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impjohn

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If they try a DOS attack on my time and sanity, I can reciprocate.

Isn't it better just to tell them that instead of passive aggressively continuing the cycle? Granted, though, harder to navigate.

artisanal home made slop

Even in the depths of corporate life, the last beacon of light was interacting with a person who may be similarly philosophically placed as you, sharing something. Artisanal home made slop may be more underrated that people think, its a proxy for human connection, which surprise surprise, is a big basis of life

I find this to be my current number 1 challenge when working on a terminal and seeking explanations for why a problem was approached in that way. the terminal only holds so many lines at once. Let's not talk about current scrolling in terminals.

It's interesting that the LLM will oblige my succinctness requests for one or two replies then back to 7 paragraph answers that I can't reply to point by point in a TUI.

Map of Metal 2 months ago

Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers

Your take is cynical, but sensible in a massive org with dysfunctional culture that jades and burns out engineers until they only care about their own personal gains and everything else is secondary. I think people project their values in situations that don't have place for them and get upset

I believe it's ultimately a tug of war between what the business wants (more features, faster, etc) and the engineers want (maintainability, documentation, scalable patterns etc). Engineers rarely win this tug of war. At times it feels like watching a car crash in slow motion. I don't think this trend will meaningfully slow or change, until businesses interests are hit. That may take a while for this cruft to start causing pain. Even then, you may just throw money at the problem, or just live with it. Will companies go bankrupt because of vibe coding? I don't think so, and that's why ai coding is here to stay. My 2 cents

GPT Image 1.5 7 months ago

This is what struck me as well. I got weird undertones of 'Now you don't even need to have real memories! Just fabricate them.' They even prominently showcase edits of placing you with another person, further deepening disingenuous or parasocial relationships

then tell it to give you the top 10 things wrong with the code, then tell it to fix the five of them that are valid and important.

I would be cautious of this. I've tried this multiple times and often it produces very subtle bugs. Sometimes the code is not bad enough to have 5 defects with it, but it will comply, and change things that don't need to. You will find out in prod at some point.

Claude for Excel 9 months ago

Crappy spreadsheet is just the codification of business processes. Those are inherently messy and there's lots of assumptions, lots of edge cases. That's why spreadsheets tend towards crappy on a long enough timeline. It's a fundamentally messy problem.

Spreadsheets are an abstraction over a messy reality, lossy. They were already generalizing reality.

Now we generalize the generalization. It is this lossy reality that people are worried about with AI in HN.

Claude for Excel 9 months ago

but couldn't care less if it disappeared tomorrow.

Wonder how true that is. Some things incorporate in your life so subtly that you only become aware of them when totally switched off.

Focus Is Saying No 10 months ago

What were the clues, in hindsight?

I wonder if someone can get scent of 'want you to fail' early, so one can play their cards a bit differently armed with this knowledge.

I've been personally surprised that this doesn't come up more often. Most mature codebases span a decade or more, and especially in the web, there's so many layers of evolving technologies that were introduced during this time, resulting in complex geological layers forming in the codebase as the patterns evolved. That is not only a lot of lines of code, but a lot of nuance as well. Even a basic problem like routing can make these AIs fall flat on their face because of the sheer context and complexities involved

Hm. The 'prompt obedience' was definitely a huge step up, but there's a huge number of acceptable results to an image generation prompt, while for coding usually there a handful, many times just one right solution. So I don't think this parallel here is telling

Of the swarm itself? If you gather the swarms orbital energy they will fall into the sun, because they won't be moving fast enough. So you'd need to propel them using more energy