danfunk

Perfect kind of intuitive. It was a joy to figure it out, and just "learn by doing".

Focused generally on communication, with BPMN being one tool among many. No one here gives a 1/2 damn about BPMN, but I think you will find the article worthy of the 5 minutes.

I love the story of Clever Hans, which says so much about humans and so little about horses - I get the point that it makes these experiments very difficult.

my dad passed away within a year of retirement. I remember there being studies at the time saying this was common, but the research doesn't seem to hold this up as much any more.

But I agree that "purpose" is critical to life. I tend to think of it as having a meaningful role in our "community" - but there seems to be wide flexibility in what defines a community. I was certain for a very long time that we had to work to live meaningful lives, and I think I've drifted slightly away from that notion over the last year. We just need to be important to at least one other person. There is great deal of "work" involved in just doing that.

Reminds me of the quote from A Princess Bride - Life is pain. Anyone who says different is selling something.

Accountability is especially beautiful when self directed. It isn't us holding the cat accountable for the vase. That is pointless. The cat holding itself responsible, that is what makes our relationship with them possible.

I work for a small start up. We often work with corporations. It does, from a distance, seem like giving a shit separates the two. I feel that. But you look inside big companies, and lots of folks inside care a great deal. I've also been through incubators and accelerators. And some of those people didn't give 1/2 a fuck.

Corporations aren't people. LLMs aren't people. Personification of these things is the source a great deal of trouble.

I love "small internet theory." Beautiful view of the future.

You may have said it better than I, in shorter words. An LLM in the hands of someone with expertise is life changing, and in the hands of someone without it - it's a bit dangerous, but also wonderfully empowering, even if they can't make a good chair on their first try.

Spent a delightful weekend in Quebec last month. Beautiful city, great culture, friendly people, best damn duck I have ever eaten in the a resteraunt they must having teleported from southern France

Great tool for a Makerspace - really appreciate the ability to use the same tool for laser cutting, 3d printing, and CNC. These are big jumps for people typically - having a familiar tool would help people transition from one area to another.

What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.

12 years ago I got divorsed. My wife and I had a company together, and she kept the company. I hadn't spent time with family in years, had few friends outside of work. I did independent contract work out of my house. Deeply isolated times, interspersed with part time custody of my son. I ended up starting a Makerspace , renting a building and setting up a 3d printer. That was all 11 years ago. We now have 6k square foot building, 8 different guilds, from pottery to black smithing. I count myself beyond lucky for the community. Like the author, I sent too many years discounting the most important part of life .. Our relationship with other humans.

Same experience with Google. I was setting up SSO for a new web application and set off some AI flag on a sub domain for our company website. For 2 weeks every visitor saw a warning that out site was a phishing scam. Nightmare. With no recourse. No number to call. No person to talk to. No actual explanation of the error (I still don't know exactly what I got wrong). I just took it down, waited, and prayed.

All these comments are from the standpoint of being managed, with a derogatory view of someone who would stoop so low as to take a management role. I liked the article. Managing people is ass hard. Doing so is a way to make peoples working lives better, anf to tackle problems larger than a single person can accomplish. Thinking about how to do it better is good thing. It takes courage.

I hate web forms. You hate web forms. Especially when when they are long. Or one form follows another after another after another.

We have conversational LLM's that can make this feel much better, and there is this great BPMN diagramming tool that makes it easy to describe the flow of long, complex sessions like these. Together they can give everyone a far better experience.

There is a companion video and a working demo - where you can run the model, change it, and refine it to cover new topics or extend the conversation.

We are really excited about this technique and look forward to your feedback.

We are working on a workflow engine as well - picking up concepts from the past - not quite as far back as mainframes, but I respect looking back to the past for things that work well, and re-applying them to a new world. I'd be up for sharing notes. Our work is here https://github.com/sartography/spiff-arena -- live demo is here https://spiff.works/agent-demo

brilliant link. This says everything I had to say with far greater eloquence.

I help run a Makerspace, will definitely be looking into this. Great idea. I know many adults that should start out on such a tool!

I hold a lot of hope that visual workflow tools like this will help more people use software to solve their own problems. With an LM's assistance a lot more people can create code but they need some kind of organizational structure - a software architecture that "citizen developers" can easily conceptualize. Targeting Data analysts and scientists seems like a good idea.

I admire the openness of the platform you are creating. I appreciate your blog post's note that current SaaS, cloud native, multi-tenant systems don't permit the kind of flexibility you need. There is substantial depth here - you have been working on this a while. Secrets for api calls, a repository for sharing solutions. I'd try it if it ran on Linux.

My company is working on a similar project, and I have mad respect for your efforts and how far you have come.

This feels a little like "I don't use a cordless drill because my screw driver works so well and is faster in most cases" grug brain says use best tool, not just tool grug used last.

Visual workflow tools, particularly those that are able to support a human-in-the-loop, MUST exist for the world to adapt and effectively use LLMs.

Literate Programming - coined by Donald Knuth and at the heart of Jupyter Notebooks - is powerful means of making software development a tool in the pockets a lot of people. I agree that just pressing "run" is critical to making a tool like this accessible.

I'm one of the core contributors to SpiffWorkflow. We are also visual programming platform and echo your belief of the power of combining visuals with programming. I shared this article here a few months ago that delves into our methodology. - https://medium.com/@danfunk/5-ways-bpmn-python-will-simplify...

conartist6 mentioned elsewhere in the comments of a need for a common standard for editors - I think BPMN could be that standard, or new revolutions of it, such as POWL.

collingree mentioned "good visual programming makes the software development process more accessible to other smart people" -- I think this maybe the MOST important long term benefit of these tools. More people in organizations need to understand what the hell is going on - and stop shrugging their shoulders when it turns out all the business logic is buried in 100k lines of code. Important shit should be easy to find and change.

As many others have mentioned here, visual tools are not likely to see wide adoption by software engineers for all of their work. But as middle groud in which to plant business rules, so those rules can be cultivated - it could change the world and the way we collaborate on software efforts.

Would love to talk to you both sometime, share war stories, dreams, and go to market strategies.

My 18 year old son is pursuing a degree in CS. I think about this question often. I also mentor graduates and it is indeed a very difficult job market right now.

We are in a period of rapid change. And rapid change ultimately favors the young.

AI is creating uncertainty. Eventually it will open up new fields, new jobs, new opportunities. CS feels worth the risk. The better you understand the forces that are shaping the world, the better off you will be.

This article summarizes my understanding of the role workflows play in modern research and how BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) tools can help remediate some of these issues.

Would love some feedback on the ideas here - and would be over the top delighted if folks checked out the project and took a look at our online app.

There are good realtors and bad realtors. I could imagine an AI chat bot that was better than some of the mouth breathers out there. But I wouldn't use those people anyway. But there are good people in the real estate business. if you want someone that can negotiate a good deal, and answer complex questions specific to the local laws, who knows the local neighborhood, and the local realtors, who can handle last minute changes and help you buy that house when your approved loan suddenly falls through ... you want someone on your side in those cases. Not some damn chatbot. ( my wife is a realtor)

Now ... an AI powered tool to helped realtors and buyers communicate, schedule, track progress, .... that would be a great application.

100 percent agree. I keep a todo list, in a notebook, copy undone items over every two or three days to a fresh list. It reminds me what's not getting done. It is easy to look at. I feel a sense of accomplishment. It reduces my stress to put an item on the list for later. I can look at non digital, simple, complete synopsis of my work and get an instant gauge on how things are going.

Agreed. Take long term ownership. Don't farm this out. There are some companies out there that provide support and consulting on open source projects. Rather than look for a freelancer to build an in-house application, find someone that can help you capitalize on tools that already exist.

My company does exactly this. We build and maintain an open source project (SpiffWorkflow, for process automation) and help our clients build internal skills to deploy it and use it. No license fees or SAAS lockin - and no team of developers that walk out the door when things get difficult.

A healthy open source project is more than a git repo and a license file. It takes community, trusted funding sources and ...

We are hard at work on SpiffWorkflow - adding new features and enhancements every week. Here is a recap of what we've done in the last quarter.