asielen

I feel the same way about bespoke software as I do about 3D printing. For a small subset of people who like to tinker it is amazing, but there is a pretty big market for paying other people to please to 3D print for you.

For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.

The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.

Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.

On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.

Yeah, I think I agree with your assessment.

Everyone creating their own bespoke apps sounds great until all these people realize what they were paying software companies for, maintenance, security and inoperability.

I'm seeing this in my ops role currently. Everyone from development to marketing vibe coding things that look good and function on a surface level but are creating more maintenance headaches for me to support since once they get their pretty front end, they think they did the hard work and now it is on ops to support.

A couple weeks ago, I had accounting come to me to show me their cool app they vibe coded and asking for help "just finishing it up." They spent 6 hours making the front end to a form.

A form that I could have spun up in 10 minutes if they came to me first using tools we already had. But now because they "made it" they feel ownership of it and don't like the idea of me rebuilding it in a more standard way.

Marketing last week showed me another "app" they spent all week on. It again was just a form. They didn't like the jira form interface so they decided to make a prettier way to submit tickets. However it doesn't actually do anything, it is just a front end. But of course they showed leadership and got kudos for it because it looks so nice, and now I have to figure out how to wire it up and maintain it.

And don't get me started on an engineer who decided to make their own BI tool that is half baked and not even connected to anything (they give it a csv every day and hit run). When we literally have a live dashboard with the same data.

These things are killing efficiency. You have teams "building things" instead of dieing their job. And leadership loving it because sexy UI must mean productivity.

Interesting, how do you use that system? I could see it useful for genealogy research.

I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%.

It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.

Execution should be executing

Also not sure about the usage of theater there. I'd probably swap it out for "show". Never heard theater used like that although it is pretty close to a standard idiom, "to make a show of something".

I won't argue that it is a universal truth but it has played out the same for my kids and my friends groups kids.

They treat it like a drug and lose all emotional regulation. I don't believe all screen time is bad, but it is something you have to teach them to regulate and 3 year olds and younger are just bad at regulating emotion in general. Teaching them to do this is just part of parenting. One of the most important things we can teach our kids is that it is okay to be bored. In fact it is great to be bored sometimes.

On the other hand, being a parent is hard and keeping your sanity is important in order to be a good parent. So if it helps you be a better parent all other times, it could be worth it.

The issue is when screens are used to in place of parenting. Parents using it as a way to fuel their own screen addiction.

On the other hand, for me airplanes are a special case and all rules go out the window to help keep the kid calm.

It is an over correction because of all the empty promises of LLMs. I use Claude and chatgpt daily at work and am amazed at what they can do and how far they can come.

BUT when I hear my executive team talk and see demos of "Agentforce" and every saas company becoming an AI company promising the world, I have to roll my eyes.

The challenge I have with LLMs is they are great at creating first draft shiny objects and the LLMs themselves over promise. I am handed half baked work created by non technical people that now I have to clean up. And they don't realize how much work it is to take something from a 60% solution to a 100% solution because it was so easy for them to get to the 60%.

Amazing, game changing tools in the right hands but also give people false confidence.

Not that they are not also useful for non-technical people but I have had to spend a ton of time explaining to copywriters on the marketing team that they shouldn't paste their credentials into the chat even if it tells them to and their vibe coded app is a security nightmare.

Related it seems AI has been effective at forcing my team to care about documentation including good comments. Before when it was just humans reading these things, it felt like there was less motivation to keep things up to date. Now the idea that AI may be using that documentation as part of a knowledge base or in evaluating processes, seems to motivate people to actually spend time updating the internal docs (with some AI help of course).

It is kind of backwards because it would have been great to do it before. But it was never prioritized. Now good internal documentation is seen as essential because it feeds the models.

Nah just Vegas being Vegas. The whole area is designed to squeeze every dollar out of you.

So a VPN?

The way you put that makes be think of the current challenge younger generations are having with technology in general. Kids who were raised on touch screen interfaces vs kids in older generations who were raised on computers that required more technical skill to figure out.

In the same way, when everything just works, there will be no difference, but when something goes wrong, the person who learned the skills before will have a distinct advantage.

The question is if AI gets good enough that slowing down occasionally to find a specialist is tenable. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be predicably not perfect.

Expertw will always be needed, but they may be more like car mechanics, there to fix hopefully rare issues and provide a tune up, rather than building the cars themselves.

In this case, why encode the string instead of just having the options as plain text parameters?

It is easy but annoying. I nearly always find it easier to write a short script and run that rather than type terminal commands directly.

Great so train to major destinations and then rent a car from there.

The money is going to rent seeking middle man corporations. Our system is basically a jobs program for lawyers, defense contractors and insurance companies. They contribute nothing to the country but absorb so much money.

Their talents would be better used if we cut out the middle layer.

feels more authentic and grassroots than most things being foisted upon them.

And then corporations squeeze any last drop of authenticity from it through merchandising it to death.

“do you think every major CEO could be wrong?”

If nothing else I think every major CEO lives in a different would than I do and has very different motivations than I do. And most of those motivations are in direct opposition to a healthy society. So yes, I do think every major CEO is wrong. If for no other reason but because of short term, earnings report driven thinking.

If it is clean, can't you also compost it?

That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.

The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.

Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...

I don't trust most CEOs perspectives on AI at all, they are far too removed from the actual work to know what AI can and can't do.

When I hear a CEO say this, what I hear is that they are going to use AI as an excuse to do massive layoffs to juice stock price and then cash out before the house of cards comes tumbling down. Every public company CEOs dream. The GE model in the age of AI.

Will AI drastically reshape industries and careers? Absolutely. Do currently CEOs understand or even care how (outside of making them richer in the next few quarters)? No.

CEOs are just marketing to investors with ridiculous claims because their products have stagnated. (See Benioffs recent claim that 50% of work at Salesforce is AI. Maybe that is why it sucks so much)

Tiff if you want to archive them and they started as raw or tiff, jpeg for everything else. If the file is already jpeg, there is no point in covering it to a new better quality format, the quality won't get better than it already is.

It may be obsolete, but it is ubiquitous. I care less about cutting edge tech than I do about the probability of being able to open it in 20+ years. Storage is cheap.

Presentation is a different matter and often should be a different format than whatever your store the original files as.

"People don’t remember who went to grab drinks on a Tuesday, but they’ll remember who helped them close a million dollar deal and get a huge bonus”

Outside of sales and senior leadership I don't agree with this statement. Maybe it is just because I've reached a time in my life where I could care less about the hustle and just want a job where it can solve interesting problems for no more than 8 hours a day. And then get home to my family.

For ladder climbers sure, but at some point relationships are more important than dollars. (As long as you have a enough to live of course).

And if you are struggling to make ends meet and you get a pat on a back for deal support, that feels more exploitive than anything else. Yay, I helped make someone else money.

Being a highly productive, easy to work with, solution oriented coworker is a super power in it's own right.

Basically a new variation of SLAPP lawsuits. It puts a ton of power in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations.

The one time I did it in highschool I suspended the egg in a small cloth bag within a box. No padding just the secure cloth bag attached to the inside corners of the box with taut twine. Egg survived the 3 story drop easily, even was fine when we kicked it around afterwards.

As a formally very active BYOND community member (joined 2003), BYOND's heyday was probably 15 years ago. Space Station 13 is its last vestige of relevance unfortunately. I've always wished for a new/updated equivalent version of it to crop up but nothing has really filled the same niche. It used to be a pretty vibrant community of (very) amateur game developers.

It seems it is going through a DDOS attack right now. https://www.reddit.com/r/BYOND/comments/1kl4bjs/byond_hub_do...

Some history of BYOND here: https://tig.fandom.com/wiki/BYOND

Basically it is a fully contained multi-user game development environment created by two friends, Dan and Tom around 2000. It has its own language, DM (DreamMaker), roughly based on C and Python. It has a map editor and server software. You would write a game and then host it and then anyone else who had the BYOND client software could connect to the server and run it. The server acted as the source of truth and the clients were effectively dumb clients just rendering. It had limitations (frankly a lot of limitations), but for the time it ran pretty damn well for reasonably sized 2d top down games. While you could publish your game to the BYOND site, you could also run it will no connection to the centralized BYOND hub.

The secret sauce was the combined game dev environment and how simple it made networking. You basically didn't have to think about any of it because the total game state was run by a server the you or someone else would host. The client just had to download the interface.

The development environment was bare bones but the language was so simple that it didn't really matter. Over simplifying but basically movable objects were of type "mob" and background tiles were of type "turf". Both inherited from "atom". You could also write like 5 lines of code defining 1 mob and 1 turf and walk around in your new world with others online. You could then add "verbs" basically functions that the mob could take and "procs" which are just all other functions you'd want to write.

You can read the language reference here on internet archive while the main site is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229044355/http://www.byond....

Some other links:

  - Forum entry from 2000 by one of the creators https://web.archive.org/web/20250325092124/http://www.byond.com/forum/post/194515
  - Getting started writing games post (formatting is all broken on this archived version but the text is there): https://web.archive.org/web/20190402034657/http://www.byond.com/forum/post/46230
  - Interesting crash course on everything from 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzAzMtWa0u0
  - Probably the biggest game that made it out of just cult following was NEStalgia: http://www.silkgames.com/nestalgia/

I would generally agree, except that there is a very well know Pope Leo that anyone who has taken any European history should know about. Pope Leo X that was Pope when Martin Luther kicked off the reformation.

Ecobee may be able to support your system.

https://support.ecobee.com/s/articles/What-do-my-thermostat-...

This has been my experience also, especially considering no tipping.

San Francisco is perfect conditions without traffic? Sure, no snow but plenty of other human hazards.

It may be more fair to compare them to Uber drivers and taxis and at least on that comparison haven't ridden in thousands of Uber and taxis and a couple dozen waymos, it is better than 100%.

Anecdotal of course but within my circle people are becoming Waymo first over other options almost entirely because of the better experience and perceived better driving. And parents in my circle also trust that a waymo won't mow them down in a crosswalk. Which is more than you can say for many drivers in SF.