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danielvaughn

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UX Engineer. I'm building Matry - a browser for designers.

https://matry.design https://github.com/danielvaughn

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According to the post, the first computer was in their trailer, but there's an earlier scene where they're using a monitor to view the raptor bones in a tent at the dig site. Not sure if that counts but I'd like to have learned more about that device.

It was not intentional, and that's what makes this thing so weird. I wouldn't categorize my sentence that way because it's subtly different enough than the LLM version, which has a very punchy cadence.

It's not that it uses certain phrases, it's that it settles on predictable speech patterns and uses them incessantly. What's funny is that humans do this too, but we don't find it irritating; we just call it a speaking style. But when a machine does it, it drives us crazy. Very interesting psychological phenomenon there.

I've been considering going back to vanilla javascript, given the current power of LLMs. It could become unreadable spaghetti, but it does that anyway with frameworks.

I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.

I'm not criticizing CEOs, only mentioning them because they're at the helm and the ones calling the shots at companies. But the psychosis has hit pretty much everyone, of all intelligence ranges.

Also, I'm genuinely excited about AI. It's absolutely incredible. Even with all the problems, I'm more invigorated about being a programmer than at almost any point in my career. You have to embrace the chaos.

We're in a dangerous valley where AI is _just_ good enough to fool some otherwise very smart people. Similar to the old adage of "a little bit of information is a dangerous thing." Lots of CEOs got duped into thinking that model capabilities were far ahead of where they actually were. I'm actually not sure if we're going to get out of the valley without figuring out a surefire way to reliably evaluate these things.

It used to be hard 1 month ago

What will always be hard and useful is to observe people, find a problem they haven't solved, and then solve that problem for them. AI has not, and will not, make that easier or less useful.

It's not just for myself, but I'm primarily creating it for myself - it's a browser for designers. I work in code but I often want a figma-type interface to explore different ideas without having to branch or litter my codebase with a bunch of demo components/files.

Normal browsers have built-in dev tools - this has built-in design tools. so I can visit my app, open up a surrounding canvas, pull fragments into the canvas, do some design-ish stuff, and merge it back into code. All in the same UI. It was cool enough that I'm going to release it, but for now it's very useful for myself.

https://matry.design/

lol I'm more speaking to reliability than the quality of the interface. git and ffmpeg are not exactly known for the most intuitive API surface, but I don't think I've ever encountered a bug with them in my 17 years. That's a pretty extraordinary thing when you think about it.

I know I must be underthinking this, but I really don't know why native toolkits can't just implement some codegen thing that takes XML and produces the above.

Like, all of that should be expressable with just

  <graph>
    <circle />
  </graph>

I do agree with you though. It feels like the industry has steadily been getting worse, AI is just like pouring kerosine on the fire. I'm almost embarrassed to call myself a software engineer now.

On a small bright note, I've gotten AI to help me produce some of my best work over the last couple of months. It may enable sloppy behavior, but it doesn't require it. I have hope that serious work will win out in the end, and that sheer human effort is still the differentiator.

To be fair, "excited by the promise only to be disappointed by the reality of the implementation" describes ~95% of my experiences with all software over the last 20 years. In fact only a few exceptions really come to mind - git, treesitter, ffmpeg, and sqlite.

That's all true - I taught myself how to code from 2009-2012 so I remember what it was like. However, around that time there was also deep focus on architecture, an obsessive focus on rendering performance and page weight. Everyone could recite the loading sequence that HTML pages used, we knew how many requests could be downloaded in parallel, how to best bundle assets for the fastest time to render, etc. So it was a mix of both pain and frustration on one hand, and a pride in one's work on the other hand.

Both have been lost; good riddance the former, but I miss the latter.

I hate it so much. It's one thing to lean on AI for complex or toilsome work, but to openly supplant your own ability to interact thoughtfully with another person. It should be embarrassing.

When I say "this stuff" I'm not talking about a link, I'm talking about the overall markdown/text capabilities that the post is talking about. I meant that I expected more parity with what you'd encounter on the web.