each, because cost definitely isn't an issue for any well-paid software engineer or startup founder.

I definitely think that you are right - this is definitely going to be a major crisis in the next few decades, and there needs to be a serious course correction, and -major- incentives for having kids.

But I don't think it comes down to cost, for the most part. I think there are a number of other factors, but cost just ends up being a nice easy scapegoat because it sounds completely reasonable. Nobody can argue with it, not even oneself.

That is a good idea, but I don't think it does enough to serve the purpose - the point of brownouts is to trigger their error/alert system. If the API is just being slower than usual, it won't trigger anything. Even if a human was reviewing it manually (which is quite unlikely), they would only think "oh, their API's really getting slower these days, sad".

There'd be nothing that indicates "The API is going to get shut down in a month and I need to move off of it ASAP!". Random, intermittent API failures would lead you to go check the API status out, and in the process you'd find out "oh, this API is going away".

Edit: On the point of rate limiting, I think the problem with it is that it'll affect everyone using the API all the time, not just during the brownout period. It effectively shuts the API down for everyone still using it (if the rate limit is too low, and if it isn't, then it won't be noticed by low-use consumers).

Something that can be extremely useful as well in situations like this, is doing API brownouts, toward the later stages of the process. Disable the API for short stretches of time, on the way to disabling it entirely, to give consumers who might not be keeping up with changes a way to be alerted (they'll notice the downtime).

> “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

Honestly this page is a treasure trove of honest quotes, dang.

Given it's Tailwind + shadcn, I'd be surprised if it's not v0[0].

[0]: https://v0.dev

Location: Idaho, US

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Vue.js, SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL), AWS, DevOps, Go, PHP

Résumé/CV: https://pocketarc.com/cv.pdf

Email: bruno@pocketarc.com

Senior software engineer with 15+ years of experience in full-stack development. Strong background in React, TypeScript, and SQL, with a focus on automation and performance optimization. Led development of core platforms and management systems at Just Move In (PropTech). Recently relocated to the US and looking for remote opportunities. Fluent in 5 languages and experienced working with international teams.

GitHub: https://github.com/pocketarc

Website: https://pocketarc.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/pocketarc

> Furthermore, bundling an 80MB+ SQLite file to our codebase slowed down the entire Github repository and hindered us from considering more robust hosting platforms.

It's... an 80MB database. It couldn't be smaller. There are local apps that have DBs bigger than that. There is no scale issue here.

And... it's committed to GitHub instead of just living somewhere. And they switched to Neon.

To me, this screams "we don't know backend and we refuse to learn".

To their credit, I will say this: They clearly were in a situation like: "we have no backend, we have nowhere to store a DB, but we need to store this data, what do we do?" and someone came up with "store it in git and that way it's deployed and available to the app". That's... clever. Even if terrible.

> I guess my dozens of followed authors and infinitely expanding TBR list on goodreads that I regularly buy books and 15+ years of purchase history and ratings just can't be used as a signal, because my reccs are full of this nonsense too.

This is what I don't understand. There is SO much -good- data about us, but recommendations everywhere, by and large, are terrible. You'd think that with all the tracking, with all the pushback on privacy protections and whatnot, that we'd be getting -something- out of it. But I go to Amazon and it tells me "you just bought a printer? here's 10 more printers you might be interested in".

> Saying "it's legal as long as the percent is small enough" is silly.

Credit card companies have had caps on their fee percentages in the EU for a long time, it's not unusual for the EU to set these limits.

Others have commented on it being SEO-related, but I think there might be a psychological component to it as well, where you don’t want people to bounce because they think it’s an old and irrelevant article.

Hard to believe it, but that was over a decade ago already.

I'm assuming it's Sherlock Holmes and the case of the rose tattoo! What a brilliant game.

Believe it or not, thanks to ScummVM being in the iOS/iPad OS App Store now, I have actually played that game on my iPad. You'd be amazed at how well it's held up. It looks really good on an iPad, and the point and click nature of it fits touchscreens perfectly.

> sometimes mandatory

This is definitely a bit off-topic compared to the article, but it's worth noting that those modals are there to obtain consent to store and use your personal data, and aren't specifically related to cookies (anymore), but the GDPR. If the news website didn't store personally identifying information about you (anywhere! not just in cookies), it wouldn't have to obtain consent, and wouldn't need any modals.

I think the most annoying part of the regulation has been its lack of enforcement, because it has led to a weird sort of complacency where there's no clear knowledge of what is and isn't required, and then websites half-ass the banner (for example, they should be making it as easy to click Reject as it is to click Accept, not sending you down a dark pattern of checkboxes and stuff), or throw up a banner just to say they have one, even if they don't need it (I've seen that!).

So we get the worst of both worlds: bad modals that don't even do what they're supposed to, and no enforcement to correct any of it.