bloomca

I have a sizeable collection of CDs and during last year wrote my own CD reader and a ripper CLI.

As ridiculous as it sounds, but there is some intent in doing all of that and listening to the files on your hard drive. We have a vynil/CD player as well, but they are not at my workplace.

the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine

Who are the competitors? Something lower level like bevvy? The way I see it even with vibe coding you need to do a lot of infrastructure work to make editing easy, and anybody except Unity is far off from them.

Yes, this is the direction I am observing. Ironically, I don't think anybody is happy about it and we keep saying that it is a tool and you need to verify everything, etc, but this is not what is happening.

There are tons of people who produce questionable code at a rate which is not really compatible with a thoughtful review, we have people with little engineering background pushing their changes (although there is a large pushback against that as the results are really bad even short term), as you said, there is an explosion of LLM-generated tests.

As soon as someone writes a next-level harness which tightly iterates based on the spec/plan and/pr pioneers some sort of acceptance criteria format that works, I think at that point SWE job will completely change. We are not there yet but probably not that far off.

VLC does have atrocious UI but it works great, while macOS stuff both looks bad and does not work well, so I would take VLC easily.

Developers at big companies need to pay per token, they don't have subscription available. So in case you use that, you likely spend way more than $20 in tokens.

As for how to spend that much -- not that hard, to be honest. Just give it a lot of context and some relatively open-ended problem and it will easily eat through tons of tokens.

I have $200 subscription for Codex and it is crazy what it can do in terms of debugging. I have a pretty complex Electron setup with some native code linked via Node addons, a few App Extensions and it can easily read the source code to see how the builder works internally (e.g. if your end Info.plist is not correct), debug the xcodebuild output to see at which step something is not linked correctly (like after XCode major version bump), etc.

It is not a silver bullet but if you are not the one paying for it, there is no downside to throw a problem at it and see if it can come up with a fix.

And, if they are pouring thousands into LLMs per developer, have they considered looking at alternatives like having LLMs running locally on own hardware with their own agent harness?

I am curious about that myself. I have a good machine now (Macbook Pro M5 Pro with 48GB memory), so I'll give it a try; I don't have high expectations so if it is actually helpful would be very neat.

I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require.

But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications.

Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?

You can't uninstall Apple Music as far as I am aware, so it is not just a "music player" but a specific app, which I personally don't use. For the play button I at least see the point, but it opens it when you insert an audio CD, for example. Even Windows asks what to do in a notification.

I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.

Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?

It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.

I suppose the issue is that they will simply ask their LLM to summarize and to reply, so if anything, it might just normalize and justify it a bit more.

Turning people down when they ask questions is such a short-sighted perspective. When you answer, you can tailor it to them, you can give extra context, you can elaborate, you can dive into specific nuances. Long-term it will be very likely a positive thing as the person will trust you more, they will be comfortable asking more questions and the knowledge might actually help them to contribute in the future.

I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.

I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.

Every other post too. At this point it is quite challenging to find a genuine human interaction on popular online sites.

All you need is to invest into the index funds tracking some sort of the total market and you are golden. Not sure if I would describe that as aggressive.

But I fully agree that mortgage forces people to actually save money, most people would just spend it all.

The biggest advantage of buying a house is that it forces people to actually put money into a giant savings account which is not easily accessible. Otherwise people just spend the vast majority of the money they have. As an investment, houses are historically mediocre outside of some hot areas.

HOAs can be very tricky, the money comes to maintain some shared amenities. Usually it is not too bad, but in case of condos HOAs maintain much more and sometimes the board makes very questionable decisions and can end up short on cash when big things are required, and that can hike the payments a lot.

As for the insurance, the best advice is just to avoid high-risk areas like flooding zones.

If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

You'd actually end up in a much better place historically, homes were never a particularly good investment in the US, but there are very few people who can pull it off and actually invest the difference and not just spend it.

I love to walk and think through things, but I honestly think walking itself is just a tool. It just allows your mind to wander as long as you are not busy (not alone, listening to a podcast, etc) and in the modern world it is a bit too easy to get distracted.

The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:

- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)

The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).

It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. Definitely agree about talking to an abuser, though.

Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps.

But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.

It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts

You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF.

Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself.

The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux.

Also curious about this.

Windows APIs docs for older stuff from Win32 is extremely barebones. WinRT is better, but still can be confusing.

I think AI is really great to start with the systems programming, as you can tailor the responses to your level, ask to solve specific build issues and so on. You can also ask more obscure questions and it will at least point you at the right direction.

Apple docs are also not the best for learning, so I think as a documentation browser with auto-generating examples AI is great.

I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.

Apple seemed to copy this one exactly as iCloud asks you the same all the time. Honestly these days Linux feels like the only sane platform as you can customize it properly.

System Settings is so slow for the amount of contents it has that I have to say it is probably the worst offender per content capita

The rise of Electron was purely because you can share the codebase for real with the web app (for lots of apps it is their main focus) and get cross-platform support for free.

Native apps are not bad to develop when using Swift or C#, they are nice to use and their UI frameworks are fine, it's just that it requires a separate team. With Electron you need much less, simple as that.

As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.

I think it shows how important the platform itself is to the company. The system settings app on macOS is literally slow to change the topic (the detail page is updated like ~500ms after clicking).

I personally love to develop desktop apps but business-wise they rarely make sense these days.

I don't think it's worth to include the session -- it would bloat the context too much anyway.

However, I do think that a higher-level description of every notable feature should be documented, along with the general implementation details. I use this approach for my side projects and it works fairly well.

The biggest question whether it will scale, I suspect that no, and I also suspect it is probably better to include nothing than a poor/disjointed/rare documentation of the sessions.

I think a lot of companies are going to get burnt on these things. Sure it is easy to one-shot something which looks close, but then you are responsible for releasing/maintaining/improving.

Not to mention that you'd need to integrate it with lots of other vibe-coded products. It can be great for some use cases for sure, though, but identifying them can be tricky, as big orgs are pretty terrible at formulating what they need clearly.