gyulai

...well, the "audiophile" angle is simply not where I'm coming from (see my argument about bad sound quality being "the feature, not the bug"). From an audiophile perspective: Absolutely, cassettes have no place in the modern world.

I think the way to go is lossless digitial downloads purchased as one-time purchases and optimized for lowest non-artist revenue share for sourcing and then probably also hobbyist archiving (combined with sensible backup strategies, etc.) Recording to tape then instantiates the tape as the medium that creates an enjoyable experience and cultural artefact around it. But there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too, going back to the digital for maximum quality. -- I just don't think the two are in competition all that much.

If it was my son and he was enjoying it, I would support him, mostly because of the secondary effects of learning to code on cognitive development. I am of a mind that coding teaches you to think logically. It's not the same as "literacy", though, in my opinion. So, if he wasn't enjoying it, I definitely wouldn't force him to learn it on similar grounds as I might force him to learn to read.

If he wanted to pursue an actual career in the space (like I did), I would actively try to dissuade him. I think the reasons that applied to me when I got into this in the late 90s / early 00s, simply no longer apply. I would get out, if I could, myself, right now.

I've been on a journey to rediscover cassettes as a medium this year, both for myself and my kid.

For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like).

For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens.

The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way.

So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way.

For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner.

The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison.

Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much).

I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them.

So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.

Actually, riding horses is a great example, and you happened to pick a domain within which I dabble: People are not capable of riding horses today at the level of skill of a nobleman from Renaissance Europe. People at the forefront of the riding arts today read manuscripts from Guérinière, second-guessing at the meaning of every last syllable, because many of those sources describe things that are unintelligible and unfathomable today that seem to have been quite commonplace. And this is despite even the centuries of continuity of government funding for institutions that have been dedicated to trying to prevent precisely this. (Namely the Spanish Riding School of Vienna and similar institutions in Lisbon and Jerez, the Cadre Noir, etc.)

Also: Saying that "learn to code" has been reduced from a meme about a surefire ticket to economic security to the equivalent of glassblower, is not really refuting what, in broad strokes, the original point actually was; is it?

How will they hire experts from those professions on whose output to train on, if they destroy the skills currently extant in those professions? Maybe lawyers will still read contracts every once in a while. Certainly, programmers around me no longer bother with reading code. ...and you can make an argument that a similar effect will happen that is widely observed in language-learners: Namely, if you only ever use a language passively (to read/listen), you're not necessarily able to use it actively (to write/speak).

large corpus of commercially available source code

Like garbling up GitHub? Currently, people put hand-crafted code there to earn "street cred". Will people continue to do that, if AIs regurgitate their code without giving credit? Will people continue to bother with learning to code, when AI has reconfigured the economy to make this skill a worthless commodity?

To be clear: I don't envision a scenario where people who are completely unable to code will come out of nowhere, and make a career out of prompting claude to write software without ever learning to code. What I am saying is that the threshold of what constitutes "good enough" coding skill has shifted down, and those people who already knew how to code now have a certain multiplier on the outcomes they deliver. (this multiplier is high if you measure on low time horizons and gets lower, the longer the time horizons, but the latter doesn't matter in managers' minds). So there will, for a time, be a massive overhang of good-enough coding skill from "old stock", so to speak. For those who do not already know how to code, this make the proposition of learning to code right now uneconomical. If there is already a massive oversupply of grapes in the market, and you're trying to decide which crop to plant, then planting more grapes is economically probably a pretty poor decision. It would be better to plant things that are undersupplied.

Part of the industry always seek humans able to code with deep understanding.

Name them. In my 16 years in the business I've never come across any; I've always worked under leaders who did not care about code quality in the slightest and just looked at outcomes, and when outcomes stopped happening as a result of poor code quality were always unable to connect those dots (or wilfully looked the other way).

I think embedded software for highly-regulated medical devices or whatever is just not enough to take in all the "AI-refugees" who are now seeking meaningful work that has been taken away from them. The pessimistic side of me expects that it's probably not true in the first place that these industries work any different than what I'm used to. And even the optimistic side of me has to admit that the laws of supply and demand imply that, in those few niches where it still matters, there are enough people out there desperate to do that kind of work right now, that it will be done for free and won't present a real earning opportunity.

The coding we want for industry sure. Difference between IKEA and my uncle, an incredible, sought after carpenter.

The thing is that programming was one of those rare crafts/arts, where you could have your cake and eat it too: Since you were writing all the code by hand, and since that process takes a fair bit of time anyway, you might as well write good code at no extra cost (which is where the artisanship comes in). Now the difference between good code and cheap code that does the same thing is the difference between 2 months of hand-crafting code and micromanaging LLMs versus an afternoon of vibing, and that is much less defensible from a business point-of-view.

I think that, even among those who have had the ability to code since before LLMs, the skill of coding has been in atrophy, and will continue to be so over the next 10 or 20 years. Learning to code, over the same period of time, will not be worthwhile. At the end of that process, cracks in the system will start to show: Namely, we will have nothing but LLM-generated code to train future LLMs on, and codebases for production code will be so low in quality that they will be unintelligible to humans, and LLMs, too, will have trouble maintaining them. At that point, coding will become a valuable skill again. The practical question for someone planning out their career from todays' point of view, is that it's uncertain when that time will come, and these markets can and will stay irrational for longer than any single individual trying to resist them will be able to stay solvent.

...still not enough to meaningfully incentivise giving a crap about the law over just paying the fine.

I was referring to something slightly different namely that price, horsepower, and socioeconomic status are all monotonically increasing functions of each other when you look at any given lineup of cars -- say you're comparing the different company cars owned by a given company, the different cars in the lineup of a given manufacturer, or the cars parked outside the venue when there's a wedding and the extended family has been invited. The cars themselves are all "trivial" variations of each other. I've noticed this more strongly in Germany than in other countries I've lived in (which is a few). You don't get the kind of variety of styles and designs you would get in the U.S. and many cars that are commonplace in the U.S. like a Ford Mustang or a Dodge RAM, when you encounter it in Germany, would instantly read as "someone desparate to get noticed".

But the variation in horsepower is still there. It's not like cars with 300 HP are forbidden in Germany. It's just that they need to fit in the continuum. The 300HP BMW is the CEO's car, and its existence is justified by the fact that the other top managers drive the 200HP version which is otherwise almost the exact same car, which are in turn justified by the fact that the middle managers drive the 120HP version, and if you're a new-hire individual contributor then anything more than 90HP would cause a scandal if word got out. (I'm painting a mental picture here; obviously not making a universal claim).

I think that culture is part of the reason why a $30k electric pickup truck would ruffle feathers so much, and it's a particularly stupid reason, but I think it's real.

The "Kastenwagen" example from above escapes that calculus by clearly being something that stands completely outside of any established continuum of this kind. The rare Ford Mustang or imported Dodge RAM that you sometimes see in Germany is similarly socially/politically acceptable on the grounds that it would either be expensive as hell, or a car buff's hobby. Both of those cases mean the owner has duly paid for their ticket to the high-horsepower social club (either financially, or by having a respectable hobby and putting in the work), whereas a $30k electric pickup that you can just buy would come across as "cheating the system".

The distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "civic duty" by buying German, but it clearly ruffles feathers and meets with political headwind when it ties in with the culture and financial constraint of the "commoner".

I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.

It's not the substance of what is being said, but the "moral outrage washing" communication strategy, employed by a market participant who is themselves deeply immoral, that I find kind of interesting, entertaining, noteworthy, funny, and morally objectionable.

Also: With something like a 75% market share that Chrome enjoys, I don't see how they can keep a straight face when complaining about the anticompetitive practices allowing a competitor to hold on to a 10% market share.

If there's any pinning needing to be done it would be on lax antitrust laws or enforcement in the U.S. In the E.U., all of these companies consistently get slapped on the wrist about all of these things, but there's only so much the E.U. can do, if these companies get a safe haven in the U.S. and if the E.U. wants to continue to trade with the U.S. relatively freely. The U.S. is taking a stance that it benefits them more to be the domicile of evil monopolistic global megacorps than to police the necessary preconditions for the existence of free markets (which would imply that other nations could compete more freely with the U.S.) The E.U. has no such conflict of interests, so it's easy for them to take the "moral" high ground (although it's not moral to be precise; more like an appeal to free market values, which, they themselves, are also happy to violate on a case-by-case basis pretty much as it suits them).

SPONSORED CONTENT FROM BROWSER CHOICE ALLIANCE

Who is the "Browser Choice Alliance" I thought to myself. One web search later:

Our members: Midori, Opera, Vivaldi, Wavebox, Browserworks, and, ... wait for it ...

Chrome.

The “magic” of the SERP is that it makes the organics product and the ads product reinforce each other: People come for the organics and don't have to pay. That brings eyeballs, which advertisers pay for.

If Google no longer sends users to websites for free on organics, the world will have to figure out some mechanism whereby Google pays site owners for putting the information on the web in the first place. Where will that money come from?

If it's ads, the AI experience is a “lies engine” where advertisers get to pick which lies the AI tells. Not sure what kinds of people would show up for that experience. Probably the same kind who watch home shopping TV. I would venture to guess that there will be a ceiling in the advertising value of that property. Or the AI interacts with people in good faith. But then, if I'm an advertiser, how do I get my lies into the world? “We will tell your lie, only if it's a truth” doesn't work because, as an advertiser, I understand that the truth about me already gets spoken, and I don't need to pay a dime for that.

You can run an argument that people can tell ads from organics on the current SERP, and you can calibrate how much of each there should be. But you can't really “calibrate” the amount and level of the lying in the AI to where it's just enough so that people will show up, but not so much that there's no value for advertisers. You can't have little boxes either, where the AI is like “having told you the truth, I want you to also pay attention to this lie that someone paid me to tell you: …”

Is Google really saying: “Hey, we're the lion's share of the advertising market right now. But, because we kind of like these newfangled AI things, we're going to just vacate that spot to whoever. Instead, we will turn ourselves into a pre-product-market-fit company. Maybe at some point over the next 10 years, we're going to be able to tell you how we might actually monetize ourselves. Stay toooooned.”

The reason why AI is a better experience than the web right now, is because we have pre-enshittification AI and post-enshittification web. What will the whole thing look like, after enshittification is through with AI?

What's the law these days in Vermont / the U.S. around anonymous use of the phone system? Are anonymous burner SIMs still allowed?

If anything, the lesson to learn from the LiMux failure has nothing to do with technology or with project planning + execution, but with politics. If you extort millions from government as a for-profit business, most of which ends up as pure profit, there is an “emperor's new clothes” dynamic. It aligns the interests of government officials with yours in driving a narrative that there was good value generated for the taxpayer from that taxpayer money you got. Also: You now have those millions in a war fund, which you can use as negotiation mass. (In the case of LiMux and Munich, Microsoft relocated their corporate HQ to Munich as a quid pro quo for the City of Munich abandoning the LiMux project, which directly benefitted the City of Munich because it now got to tax Microsoft in a way that it didn't previously get to do). … these kinds of strategies game theoretically dominate any kind of play that's possible through open source.

Investor narrative pointing out a relationship is not the same as substantive technological overlap.

I feel like I really need to learn how to raise money. For $17M, one could probably ...

People complaining about investors throwing stupid sums of money at stupid or trivial things unrelated (or only marginally related) to AI? ...sounds to me like the first glimpse of hope I have come across in this industry for half a decade.

i am actually fine with how svn works.

I came here to say precisely that. I was on svn before git was a thing, and I've never moved off it for any projects where I get to decide such things.

To a first approximation, one could say that distributed version control is a problem nobody ever had, and nobody ever intends to have. (GitHub is the world's centralized monorepo.)

Yet, distributed version control is the majority of the reason why git's mental model is so overcomplicated.

In a perfect society, companies would find that the more negative externality they create, the more difficult a time they'll have finding people willing to do it for them. One case in point is when a civil-oriented software company starts taking on military contracts and putting their people to work towards death and destruction. In a perfect society, the reaction we would get is the employees going "wait a second; I liked this company when I joined, but I never signed up for this." … and even in our less-than-perfect society, we do get some of this; what we need is more of this, not less.

I normally know better than to respond to "career advice", particularly, coming at it from an angle of vulnerability. I think the primary reason I'm doing it is as a service to my younger self (and people in equivalent situations now), which could have been spared quite a bit of heartache, if it had had more people around ready to call bullshit on bad advice.

Moving to SF is only an option for the rich and privileged. Saying no to a solid paycheck that comes with a 40-hour workweek to make space for randomness is for the rich and privileged. Some of us are born rich and privileged, some are not. Some of us are born as extroverts, some as introverts. For some of us, putting off-hours to use for doing more work-related stuff ends up working out, for others it wreaks havoc on our ability to have hobbies, social lives, and families and is a surefire way to destroy happiness (and might still not help our careers).

"Everyone needs to move to SF and start prioritizing hustling over staring at their editors and compilers" is terrible advice. For a sizeable proportion of people it's not an option. For a sizeable proportion of people it's a surefire way to destroy their lives.

Telling someone they need to learn to be an extrovert to get ahead in a field that people tend to gravitate towards because they are introverts is psychologically quite unsound advice, because personality is quite fixed. I've beaten myself up over my not-get-ahead-able personality enough when I was at college, and have, paradoxically, gotten ahead quite a bit better than the people I knew back then, who did have those model extrovert personalities.

The second reason why I take issue with that line is, as I've said, the fact that few employers allow employees time "on the clock" to do anything at all that's away from screens, and saying "do it in your spare time, then" is adding insult to injury. I have a rich social life, hobbies, and am raising a family. What I'm observing is that this is not helping my career one bit, and that's perfectly fine. Not everything in life needs to be in service of one's career. But this is also the reason, why I do not have time, off the clock, to attend meetups and events.

The third thing I would notice is that it helps your career (again, speaking from a "code monkey" perspective here), less than you'd think. What is going to come out of the chance encounters at meetups and events? Maybe someone wants to hire you. Maybe someone wants to work with you more informally. If you sell your time in 40-hour-per-week blocks, none of this is a business opportunity you can capitalize on. If you're on a job, you've already sold your 40-hour-block, and have nothing left to transact with. If you're off a job, you need a new one, and you need it now, so you need to be more transactionally-minded than just investing time into chance encounters.

Now, there is a separate consideration that may enter into career planning, namely that one might try to evade the 40-hour-per-week payrolled-employee trap, and try to prioritize maximizing hourly rate over yearly compensation and do freelancing. But this sort of consideration, in my mind, is not properly the domain of career advice. Career advice is: "Here is some mistakes you should avoid. Avoiding them is always an option, no matter what your circumstances are, and by avoiding them, you will always have better outcomes." This is not that: It is simply not the case, that everyone can and should be a freelancer.

It's not like "spend more time away from the screen" is a real choice that is actually offered to "codemonkey ICs", like myself, in most workplaces, and I haven't seen AI change a damn thing about that. If anything, it has become worse. With AI raising the expectations about how much code I need to ship per unit of time (and all the responsibility for that code actually working still resting with me), I am more glued to the screen than ever.

Oh boy. Vaporware startup facing an unsolved cold-start problem calling itself the “next era” of something and announcing lofty funding goals. Exactly where I want to put my personal data.

Why do people need banking on their phones though? Banks have websites too.

2FA. I was a smartphone hold-out for longer than anyone I know, but banks mandating 2FA with no options for doing it in a standards-compliant way or any way that doesn't involve the app stores was what finally broke my resistance.

I would have thought it would be about OS/400.

I'll repeat a critique I've made about Tonies before [1]:

I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.

Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.

Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.

One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.

There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”

I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.

And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597664