jasonkester

Can we save everybody having to put “I know about ChatGPT, but I’m asking for advice from an actual human who has experience with this so please refrain from answering if you’re not one of those” on every post they make, and just have that be a baked into the etiquette when discussing things online?

We’ve just got this wild culture where everyone puts such a premium on their own time but now doesn’t value anyone else’s

My favorite example of this is dropping a random acronym into a message board reply and repeating it five times without ever defining it, expecting every single person who reads your post to google it themselves to understand what you’re talking about, thus saving you having to type three words yourself.

“I tried BDI for a while, and I found the important thing is to focus on biased BDI and not just the vanilla BDI that you see so much of in the BDI community”

… tossed into a 30 comment thread where no other comments mention anything similar.

For what it’s worth, I recently retired from a 30 year career as a developer and while I’m aware of all three of those things, I’ve never used any of them in or out of work.

And I’ve hosted my own web server these last 20 years.

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI.

Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?"

So I ask the Author: Please write this article for us using your own words, taking your own time to convey your thoughts. Submit it and let us read it.

I bet it will be better than this.

I don’t think this is about fairness so much as a wish that developers would look out for their own self interest just a tiny bit.

We all get the full-court open source brainwashing during our early years of learning about programming, so it’s hard to ever step back and look at creating something from any other lens than “I should release this as open source”.

That’s the default, and anything less might get you grumped at by “the community”, so it’s the safest option.

But if your thing can be picked up by a megacorp and used as the basis for their $100M product, it might be in your best interest to carve yourself out a little clause that lets you capture some of that.

I’ve had this happen a few times in the past, back when you’d fire your expensive people and replace them with cheap human labour instead of AI, so I have a word of advice.

Be sure to have “updated your rate schedule” recently, which explains why you’re now twice as expensive as before.

They know how bad they screwed up and how bad they need you now. I’ve never had anybody refuse a giant rate bump now that we were all on the same page.

I don’t get it. Why did you title your hn submission after a feature that doesn’t exist?

Why not use that space to say something that your thing actually does? It’d save everyone a lot of confusion.

I tried your monsterwriter site (nice looking app, by the way), and logged in with google. I don't see any option to "control where my data is stored". As far as I can tell as an end user, I've just created an account on your site.

Reading the Getting Started code, it only shows me configuring storage as a developer. Nothing about users doing any sort of bring-your-own storage, let alone firing one up from scratch with a friendly workflow.

What am I missing?

Yeah, you definitely should have linked to that instead of a Github repo (or copied the text across to the repo readme).

The copy is still pretty focused on the Developer experience building something that uses your thing. But I can't imagine anybody choosing to use this for a product until they know for sure that the end-user experience is painless and frictionless.

I'm actually in the market for something like this. I'm building a game that could benefit from letting people store their savegames in the cloud, but I don't see any particular reason for it to be _my_ cloud. I'd rather not store user/pass information or data at my end, and I'm sure players aren't interested in making an account on my site just to play the game.

If there was something like this that was sufficiently frictionless (on the order of magnitude of going through a "Log in with Google" flow) to set up, I'd be keen to give it a shot. But if there was anything user facing that felt "Open Source", that would kill the idea dead.

Do you have an example of a user setup flow?

Sounds cool, but you never got around to explaining how “users control where their data is stored “, which is odd because that’s the title of your post.

So if I’m a user of an app built with your thing, how do I go about controlling where my data is stored? What’s the experience like for the end user to set this up and connect it to an app?

Because people move to different countries.

There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here.

As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)?

Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).

It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country.

I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.

There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.

I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

I didn’t get to use any of the cool terms for what I was doing though. FIRE and Digital Nomadding hadn’t been invented yet.

The problem was that every time I stopped contracting for somebody, they stopped sending me money. Building software products fixed that:

https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...

Managers love the idea that contractors can be fired more easily than employees. Except that this flexibility comes at a cost;

I noticed this early, and spent the first half of my career leaning into it. If you negotiate every gig as a contract, you get to double (or more) your salary. And the only thing you're trading away is job security which, if you pay attention, you'll notice doesn't actually exist for your salaried counterparts either.

To nitpick, you also have to pay for your own health insurance. So subtract $200/month from that extra $15,000/month for the sort of catastrophic coverage plan that a 27 year old needs.

Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected.

It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.

I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).

Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act. It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".

Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.

If you're not familiar with this channel, do yourself a favor and watch your way through his backyard trail build videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8...

They're so well done. Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while. Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.

If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for Ken Arnold to get in touch to offer to compose me a soundtrack.

I'm building a video game. It's a Retro Survival Crafting RPG that crams the gameplay of Valheim into the tile-based UI of Ultima IV.

https://stravaeger.com/

It's all vanilla Javascript, running in the browser, so you can wreck today's productivity right this minute if you like. It has multiplayer support, so I'll stand up a server in case anybody wants to jump in.

I guess the difference between the parent and me is that I’ve been around long enough to see my share of “fix typo “ and “remove logging “ commits that accidentally removed the line above or below.

That’s the commit I want to find six months later when the SVG text is blurry because we’re no longer forcing opacity to 1.0 at the end of a transition.

This is the response I expected to see here.

Reading through the article, I'm reminded of my dismay reading this exact sentiment every time version control is discussed. So many people are so quick to throw away their history so that things look "tidy". It makes no sense, but somehow it fits a certain programmer-brain logic that is surprisingly common.

My style is to commit often. Like dozens of times per day. Commits are the record of what happened, and I want as much of that record to exist as possible. I've been saved so many times by a git bisect that landed pointing at a tiny commit to a single line that looks completely innocuous, yet broke something in a subtle way that only got discovered way later.

That's what source control is for, in my opinion. Finding stuff like that. So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.

So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.

But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp, so the author's plan to add even more granularity will be an uphill battle.

Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.

I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.

When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.

It’s the big advantage that small companies have over big ones.

I’ve ridden startups through the phase where they transition to “responsible adults”, and start putting in policies and locking things down and generally behaving like the giant corporations they expect to be one day (and that the locker downers came from and are used to).

You can feel the deceleration, like taking your foot off the gas on the freeway. I’ve sat through all hands meetings where the ceo asked why we don’t ship as fast anymore, and since by that time most of the fast moving folk have moved on, nobody has an explanation.

You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.

And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.

But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.

But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.

Yeah, compared to the AWS experience:

I had a toy Free Tier account that managed to overstep a limit one month and rack up $0.0038 in charges.

AWS hounded me about it for an entire year before finally putting the account on hold. Then kept at it for months more before finally deleting it.

It’s pike the paperboy from Better off Dead, if he were to continue delivering newspapers while hounding you for his two dollars.

There are good overnight ferries from England to France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Cheap too.

We live in France and often spend the summer visiting family in the north of England. For a family of four, it works out about the same price to take the Rotterdam to Hull night ferry (outside cabin, meals and all) as it would to go through Calais and spend the night in a hotel instead.

And then it’s 2 hours of driving instead of 8 at the end.

Even when plans take us south, we’ll often take a night ferry from Portsmouth instead of the tunnel, just because it’s a better experience for roughly the same price.

Everybody gets killed by the goat.

Thanks! Yeah, all the tiles are hand drawn, though I took a lot of inspiration from the original Ultima graphics.

Early on, I actually used a bunch of tiles that I had lifted straight from Ultima V, but I swapped them all out for my own work once it looked like the game was fun and I might want to actually show it in public one day.

The json thing is what makes it particularly surprising.

It’s literally ’gameconstants.js’ with an item list that has a .name string and a .armor value that it could look up. But when I pointed it to the file and told it which row to read from, still chose to make something up instead of read the data designed to be read by computers.

I do like how your ai tries to cover for its buddies with lies about there not being any documentation online. Because pointing AIs to a specific page and asking them to read the numbers there is a known trap.