eric4smith

Really? No.

That’s like saying generative AI is not real AI.

It’s open enough that a poor person working freelance for $5 per hour on the other side of the world can use it for free to enhance their work.

Sure you can bleat on and on that it’s not GPL blah blah.

But I see some VA’s who have English as a third language step up their game and be able to be more efficient?

They don’t have to pay a cent. Just have an internet connection and an e-mail address and they are on the same playing field as you.

That’s open enough for me. And for the vast number of people outside the HN ivory tower.

When their careers is something that is suitable for 18 years and older I would agree with you.

Otherwise you’re deliberately ignoring the elephants in the room.

People keep saying I’m “anti woke and anti tran$”.

But it’s things like this that give me pause. Why not just not read the books you don’t like??

I love to re-read books I like every few years.

Similarly If someone said that people should accept the fine ladies from the local gentleman’s clubs coming over to teach an 8 year old kid about their lives - everyone would be up in arms.

Instead why not allow the fine ladies from the gentleman’s club to teach their 8 year old kid these things at home and then the local butcher can teach their 8 year old kid about their lives and principles at their home also? Shouldn’t classrooms be for the basics?

And I (as a 58 year old black man) loved the original little mermaid! I remember going to see it with my girlfriend decades ago - was a magical day.

Instead of changing the original story and characters, why not do something original instead?

See how all of this stuff does not make sense anymore?

Now because my eyes are going bad I listen to audible. Will I have to listen to a changed version of these books instead?

The world has gone mad.

Bruh.

Yeah it’s sucks how he was let go. But he will get paid.

But for the first time I’m using Twitter more than HN , which has jumped the shark.

Elon’s accomplishments? - helped start openai

- runs the biggest rocket company that makes a new raptor engine every day.

- runs one of the biggest car companies.

- just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motors.

- runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.

No matter what you think about the dude, doing all that stuff is going to make you a dick.

But then again, it’s the dicks that make the world we live in.

Cough, cough... HN?

"Keep body text at 16px or above

16px is the default text size in most browsers. Text below this size gets harder to read, so it’s safest to avoid it for body text. The higher you go beyond 16px, the easier the text is to read."

Makes HUGE difference. All the front-end work is another complete app with all the work that entails.

Hustle bros were there since the beginning of time.

Think about that.

Every new thing for thousands of years someone always jumped on it for short term $$$ gain.

The hustle bros have a firm place in the ecosystem and the internet has just put a magnifying glass on the movement and made the hustle faster and easier.

Don’t hate the player (or the game), for they are as old as time.

This article reminds me of some guy on Twitter who says nothing in AI space has changed since 2020.

Maybe so.

But you know what’s changed? Someone decided to get their a$$ out of the AI labs, write a really simple interface just to “get it up” and released it to the world.

That definitely will trump anything else.

Release early and release often.

The author is just jealous.

Most SPA is totally unnecessary and a big waste of time.

People are worrying about the speed of SSR when they should be worrying about the developer time on the client which is several orders of magnitude more.

I think people have fallen in love so much with complex Javascript frameworks that they’ve forgotten how easy it is to get to an MVP with SSR.

Speed is important.

Speed of development is even more important for businesses in this era who have to get to revenue faster.

And that’s why things like Phoenix LiveView and its counterparts in other languages is catching on so quickly.

People are getting fatigued with the latest flavor of the month JS framework.

But what do I know… I’m just a lowly “developer” working for crumbs. Never even finished a CS degree. Sigh.

Visited Japan and loved it.

BUT.

The rest of the world treats Japan as something "special". All the media/manga/anime/pr0n/temples/culture and people.

What I've learned traveling to various countries in the region?

There's nothing really special about Japan, it's people, or it's media.

The country and its denizens have been blown out of proportion with a kind of reputation that's out of this world... for the past 50 years. Yeah I look forward to going back and meeting more people next time -- but it's just a super-ordinary place.

Remember "Big in Japan"?

Nothing special. Go home.

Sometimes capitalism works!

The point is to get the list quickly.

Then the next point is to summarize each item.

Then I can go in and validate the info from other sources and clean up the writing to my style.

Get it now?

Ugh I’m not.

I Clearly said we use google to confirm the AI output.

And we also do not do medical stuff. I just used that as an example.

A lot of my reason for googling was to find facts or answers for what I’m writing or coding.

Now I use ChatGPT as an “assistant” to do a lot of tasks that I would have normally done with laborious searching through google.

It truly saves a lot of time.

Google is right to be quite worried.

Sure I still use google but really, maybe only 40% of as much time as I did before.

Why research: “give me 30 of the most common health conditions related to the human liver” and spend a lot of time in google, when the Ai can spit out that in seconds?

And worse I can ask the Ai to write a short couple of paragraphs about each one.

Then I can confirm the output and clean up the generated text into my own style.

What do I do?

I do online marketing and programming to support online marketing activities.

I write. I plan. I code. I hire.

We just taught a junior employee who is not great as a writer to use ChatGPT to help her with a good start to writing.

The training for her was how to formulate detailed and highly specific “prompts” and to use google as a backup to confirm facts in the AI generated output.

It’s not there to replace people’s work. It’s there to make them much, much more efficient.

Default Vim is best.

Actually just editing/copy/paste/delete is more than enough for 99% of uses cases.

I been using vi since 1982 and vim now. No need for anything else.

No plugins. Nothing. Just vim.

“Open protocols” is all well and good. Onboarding is important.

However what will cause Mastodon to remain as a niche network is that the networks you want are not over there.

Ask yourself this…

Which server are most of these people on?

Are they scattered on multiple instances?

How can you reach most of them without too much effort?

That’s the reason I’ve not even been over there.

Me: ChatGPT please write 500 words for todays essay on the importance of writing 500 words each day.

ChatGPT: Ok, here is an essay…

I do online marketing for many small websites in my portfolio.

Yesterday I had to write some fairly boilerplate landing page content for 13 types of sub-services.

In each case I asked ChatGPT to write 500 words in the style I wanted.

It did a very decent job and I only had to edit a word here or there for style.

It’s miles better than most people on Fiver or other freelance sites.

Normally I’d seek someone to do this copywriting. But in this case it was well written, the facts were correct and properly formatted and presented.

I would pay for this monthly as it’s been so useful for so many things recently.

Was a vegan for 15 years. Then switched to carnivore abruptly. Changed my life for the better.

Would never eat any plant based fake meat products.

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and Forever Peace series of novels chronicle this with pretty decent speculation.

He goes from war, to loneliness, to very low birth rates in society to rising same sex unions, to interesting alternative unions -- all designed by the governments of the time to support the martial future society.

A fascinating pair of books to read that speculate on the future.

(Please don't downvote me for talking about the damn books)

Slightly off topic...

Back before my Phoenix/Elixir days, we used to have to cache almost everything. Now we don't cache anything -- even with more traffic and less servers. Now, the projects I work on are not getting millions of views every day. But they are still important for many customers.

We don't really design anything that needs to be cached anymore. Just better access patterns and table design as we get wiser.

Take Wordpress as an example. There really should not be a need to cache a Wordpress site. But some of the most popular plugins are those that cache. To be fair, I suppose, their legacy non-optimal database design access pattern and code is responsible for this.

Just getting something up and aiming for product-market fit is priority #1 and then struggling with caching if it gets popular, at which point, more resources can be thrown at it.

I had a database table where I used UUID as primary key. Big mistake. Haunts us to this day.

Not sortable. Takes a lot of space. Table relationships are annoying. Etc.

What we do instead is have a secondary UUID key and keep Bigint as primary keys. Then use the UUID column in the external context instead.

UUIDs are fine for 99.99999% of the time in your own domain.

Don’t expect universal uniqueness across all domains.

My mistake. I refer to time as it is relatively perceived as in "relativity".

Some concepts are hard to grasp because of their scale.

Greg Bear was the first person who really made me understand time slowing down as speed increases in Anvil of Stars.

Also the destruction of earth in “The Forge of God” was so visceral that I was depressed in a dark place for days after finishing it.

Not to mention one of the few authors who very well explained the role of bacteria and viruses in very entertaining and hard sci-fi believable fashion.

RIP.

Yes

You just don’t know them enough as yet.

I’m not gonna google that for you.

Don’t be lazy, spend the 15 minutes and do that research yourself.