wry_discontent

Yes, I think it's a big deal if you worked for a big evil organization on purpose.

And you'll keep hearing that, because it's a marketing term.

How I interpreted their thoughts on "loops" and "graphs" etc, is that they 1. have unlimited token allowances, and 2. are working on problems where the solution itself can be described by code.

It reminds me of property based testing. I really liked the idea when I heard about it, but most of what I work on does not tend to behave in a way that can be easily described mathematically like that.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to do it.

What the hell am I supposed to be excited about? Endless slop? Career change from intellectually stimulating creation to bland gatekeeping?

There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.

They work on research problems you can define a clear solution criteria for.

The kinds of business software I work on don't have those characteristics. If I needed something like a utils library, I think I could easily have Claude write the whole thing and not read the code.

You get over it really quickly once you start actually using it. I find it basically impossible to read Clojure outside the editor in any meaningful sense.

Huge fan of the Voyager with home-row-mods.

This seems totally reasonable. It is designed to be addictive, and they definitely target folks under 18. The article specifically mentions teens.

The tools produce mediocre, usually working in the most technical sense of the word, and most developers are pretty shit at writing code that doesn't suck (myself included).

I think it's safe to say that people singularly focused on the business value of software are going to produce acceptable slop with AI.

That makes sense given that it's trained on real world developers.

I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.

I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.

This is great. One of the things I say to my wife all the time, which is taken from a Kurt Vonnegut quote, is that "I don't have to be good at my hobbies".

It's my preference to a point. I think you can over-do it. I've worked in systems that didn't use it and worked just fine. I would bet most folks err on the side of too little, unless they have some kind of framework doing the heavy lifting.

    Here will be a list of ... things I don't like about them.

I did not see a list of things not to like. Just a set of vague thoughtless complaints.

I see a lot of times people (read: me) are lazy and make a mock that does not have anywhere near the behavior of the original. It's more like a very partial stub. I will mock an api with 20 possible calls with the 2 that I use. Unsurprisingly, this mock is closely tied to the current implementation.

This sounds great until one of your other functions calls that function.

You're just describing dependency injection, but if you say that, people won't want to listen cause doing that all the time sucks.

I've been working on a web framework in Clojure. There are already a few others, but they're, in my opinion, too focused on the Clojure community, and are much harder to sell to people I know who might otherwise use Clojure. I wanted something that was more like a Rails or a Phoenix or a Next.js. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

I would say this does not work in any nontrivial way from what I've seen.

Even basic scripts and UI components are fucked up all the time.

I've been using NoBS toothpaste tabs for a couple years which are nano-hydroxyapatite. I find them effective. No issues at my dentist.

In fact, a year ago, they wanted to put in a filling for a minor cavity, but I wanted to put it off and by the time I went back they said it was gone.

edit: I also like the tabs because they're easy to travel with.

I mean I hate low effort slop that's pushed from every vaguely technical source and tells me it's great. It's very clearly junk.

I think what people hate is the sense of quality degradation. Everything feels cheap. Everything feels like it's meant to be consumed in the next 20 seconds, and then forgotten about. People want stuff that doesn't suck.

This seems naive to me.

There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.

I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.

Isn't that begging the question? If you just accept the presupposition that intelligence is tightly coupled to consciousness, then all that makes perfect sense to me. But I don't see why I should accept that. It isn't obvious to me, and it doesn't match my own experience of being conscious.

Totally possible that we're talking past each other.

But that's not an answer. Why should intelligence and not some other quality be coupled to consciousness? In my experience, consciousness (by which I'm specifically talking about qualia/experience/awarenesss) doesn't at all seem tightly coupled to intelligence. Certainly not in a way that seems obvious to me.

What makes you think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence?

"brain as computer" is just the latest iteration of a line of thinking that goes back forever. Whatever we kinda understand and interact with, that's what we are and what the brain is. Chemicals, electricity, clocks, steam engines, fire, earth; they're all analogies that help us learn but don't necessarily reflect an underlying reality.

I have found that chaining things in Smalltalk get immensely painful after just a couple elements. Unlike most other languages, I find myself reaching for silly little var names for lots of different things I would normally just let flow.

I've used zippers a couple times.

Once for navigating a collection of deeply nested routes in a webapp, and once for navigating deeply nested xml to grab very particular data.

Both times it was pretty pleasant and nice to use.

I wouldn't reach for them in most normal situations cause they're more complicated to get right than simple looping (or `clojure.walk/prewalk`), but if you have large semi-predictable data structures, you can do cool stuff with zippers.

If you use Emacs, there's a mode similar to magit that's under active development: https://github.com/bolivier/jj-mode.el

Isn't git the only supported backend?

I always introduce jj as a better git ui.

React was such a simple and elegant solution when it started, and it's accreted so many quirks and weird behaviors that are clearly specific to the use cases of the companies leading development.

At this point, I'm not interested in what they're doing anymore. I'm not starting new projects with React, and I'd move away from it for anything small.