Multicomp

What I love about this post showing is that it admits up front that the quality of a given entertainment medium is in the writing.

Staff writers are not respected and treated as less than in Hollywood.

Yet the classics of any given medium have emotionally resonating entertainment medium have unique or paradigm-shifting results on audiences, and the medium itself (novel, comic book, TV show, miniseries, film, video game) has influence, but ultimately, it's the writing that is the single most important element of an entertainment IP's value.

An entertainment product that makes you feel emotions beyond boredom is doing its job. True crime/horror bring emotions of fear, mystery, and danger. Sci-Fi/Fantasy bring wonder, curiosity, and discovery, with genre-specific forms of each of those emotions. Mysteries and thrillers bring, well, mysteries and thrills.

So a slice of life AI anime, if it can properly portray from its writing a sense of growing mutual trust, awkwardness of growing up, combined with hope for a better tomorrow, it will have done its job as an entertainment product.

I'm procrastinating working on a fantasy novel which I started in 2012 and need to finish it. It has to hold up in today's neon flashing lights tiktok world as a book. But then there's no reason I couldn't use AI tools to direct adaptations of the source material to an anime or manga or TV show or web series.

Do I wish I could hire and pay and create an anime with a dedicated studio of practitioners who are pros and passionate about the medium beyond my wildest dreams? Sure! Is that likely to happen in 100 million lifetimes? Nope! So if I want to have my IP appear as an anime or TV show, my only realistic option with my one life on earth would be to try to do a similar process to how this animation studio works.

Bravo for them for advancing the medium for this, to find what works and what doesn't. Maybe some day if I will just finish my actual novel and get it eviscerated, after I've figured out how much it will take to pay Michael Kramer and Kate Reading to do an audiobook for it, I can find wild business success such that I could commission an anime series for the IP as my creative vision directs, and have humans do the interesting parts, and let the AIs do the boring inbetweens and tedium work.

But until then, I'll be keeping an eye on aventos to see where they go with this potential.

rainwave.cc has a chiptune mode, that's not electronic necessarily, but its an internet streaming radio that I've used to learn lots of new soundtracks I wouldn't otherwise encounter.

I like how DokuWiki has been chugging along, I first found out about it in 2013 when it was a company wiki (which is no doubt long gone, but thanks for sharing it Jeff B!) and have been using it ever since.

At my day job, workers and sqlite-backed durable objects that quickly hibernate and quickly resume are quite nice, I prefer that to standard lambda.

This reminds me of Fly.io's model off the top of my head, though its not a self-hosted firecracker as such.

I am a heliboard user myself and im only just trying this new keyboard out but at least right now it feels faster and has all the goodies I want in a soft keyboard.

1. super responsive

2. arrow keys!! why this is impossible is beyond me

3. easy access to text editor and undo redo via the long pressing of the enter button

4. easy resizing and im using a floating mode so it's all near my thumb and no awkward bends, just my phone being too heavy for my pinky because phones are massive these days

5. offline voice is comparable at a glance to the offline voice input app I was using with heliboard. that's with their biggest ugliest English model and my phone is from 2022 at the newest.

6. have I mentioned how performance is great on this app yet? pleasantly surprised.

y'all do you but I am keeping this FUTO keyboard.

Code is part of a shared and built understanding of an information system.

If these loopers mean we all have to move at this continuous wave of software happening, then we get to the highest levels of logical information system design and its all human judgement and balancing of business requirements to fit a given niche in a company or market. So all the programmers have to become business analysts/market researchers/businessmen...except the specific niches where AI tooling can't really clank well...or the end of the subsidized AI token era makes all this looping too expensive to continue. This feels like expert systems and symbolics lisps machines redux, where we briefly ran into the fact that its not so much the code itself not being able to do stuff, it's that your company's org always gets shipped, so if you can't change your company org, your software only has so much flexibility.

Dataflow diagrams and domain knowledge / domain modeling / ubiquitous languages may become the metalanguage that we start to use and set the standards for quality, functional, and non-functional standards and conventions. We make the "looper clankers" ensure that they fulfill that data / behavior / performance contracts before saying what "done" is, because "done" is no longer just code that compiles, code that builds, code that deploys, or even code that sits in production; it's code that fulfills all of the user requirements, operator requirements, and maintainer requirements. So, the language used may be required to make us all turn into business analysts and software architects more than syntax knowers. The revenge of UML and the return of declarative / logical design / BDD triumphing?

(Typo scan by gemma4-12b but I didn't let it alter my message)

I missed seeing DeltaChat on there from past grants, but I'm glad to see new projects I've never seen before.

We may never know!

This is what I get for trying out Fable 5.

I've had some luck giving either an example website to ape or listing out a particular era, monkey see monkey do seems to help a bunch.

I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.

This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).

When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.

Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.

And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:

This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.

Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.

I divide up the world into the pre-iPad world and the post-iPad world.

Less because of the iPad itself (though it was the first mainstream 'consumption first' device in my mind) and more because of those sorts of early user-hostile and spyware-first models that were coming out around that time.

Hi Lucas! electronic engineering and plumbing and other skills traditionally seen as 'blue collar' may not be as affected by AI right now, but if the Optimus robots and Hyundai androids Japan is working on so as to supplement their aging population come into fruition, then those areas won't be as AI free as one would expect.

None of us know the future.

Having said that, while your programming career will be different from mine (I started in the twilight of the pre-pandemic era) because of AI tool abilities, the AI tools, while improving a lot, require good judgement to be put to useful work.

In a world where the AI is so smart that it does not need your judgement, then the business is so smart that it does not need any employees at all.

"Coding" as in "I can hand type syntax" will likely be more commoditized.

But being able to design and implement systems that automate and accomplish work useful to business workflows that are ill-defined, have lots of stakeholders who don't necessarily know the entire domain of the work, and need integration of a chain of people's workflows in order to make all the gears of industry go?

That makes you a good programmer. Add on the ability to socialize / network with people, identify an underserved market and bring a profitable product to it? That makes you a full on businessman.

Specific technical skills like digital logic understanding, algorithms and data structures familiarity, set theory, data-intensive application design, SQL (everything eventually becomes SQL with databases), C (still a lingua franca that in some form or fashion will be directly present or a heavy influence in whatever programs one works in), and yes, confidence bred from experience working in the industry, will make you valuable enough to be on whatever short list of humans hired, even if an AI agent is smart enough to handle or give educated guesses about whatever class of problems were commonly known and solved pre 2022.

Your value is no longer only or mainly in "I can follow the process of writing source code that compiles to a program somewhere" - your value is in your developing judgement and experience that lets you take the imperfect world of now, see a goal that the business needs to get to, and use various technical skills to bring that future world into the present state.

AI agents will eagerly and over-politely try to help, but beyond their limitations, your work will be needed then.

You can still do a full career in programming / technical fields, no it is not a wild hiring frenzy like it was 5 years ago, but you can still pursue this field - it's not as obsolete as lots of us like to complain about over here.

Mine told me my graphics card was "or similar" so my stock Firefox is doing at least okay.

While I still follow the general privacy first tenets, I have ended up backing off on some tools (noscript and librewolf) at the extremes of privacy because if every site is going to track everything by my IP or by my ASN or browser fingerprint, I do have a happy medium of being private enough while not being utterly broken in my browsing.

Roughly that looks like email aliases on demand via sieve rules, ublock origin with liberal use of filter lists, different handles and a password manager, frozen credit ratings, and Tailscale exit nodes or Mozilla(Mullvad) VPN for uncontrolled WiFi access points for my jnrootabke android device and mostly signal for comms.

I'm getting to old to be a privacy extreme enthusiast when all of my family side channels everything straight to Facebook, so this is the impure level of privacy I can sustain.

I never bought into Kindle because of this lockdown attitude. I buy audiobooks from audiobookstore and ebooks from google play books when lazy and itch and the other usual independent sites that sell drm free files when I'm not doing a jit in time purchase. I have a kindle I USB sideload or put files on sd card, because it has a physical keyboard.

But with the state of digital goods disrepect for the customer and locking us in mustache twirling reasons, I have better ways to spend my income. Yes I am not above reading shadow copies of books at times, but I'd rather kindle sell all titles as DRM free on rootable devices and their convenient storefront would be enough for me to direct my business there more.

JMAP is a bonus (other fastmail user here) bjt if I can do custom sieve rules and or unlimited aliases created on demand at (somestring)@customdomainiown.com thst I can then use the sieve rules to put into a folder of the same name as that email address, I would rather give my money to support Thunderbird. Fastmail is fine and all but they are in australia so they live on spyware island and they dont have good native clients in the works like thunderbird does.

Fastmail was developing JMAP for a while, it's not gotten a lot of uptake (mostly because Fastmails primary mail partners like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail are all 20 year old legacy dot com companies...did Microsoft spend all day trying to get Fairchild Semiconductor to play nice with them? No, they did a worse is better DOS and the rest is history).

But email is a least common denominator, and like how plan9 failed to take over from unix bc unix inertia, JMAP or deltachat IM over email won't take over bc of network effect inertia, I suspect.

I still tell myself if I going to vibecode a windows app, it will be native and suport 2000 and be a completely static linked executive. Petzold style programming may require memory unsafe legacy languages, but boy does the resulting small fast program with accelerafor keys and native themeable controls make me comfortable.

Im still bummed the web won the UI wars.

Clever use of email delay features to provide extra motivation to pull out the thoughts and post them to yourself. Thats a good habit cycle to power up and use.

I used to do morning pages each day, but i stopped because it seemed to be too hard to maintain the discipline. Everything takes discipline for me to do, if I want to act better than an overgrown toddler, i do have adhd but thats a challenge not a get out of grow up jail free card.

Whoever robbed me of my joyous hope and reward for doing good like journalling, just know I will start that back up someday. Perhaps tomorrow

Yeah having the messages be e2ee by default and then extending it out to one or more groups depending in which circles are currently included for messages could let atproto act like an encrypted group chat with crisscrossing group chats per message, which can ratchet up and along with the new enceyption keys each message/batch of 10 messages/hour/day until that client is dropped from a group or a group is dropped from a conversation, then the keys change and pfs prevents old clients from continuing to read future messages.

Sure you can see that users emit messages in the pds but you dint know if its for your former group or other activitt

I like the fact that Sony's own Betamax victory in the past (when someone else tried to nail THEM for contributory copyright infringement) was used against them now. My, how the turn-tables turn!

For me its mostly that nanobot is very not stable, its only 0.1.4.post4 and who knows what software provenance it's got. Functionality that worked last week doesn't work this week (anecdote: I used to be able to do long tool chains and conversations back to back but after more recent updates, the tool seems to only do one tool write then report back that it's done more tool writings and I have to remind it to finish the job).

This is what I've been trying to get nanobot to do, so thanks for sharing this. I plan to use this for workflow definitions like filesystems.

I have a known workflow to create an RPG character with steps, lets automate some of the boilerplate by having a succession of LLMs read my preferences about each step and apply their particular pieces of data to that step of the workflow, outputting their result to successive subdirectories, so I can pub/sub the entire process and make edits to intermediate files to tweak results as I desire.

Now that's cool!

I still hold my uncles HTC dream and my droid 2 and wish for a landscape slider android phone. This is not Atlantis technology! Though it is 20 years old now, so probably there are HN readers here who think of that device with the same alien fascination I have for those who carried around Psion 3s in their college days when I was eating crayons.

Suddenly got that too. I let archives push me off quad9 but now cloudflare has to go too? Hmmm IDK if I want to read this article that bad.

that's one of my AI shower thoughts, an improved version of https://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/ s basic idea: write compressed computer data to barcode (1d), QR code (2d), multi-color barcode ('3'd), and so on.

But I keep hoping someone will finish the 'use lasers to burn 5d storage into glass chips' project silica concept and bring it to market so I can have isolinear star trek chips.

A cheesy Roller Coaster Tycoon clone in a browser, one-shotted from an AI? Amazing capabilities. The entire "low code drag n drop" market like YoYoGames Game Maker and RPG Maker should be ready to pack it in soon if this keeps improving in this way.

I forget if it was Samsung or Sony, but somewhere along the way on my internet journey, someone claimed, without evidence, and thus I have none either, that the incentive structure for having prestige jobs at large technology companies was always in hardware design and software was seen as easier and more low class.

So since nobody will get any promotions for running good software, they are not incentivized to run good software, and therefore they do just enough to get by?

this instance is a case of abusing the law to reward friends of the administration

I don't think this is an interesting take for anyone, but this reminds me of how the nineteenth century American political system was called the spoils system, and this seems like a twenty first century echo of that.

AI component libraries in your site make your web app even more easily consumed and subsumed by AI chat clients.

This not only kills pages, but it kills the concept of a browser where the user agent is a human, rather than making your pages be designed where the user agent is an AI agent.

That doesn't make me happy to experience because I'm guessing that after a generation or so, web designers will not only do mobile first designs with stupid amounts of white space and not taking advantage of the desktops greater screen real estate and precise mouse movements, but AI first websites will get so popular that browsing sites manually will look like trying to use a text only browser in the JavaScript world.

Easy for me to do a depressing take, but hopefully the bitter lesson of AI will help this particular projected future not come to pass because the AI will get smart enough that it will embed a browser right there in line and just render the window for the user, or it will otherwise gets good enough at screen scraping and UI automation that it can just use an existing browser, just like a human, the sites won't be dumbed down even further for AI consumption.