DavidPiper

Very happy JamCorder customer here. I've started playing in improv shows since I bought it too, and it's nice to have those on record!

It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card.

Thank you so much for making this, it's basically a perfect product for me and I love it. No notes.

FWIW I don't think it's pathetic at all, and I have the same reaction as you to a lot of things on HN. There are a wide variety of topics that bring out various biases and other cognitive blind spots in people, and bots.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

Oh that hit me more than I thought it would, thank you.

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

And their reputation suffered so much that we're calling it out on an internet forum decades later.

But I can’t help but feel that the effort meant something.

Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.

Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.

I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.

Sadly it doesn't quite go away even when you've turned everything off: https://davids.town/dear-apple-please-fix-ios-music

Everyone got real loud when Windows 10 was killed off. And it happened anyway. I expect the same will happen this time, as do Microsoft.

Might be time to go back to a second, air-gapped machine so I can actually use all the software I paid for.

Slightly facetiously, but also completely seriously: I thought the speaker was talking about a "solution" that explicitly frames the students as the "problem" - and the students noticed.

Not sure I agree with some of your points, but also not sure they're downvote-worthy.

As a non-American, the only thing I could probably argue against in good faith with enough context is Point 2.

I took from the 10 stories that everybody knew what was happening, and still nobody did anything (with one exception after-the-fact). The media today is certainly broadcasting what is happening, but I'm not sure it's actually solving the "let's do something about it" problem.

Another opportunity to recommend "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45" by Milton Mayer. The audiobook is great too.

A critical but empathetic look at how fascism rises and spreads through, and alongside, ordinary people in ordinary society. Excellent book, incredibly relevant.

An excerpt, if you don't want to commit to the whole thing: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

Assembly for the correct architecture is only one part of getting an executable running on a machine.

- Dynamic libraries (e.g. for calling into the kernel, but also user space dynamic libraries) are OS-specific (.so for Linux, .dylib for macOS, .dll for Windows)

- Executable format is OS-specific (ELF for Linux, Mach-O for macOS, PE for Windows)

- Dynamic loading and linkage of both the above are also therefore OS-specific

I really enjoyed OP's story, and the way they told it. Knowing the location of Richmond Hill is really not the point.

Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.

You don't have any idea what job they have, how good they are at it, what their company does, what industry they work in, whether their income is backed by labour, knowledge work, emotional connection, government relationships, capital investments, ...

See above.

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately:

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

Nope, looks like someone's angling for some sweet domain parking money.

Or a lawsuit, given macOS is a trademark.

That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one.

Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.

I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However...

Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.

(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)

This analogy only works if the toddler buys their own lego and, while assembling it, the neighbour's toddler - whose parents can't afford to buy lego - chokes to death.

It is possible to build things that don't hurt people.

It is possible to reduce the harms of things that are likely to hurt people.

It is possible to not treat hurt as a foregone conclusion.

It is possible not to use this foregone conclusion to defend strangers who not only create things that actively harm people, but promote this harm as a good thing, without also providing the support to reduce or avoid those harms.

I agree that being further along the Vibe end of the spectrum is the issue. Some of the other ways I use Claude don't have the same problems.

If the result is something you can't explain than slow down and follow the steps it takes as they are taken.

The problem is I can explain it. But it's rote and not malleable. I didn't do the work to prove it to myself. Its primary form is on the page, not in my head, as it were.

I've just started a new role as a senior SWE after 5 months off. I've been using Claude a bit in my time off; it works really well. But now that I've started using it professionally, I keep running into a specific problem: I have nothing to hold onto in my own mind.

How this plays out:

I use Claude to write some moderately complex code and raise a PR. Someone asks me to change something. I look at the review and think, yeah, that makes sense, I missed that and Claude missed that. The code works, but it's not quite right. I'll make some changes.

Except I can't.

For me, it turns out having decisions made for you and fed to you is not the same as making the decisions and moving the code from your brain to your hands yourself. Certainly every decision made was fine: I reviewed Claude's output, got it to ask questions, answered them, and it got everything right. I reviewed its code before I raised the PR. Everything looked fine within the bounds of my knowledge, and this review was simply something I didn't know about.

But I didn't make any of those decisions. And when I have to come back to the code to make updates - perhaps tomorrow - I have nothing to grab onto in my mind. Nothing is in my own mental cache. I know what decisions were made, but I merely checked them, I didn't decide them. I know where the code was written, but I merely verified it, I didn't write it.

And so I suffer an immediate and extreme slow-down, basically re-doing all of Claude's work in my mind to reach a point where I can make manual changes correctly.

But wait, I could just use Claude for this! But for now I don't, because I've seen this before. Just a few moments ago. Using Claude has just made it significantly slower when I need to use my own knowledge and skills.

I'm still figuring out whether this problem is transient (because this is a brand new system that I don't have years of experience with), or whether it will actually be a hard blocker to me using Claude long-term. Assuming I want to be at my new workplace for many years and be successful, it will cost me a lot in time and knowledge to NOT build the castle in the sky myself.

It sounds pedantic, but I think it's important: maths and physics are often used to describe sounds, their relationships and emergent properties through combination. Maths and physics aren't ever really used to describe music.

It's like telling someone they can paint a masterpiece because they understand Fe4[Fe(CN)6]3 makes an aesthetically pleasant blue pigment.

People don't want change? Nah, people like change when it is obvious to them that the change is good.

I agree with some of what you said, but just want to point out that you're doing the very thing you criticise here.

I think lots of people genuinely don't want change. Hopefully you have great answers to my objection.

In general, I've found the question of "who needs to provide evidence first?" is one of the most casually ignored and maliciously manipulated questions in so much professional discourse. The answer is often implicitly "the person with less role power" which by itself is a terrible answer.

I don't know if anyone is holding the author up as a hero, least of all herself. The book reads as a masterclass in grooming, manipulation and abuse.

If anything, the title "Careless People" does a disservice to its message: the people above and around her clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and took great care to evade any and all responsibility for anything.

Sounds just like John Cleese's "Open Mode" and "Closed Mode" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

No idea why this has been downvoted. There is a lot of demand for this, and at least one company actively working on orchestrating home and EV batteries with the grid: https://www.amber.com.au/amber-for-evs

don't kid yourself that your actions will make any difference whatsoever to the overall trajectory of AI adoption in IT or society

How large does a group have to be (absolute number or percentage of population) for you to change your mind on this?

Serious question - genuinely curious. My answer is about 10% provided they are organised in some way. 5% if you're particularly good at collective action.