4,376 karma · joined July 21, 2013
Most recently, I worked on Kenobi.ai (YC W22).
My website is https://rorz.io
Thanks for your feedback (I got similar feedback from my friend and my partner who both write). I agree that this felt like a bit of a hole in the story as I was writing it, that I never managed to satisfactorily patch up.
> Tell us if you have something else written to share.
This is my first piece of long-form fiction, have submitted a couple of new pieces to competitions since, and aim to post those and more soon!
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
P.S. - I didn’t use LLMs to write it, no! :)
Is 16 px or 14 px a better font-size value for a subheading, in a hypothetical layout? Immediately that kind of decision, where both options are objectively good for 12 px paragraph text, suddenly becomes an issue of taste that cannot be evaluated crudely by an algorithm.
For example, a UI / UX professional being asked to appraise a website screenshot may determine that the image in question has "desirable" traits which are inherently not deterministically measurable. Such as, if the interface elements have strong information hierarchy, or if they are deemed to be "fashionable" with current UI trends.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
I was under the impression that verbosity was something that Zig tries to reduce, but perhaps this is not emblematic of other updates to the language?
I think this is a gross over-exaggeration, otherwise dark patterns wouldn't work at the magnitude (majority of the buying population) they do.
I say this not disagreeing with your point:
> We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".
> Climbing Mount Everest and getting a PhD are both hard. I wouldn’t say that doing one means you can do the other “no problem.”
and here:
> Surgeons and electrical engineers may be extremely smart and accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability to weigh in on climate science.
Feels tangentially like a version of Nobel disease[0], discussed here[1] a couple of weeks ago.
---
[0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
A daily puzzle game called Dozenal where you solve each puzzle board by creating chains totalling the number 12. My friend and I came up with the idea over a decade a go, and have finally started bringing it to life in the past couple of months.
In my opinion / experience, AI copy is a generally more cumbersome to read and process. So I would assume a company at Series B stage would have a human (with marketing guidelines) go over the language used on a one-pager to announce a new product.
But -- evidently -- anyone's guess!
I'm also starting to wonder how much real, human-made copy is mimicking AI-created copy that has been filling marketing pages as of late. When people make marketing websites, they often riff and rip off other websites' (à la "Good artists copy; great artists steal"[0]) design ideas and language -- I wouldn't be surprised if there are humans now inadvertently adopting LLM's writing style like that.
[0] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#:~:text=Good%20arti...
Marketing aside, this is the kind of thing (advancements in VCSes) that I’d usually be excited about, but which I’m less excited about coming from Zed because it makes me start to worry that they’re going to continue focussing less on the core editor experience.
I love Zed and I hope that it doesn’t start to go flakey.
It uses puppeteer with a lot of container / script shims in order to try to reliably capture parts of websites "as seen" / "as rendered". You can deploy it to Cloudflare using the button in the repo.
Wanted to share it in case people were looking for a way to use puppeteer in this way on Cloudflare, and also in case people are already doing this and wanted to share what they're working on to solve this problem!
[0] - https://kenobi.ai
I wasn't intending on a budget as large as the Paper Pro's, but I could stretch to that if it made me demonstrably more productive / happier.
I was keener on the price point of the Paper Pure, but like the idea of a backlight and colour!
14 years later, as a software engineer, I still think about that book and the way I can trace back a lot of my initial improvements to its requirement that code got written line-by-line. I still maintain the habit of rote text copying as a way to pick up new tools and commands (i.e. copying documentation examples exactly into my editor), and also when people make an assertion like:
> It's like trying to retype calculus solutions — you don't learn from it.
Maybe not everyone learns that way, but I sure did!
[0] - https://www.amazon.co.uk/iPhone-iPad-Apps-Absolute-Beginners...
I would quite like colour (for doodling), and the price point of the Move is slightly better, but I'm worried about the (small) size of it. Ideally I'd want something with colour support at an A5 paper size level. Wondering if anyone can speak to their experiences with any of them?