taybin

What does it mean to “obsessively craft every pixel?”

That’s an interesting point about the tension between standardization and creativity. I’m going to think about that for a bit.

I hate to be cynical but I expect this call will generate as much action as climate change warnings.

Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.

For a long time I was convinced they used Erlang for handling all the distributed, concurrent state. I guess not.

Coding is so rich that you can use it for artistic pursuits, but I argue that the output is the real art, and the code itself is not art and itself is not expressing anything.

I actually think plumbing does require a bunch of creativity. Trying to add some fixture to an old house with out of spec walls and prior creative solutions can be a real challenge. And you can really appreciate the people who come up with an elegant solution that isn't "tear it out and redo it from scratch".

I'd like to read that blog post.

Thank you for understanding my comment. Code is a craft and could maybe be more compared to pottery, which usually has a use, and is primarily judged by well it fulfills its purpose. I'm not saying that there isn't "beautiful" code, and certainly not denying clever code. But the goalpost that code is just as expressive as literature or music is just too much. Show me the code that is inspired by the reflection of a sunset on a pond on a windy day.

> Code is a beautiful form of creative expression, as rich as literature or music

I think this is overstating it and makes me wonder how familiar the author is with literature and music. Most programming is closer to plumbing. We come in, gripe about the guy who did the prior job, and solve a puzzle with some unique constraints. The reason LLMs are good at coding is because with coding we want boring, banal code.

I’ve seen a ton of new open source slop programs. Every day there’s so many “announcing my cool new app” posts. I don’t remember the rate being this high before.

I'm in software and I do alright, but I'm still on a PS4 too. Just can't justify the upgrade when there's still so many great old games available. Maybe when the next Horizon Zero Dawn comes out, I'll be forced to upgrade, but I'm taking my time about it.

No it doesn’t. Laws and regulations aren’t equations and don’t need to be perfectly balanced. There is no QED here with your reasoning.

The sci-fi novel A Fire in the Deep starts with describing a Software Archeologist, who digs through millennia of strata of layers of indirection and I think we could end up needing that one day.

I haven’t seen any that are made by humans for a long time.

What are you talking about? They’re so ubiquitous.

Bernie Sanders proposes a lot of things that are never implemented. I’m not sure his support is actually a useful signal of greater support.

That is exactly what i did last week. Got praised for it.

What makes it production ready? What's the code coverage on your tests? There are only seven commits in this repo as of this comment.

I don’t. What are you referring to?

Music is something you can do without formal training. Much like how you can be a terrible programmer but still create popular software. Just like how maybe what the world wanted at some moment was a slow PHP alternative to moveabletype, maybe the world also wanted sped up, stripped down, 60s girl band songs, without complicated rhythms and harmonies.

Not trying to say that Wordpress v1 was terrible software written by terrible programmers, but I hope you get my point.

No mention of “baz”

They don't post the bad photos onto instagram. You really need to figure this out or you're going to be chasing other people's dreams. All your comments just talk about how you want to make more money, when you're already making a lot of money.

This is the sort of race where once you get to the end, you realize you were racing against yourself. Stop comparing your blooper reel to their highlight reel. It's not healthy. I guarantee there are people envious of your life.

I have this book. I read it while working on my senior project, which was adding the Actor concurrency model to Icon. A pretty easy read. The Icon language was so innovative. It was my secret weapon in college.

How do we know that they don't? I'm sure they have procedures for biological warfare responses.

It's a good question. My bias is that it often does not, and that the current investors make sure it does not. However, it also isn't in people's interest to advertise that they have a lot of money suddenly, so I'm not sure we'll see some good answers here.

Who wants to hire some 'wah, syntax is hard' programmers?

"if the fundamental particles are just quasiparticles in a superfluid quantum vacuum"

well obviously.

It will be interesting to see how well Gladwell's claim stands up to empirical testing.

Maybe we can get Morgan Freeman to narrate the source code of TeX.