rafterydj

If you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it, why the hell are we paying huge amounts to mince words over the proof?

If your business plan is selling software to people, 98% is not plenty at all.

If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it, it's not good. The business side of things is reasonable to prioritize right up until it isn't.

Yeah that raised my eyebrow as well. "Popularized" maybe, but "largely built" I think is a mis-characterization.

Not technology - that's only downstream of politics.

No political administration in my lifetime (!) has made policy decisions against the interests of tech monopolists. The closest we got was Lina Kahn's FTC.

I feel like I'm going nuts.

There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice.

I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know what the AI is being asked to do is it likely you will find the output helpful.

This is itself alarming to me, but no one else seems to find this to be quite damning for the AI services being offered, preferring instanced to be wowed by the convenience and speed at which they can be delivered unreviewed and unproven information.

I don't think it is, to be honest.

Politics - particularly politics relevant to large democracies - appears to be a function of visible truth, and not truth itself. See all the articles about "X slams Y" or the endless "we're launching an investigation into [thing we cannot prove]".

Anecdotally, from one attempt at chatting with it, Grok is far and away the most obviously dishonest and shifts conversations towards right leaning talking points.

Maximally truth seeking indeed.

Oh dear. I've been using Omarchy! Had no idea. Thanks for the info.

Was already kind of annoyed at the "manual" not being very comprehensive - think I'll switch to another distro or fully yank control away from Omarchy and just roll my own Arch, I guess. Depends on how much work it'll take.

Disagree. There's a power imbalance between how easy it is to write something by hand and slap a human label next to AI output. "Let the reader decide" is not fair in a world where the reader then sees >90% AI writing in internet search results.

Personally I think it should be optional, but meaningfully optional in a way that's technically sound and easier than it is now. I kind of feel like long term I'd want "professional/public" code I'd put my name on, and separate code I'd work on under a pseudonym/handle.

Yes but Qt comes with the drawbacks of being tied to Qt.

With Electron + React, you'd be able to rip out any components you need and place them in other web apps. The browser is (psychologically) avoiding vendor dependencies to a greater degree than other options.

Man, I've really been falling into his stuff. So refreshing to hear someone speak from a perspective of care. It's good for my soul in this world of slop.

Not a product manager but I habitually try to play devil's advocate as one. I think it's popularity, full stop. You _could_ vibe code a native app no problem - but then you're targeting one set of hardware. If you're already just vibing it, why not make something that will work cross-platform while you're at it? And if an LLM is prompted with that, they'll usually go with the popular choice: web app on Electron.

I don't think we can stop publishers from rent-seeking behavior, I am only trying to get at the idea that we should clearly communicate to a user when something is truly bought and owned vs rented. If that information is clearly and loudly proclaimed to the customer at purchase time, I have to assume consumer behavior would steer the industry in a more positive direction.

I do as well, but I think it's good practice to put something like in a user preference setting somewhere if you are going to stray from default browser/system behavior.

> You're calling for legislating software architecture for a subset of software that is different to how it works everywhere else in the tech industry.

I am not even sure that's true, even in the limited scope of "we've already built this jumble of micro services that our thin client requires to do anything and a rewrite is impossible".

I think the real goal of this would simply be clearer communication with consumers. Therefore if you are selling an inherently temporary access pass to your server, say so. Don't call it the same thing as someone else who is selling a standalone or self-hostable software binary.

I don't see it regulating software architecture so much as it is the beginnings of trying to make legal categories of software, which I'm not opposed to doing.

The classic SKG example is The Crew. Where is the indie recreation of the Continental USA to drive around? Indie games are great, but let's not act like art is fungible.

I don't like the idea of "they will just find loopholes anyway", that seems defeatist. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

I wish people started thinking of good regulation as a technical problem as much as it is a social one.

Agreed that thinking about the natural progression of today's circumstances are painful to think about, and about the death of intellectualism.

However, I'd like to play devil's advocate here, and speak to your "without ever stating a position" line. I'd argue that's just careful wording hiding under the mask of intellectualism.

The argument against Israel is, as you say, that it is "essentially" genocide. Speaking as one of the cohort (although slightly older than new grad) of which you're referring, every argument against Israel is to my view quite straightforward. Killing innocent people is bad, doing so for political reasons is worse, and when you do it to an entire city/nation/people you have genocide ipso facto. While it's not a very complex take, it really doesn't need to be when there is a preponderance of evidence.

Contrasted with the defense of Israel's actions, and you have a vast array of whataboutisms, downplaying, justifying by means of referring to authority (in Israel), calling critics anti-Semitic, etc.

In my personal experience I find the majority of pro-Israel arguments to be at heart anti-intellectual.

So when you dress up a complex situation by emphasizing how above and beyond all understanding it is, to me that feels you are intentionally muddying the waters to try to obfuscate the real problem. And that, I would say, is also anti-intellectual.

Just because we have generational problems with anti-intellectualism does not mean this particular circumstance belongs in that category.

You're phrasing of "could have been a good payday" makes me think about why people pay for software at all. The bread and butter "quick job, get paid" gigs in software were always circumstantial and depended on humans understanding customer needs more than anything, and combining it with their own desires to grow in mastery of their work.

I'm reminded of the 'faster horses' remark from Ford - since AI by design produces what it thinks we are asking for, how will anyone know who to pay for true innovation?

I agree with you. I think that if we're talking about actual reliable problem solving, we have to be discussing robotic / drone systems. Software is as complex as you want to make it, and always has been.

If you are trying to say that it's not just Meta but all tech giants, you have an oddly defensive way to make that point.

Just because the entire industry was doing bad things does not absolve the largest members of the industry from doing bad things. They were leading the charge!

Facebook is forcing people to use Facebook. If there were realistic alternative social network systems that allowed account migration with contacts and messages, Facebook would be dead in the water.

You can't seriously argue that everyone can just drop a mainstream communication tool without acknowledging the lack of replacements.

Putting Meta next to Netflix in terms of moral culpability is in my opinion laughable.

I don't disagree that there are reasons people compromise on things like the morality of their employer - tale as old as society itself. I do disagree that many people like Meta's services - the only things I have seen people like about Meta is Facebook Marketplace (which is really just Craig's List or eBay if you are looking at technical problems) or the Meta Quest VR (which they've since gutted employment wise since the metaverse debacle).

Not only is it a morally bad employer, but it's also not a very good employer overall. They've just got institutional inertia keeping them entrenched, and are trying to buy their way into AI dominance to boot.

It's hard to imagine a tech company with more clear disdain for their employees than Meta. To me, that seems like a recipe for a dead company, but by all means, build your resume and network.

*Edit: people also use Instagram, but the engineering problems with that are also found in newer social networks like Bluesky, with a little less engagement addiction focus.

Could you elaborate on this?

Wow. I've essentially been circling that exact thought for awhile now. But your blunt phrasing really strikes a chord with me.

Here is the problem with the idea of "banning online advertising" - there is a large amount of people who spend a lot of time online. To the point that even small local businesses will buy advertisement space on social media. If such advertising is, it can be assumed social media overall will die, and we will regress back to a world where the previous media incumbents (network television) once again gain all the power.

Not a very wise solution in my opinion.

This is in all likelihood an improvement on just measuring lines of code output, but not at all a silver bullet. I'd imagine this skews heavily towards developers who were around first in large projects. Also skews towards developers who pick certain tasks over others - there's always circumstances where the library you are building on passes breaking changes, etc. but that I feel might be more minor in comparison to the first concern.

There has to be some language for what you're describing, because I've experienced similar perceptions of people. I've been on both sides of the "you don't actually understand what is being said until years later" discussions as well.

One thing I'd posit is that it might not be the people, but rather an ability or skill people can improve. It takes difficulty and focus and time, but it can be honed. I know this to be true; otherwise I would not be able to understand that which I dismissed years ago!

The problem with this, if it is an active ability rather than a person's inherent traits, is that it becomes impossible to recognize by any identifiable markers. I've often found that some of the most intelligent and "look at the problem from all angles" kind of minds often have very glaring blind spots (look no further than political subjects, for example). These blind spots manifest even in the most generally intelligent thinkers, that's what makes people human after all. So it can be said that good thinking is a very delicate thing, and it can be difficult to recognize against noise no matter who is speaking or what they are discussing.

I see arguments like this particularly against Electron and the web development sphere in general and I think it's more nuanced than either programmers or "marketing" (read: anyone not a programmer) gives credit towards.

The "elusive dream" of 'write once, run anywhere' is realistically just people wanting to write software with direct product or service use in mind. Native OS conventions are subject to the middlemen of OS vendors, whereas the web (while basically subject to the same vendors) makes a substantial attempt at bridging the gap of writing software for your own purposes without native OS problems. This is a symptom of OSes catering/selling to developers as a platform and hooking them in the 1990s and 2000s.

This attitude that wanting to just make useful code for people and not worry about a windows 11 update breaking everything because they are irresponsible - to think that is not a valid desire is IMO a big problem.

On the other hand, you have a point that it quickly gets out of hand in terms of standards and accessibility and performance bottlenecks. WebAssembly and the WASI are so slow to come out and will by design always be slower than native performance. This doesn't and shouldn't stop us from having decently performant and decently usable program experiences, but it is a prerequisite to care about those things, and the other inheritors of the web development sphere clearly do not want to develop things properly if they take longer than the next fiscal quarter.

There is 100% good Electron code out there, just as 100% there is bad native OS code. The problem isn't inherently the goals of the 'write once, run anywhere' idea; it's more the casualty of other interests pulling away from what developers actually want.

100% agree. The spam problem is, I fear, a symptom of the walled gardens of Google and Apple not being very judiciously maintained. They continue to push the bare minimum of notification controls out for the user, but double deal when they allow e.g. custom app-defined notification lists. Something like this would simply never fly if the Unix philosophy were an actual consideration in their product design.

I'm glad I'm not the only who seemingly has a taste for "older" diagrams from that period. It makes me think of the same aesthetic roots of what's now called "cassette futurism" or "NASA-punk". Older engineering charts really feel like there was more care and thought put into each line or facet, even though I'm sure it's a trick of time.