HN user
software developer in philadelphia.
blog at barrison.com, podcast at turing.cool.
That's exactly how I used "AI"... to augment my thinking and writing process.
On it's face, it seemed insane to not utilize this instant resource.
After a year I could no longer write for shit.
Now we're getting studies coining words like "deskilling" and "cognitive surrender", and I felt both acutely and personally despite guardrails I thought could keep me from those traps.
Now I don't even write near a computer.
also a very popular messaging platform for [redacted] enthusiasts
I used to use DuckDuckGo out of protest, despite it being inferior, but sometime in the last year (between general improvements and Google's rapid enshitification) it started outperforming Google for me.
I'm pretty sure there'd be a double-digit drop in LLM use if Google hasn't made search worse every year for the last decade.
As someone who was getting information this way most of last year, I'm pretty sure I'll never want to again.
An increasing number of studies are indicating a reliance on "AI" leads to deleterious cognitive effects. I felt this acutely myself.
I've noticed a significant boost to my recall since shunning "AI" as much as possible.
I'd gladly suffer the indignity of stepping on a few leaves if I didn't have to listen to an hour of blaring leaf-blower every Tuesday morning.
AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.
I've seen some prank calls (a YouTuber cloned Tucker Carlson's voice and called Alex Jones) but he just had a sound bank with a few pre-generated lines and it fell apart pretty quickly.
At least for now there's too much lag to do a real time conversation with a cloned voice.
Speech to Text > LLM Response > Generate Audio
If that time can shrink to subsecond, I think there'll be madness. (Specifically thinking of romance scammers)
I've tried giving it languages like Turbo Pascal or telling it to obscure frameworks like fp-ts and while sometimes it's not syntactically perfect, but I can guarntee it's not just scraping code snippets from somewhere.
I don't want to get in a pedantic argument over the definition of "intelligence" but ChatGPT got a 1020 on the SAT
yeah, exactly.
also the skeptics are really hung up on semantics of "intelligence" and not addressing the model's output, much less where this is going to be in upcoming years.
like, take home coder test is probably just dead. today.
i mean: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1598745129837281280
That's very false in my experience, and I did 100% TDD for years (have a more nuanced approach currently in TypeScript/React)
As a programmer with a problem, you first instinct is to start at the solution.
TDD pulls you back, and you first have to write the api and decide how you verify it.
If you're doing it well, you make both of those things as simple as possible, first. Reduce dependencies and inputs, etc.
That's actually the most important part, an easily consumable api that's easy to verify, not the implementation, and TDD forces you to do it first.
Also, a pet peeve of mine is seeing a line or more of code that doesn't do anything. With TDD, such detritus is impossible as you can't write production code unless it's making a red test turn green.
jfc, a coinbase recruiter emailed me just six days ago.
I used to live on a semi-busy street.
About once an hour a motorcycle would drive by so loud it would set off multiple car alarms that would then blare for ten to fifteen minutes.
This might sound very annoying.
But after countless months of this your mortal coil just dissolves into an entity of pure hatred and you completely transcend the material plane.
When Apple does this, it's really hard to undersell the "reliable" aspect of it.
The responsiveness and web experience of the first iPhone was just, a generational leap.
Same thing with Universal Control. I've used Synergy, ShareMouse and basically every clone, and I've never seen close to this same precision as Universal Control which Just Works out of the box.
I'm actually upgrading to a new Mac right now, and Universal Control is an absolute game changer for that workflow.
normalize work starting two hours after dawn.
(i think i'm only half joking)
also then just move everyone to GMT for the hell of it.
I'd prefer to work an environment where I can't get interrupted synchronously by someone wanting their problem resolved that moment.
Also, one thing with those in person interactions is you have no artifact of the interaction. Slack or tickets are great for documenting how decisions are made.
But ultimately, I have no desire to waste an extra 5 to 10 hours of my life just driving back and forth to sit at a different computer.
I do think it's great to meet your coworkers so they're more than faces in Zoom, but I am absolutely never going back to rotting away in a car and office most of my waking week.
biggest con is you have to look at it to do anything.
being able to turn the heater or defrosters on without looking is a pretty big upside when driving.
tesla changing where that is in updates and making you look for it in a new design just makes a bad problem worse
Writing code is, uh, not remotely the hardest part of software development.
Maintaining it is.
it's not just the carousel. it's organic rankings too.
we had an emergency AMP project after our traffic dropped 35% due to a smaller competitor implementing AMP and google rewarding them by boosting them in the search results.
It's not really. Google will highly reward sites with AMP (even when you're not searching on mobile.)
So unless you can survive getting bumped off of the first page of results, not implementing AMP isn't optional.
This was a decade or so ago, but we used to get a list of ~2 million email addresses that we'd import into a new database and a single mailing would take anywhere from 2 to 3 days to complete. Sometimes it would take us a few days to get to it though.
The one to two weeks lead time always made a lot of sense to me.
(And yeah, you don't need to tell me how horrible everything about that process is... but it worked and no one's motivated to fix it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same process they're using today)
But pretending to be someone else for remote voting is already a weak point
It's kinda' not, because of practicality. There's enormous risk and time involved to get that one erroneous vote. Who's going to do that for a vote that has a smaller chance of swinging an election than you have of winning the lottery?
If you have a stray actor doing that on election day they maybe vote 10 times if they're a logistical genius doing an Ocean's 11 of voter fraud. That's enormous risk of actual jail for still almost zero chance of actually swaying an election. That's why no one does that.
And the idea that you're going to coordinate that effort? You've increased the odds of possibly being statistically significant a tiny iota but have exponentially increased the chances of being caught.
This is why voter fraud arguments are complete bullshit and just cover for voter suppression.
The problem with VASSAL and Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia is that... it's awkward to play a real time board game online.
There's a lot of down time while everyone else takes their turn. You have to set aside one to three hours to play uninterrupted. In real life, you have the benefit of hanging out with these people as you play.
However, I've become a huge fan of http://www.yucata.de/ and http://boardgamearena.com recently and not playing games in real time. Making one or two turns a day means there's no down time, and I can be much more flexible making my move(s) fit into my schedule.
Wireless headphones are the future.
Weird annoying notches in your screen better not be the future.
Right now, you can't even know the height or width of the terminal. So, I think you would need to start there.
and that's why bills like this pass.
uh, no Democrat voted for this.
"The Senate" didn't vote for this. The Republicans did.
It's really a shame that our culture ascribes living on your own to status.
A new living space to heat, cool, light and manage just to live up to our culture's view of success is incredibly wasteful.
"i have no idea why minorities have a problem with someone telling them they're inferior being elevated and celebrated by the conference they're paying money for."