jfvinueza

having it include the word App is genius

Radio Paradise has a fantastic high-rhythm, excepcionally-curated, sophisticated yet not too extravagant jazz channel called Beyond https://radioparadise.com/listen/channels/beyond

It is pretty much ideal for, as Larry Wall once said, letting music "wash over you" while coding https://youtu.be/SKqBmAHwSkg?si=_vHvP8Ij9lacwhFk

Same experience. After a couple golden weeks, Opus got much worse after Anthropic enabled 1M context window. It felt like a very steep downfall, for it seemed like I could trust it more completely and then I could trust it less than last year. Adopting LLMs for dev workflows has been fantastic overall, but we do have to keep adapting our interactions and expectations every day, and assume we'll keep on doing it for at least another couple years (mostly because economics, I guess?)

Why do we put up with this. It's not onlyfans: it's facebook.com. For an user to register and then by default receive this content it's treacherous and inmoral.

Typing this on a X1 gen 6 on my home; paid $230 for it a couple months ago. My impression is that it's a modern, perfectly adequate notebook, if a bit unexciting. But maybe that's because I'm an spoiled child, because I haven't thought for _one second_ how is it that they've made a multicore processor, several gigabytes of random access memory, a fairly decent well-lit keyboard and such a nice matte screen fit into this light, rather elegant device. I mean, for a laptop. I understand Lenovo, those greedy bastards, are the ones who assembled it in interest of achieving their own quarter projections, but now that I think of it, I'm sure there _several_ soulless corporations involved on it running the way it does! Intel is inside, that's for certain, but just ponder about the conditions, and for what financial purpose was tht wireless chip manufactured? What about that screen, huh! How was the lithium in the battery mined? Where? By whom? They weren't doing it _for me_, that I can acknowledge, and yet here I am. Typing on it. Hot garbage. Actually kind of liking it? Is it because I feel more at home here, in Void Linux, than on the Mac OS, even if it's so absolutely unnatural for mammal to "feel" such things in regard to, uh, process supervision and package management? Look, I'm not going to go full-on zen and start rambling about "you" being no more than a mundane abstract construct, but insofar as we agree on our individuation I can very much assure you that this Thinkpad, right now, exists for my benefit, and even though I have set boundaries on myself on developing a sentimental relationship with it (which kinda happened with an X220, I was younger then), even though its assamblage has required thousands years of avarice, violence and rapaciousness (as well of bits of love and care, for how they were all these person fed?) as an end product, for two hundred bucks, it is pretty fucking miraculous, and I myself am especially grateful for all those saccharine videos narrow-mindedly expressing their praises for it.

https://toronja.co

so good

maybe if you had put up more effort polishing it it wouldn't have hit the front page :)

I've been using Helix daily for about three years, and it has crashed about five times. It is very, very rare for it to SEGFAULT.

the HHKB studio has a trackpoint as well

The thing about SPAs is that computation can be done in the customer's machine. That usually makes it worse for everyone, both devs and users (although sometimes it doesn't). I personally believe that we can create better experiences routing more pages with more imagination, but at times this industry is quite vocal on what "user expectations" are.

Great article, great website, well done. Don't remember the last time I looked at that PowerBook G4. It is indeed _gorgeous_.

registered in 2007

my favorite place in the internet

What has actually changed in the last 13 years regarding Whatsapp? Video. And I believe that's the reason why anyone hasn't actually challenged them regarding messaging: you can build a similar application with similar features with a rather small group of people (not saying it's easy, but it's feasible). But handling those pentabytes of bandwith shared every day? Actually _promoting_ the use of DIY video as the preferred communication media? That's something you can't do as an small shop. And that's, I think, why you cannot compete. I decided to quit Whatsapp, which in Latinamerica is quite an outrageous move: that application is the communication channel for EVERYTHING: all families, all schools, all neighborhoods. I did it because I think Meta's main metric is actually hostile to their users: they want as much of your time as they can get from you, and they'll use are sorts of psychological weaponry to keep you inside. They were actually vocal about it in the past. There's zero reason to trust them. But why is it that no one has come up with a true alternative (although props to Signal)? Well, there's the network effect, for sure. They also employ very good engineers. But I believe the true reason is scale: it didn't use to be that way, but infrastructure costs are now inmense.

If you don't have a laptop, the place you live in / study at probably doesn't have a good public library.

The article mentions how deeply compressed the files we played were back then, but I'm pretty sure nowadays it's even worse.

Funny, thanks. This is another very fun one in the same spirit:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-sad-d...

soullessness

that's ai generated content main trait

so you feel offended by this

tools to be entertained lol

Yeah, you can buy a cheap android and uninstall everything, except the thing will still be huge and google will still be in your pocket. They're all made for media production/consumption, and there are very few adequate devices available.

Yeah, zuck is the worst of the bunch. Funny that some weeks ago there was so much praise in HN for open sourcing ai models and being an engineer at heart. No, buddy. He's evil. Dunno if he was born this way or became this way but behind that robotic facade lies the worst villain of the modern world, along with putins and netanyahus and larry ellisons.

Now, here, in latin america: what must we do to get off whatsapp?

Thanks for the article.

Dunno. Writing fiction myself; asked AI to read it aloud. Narrative paragraphs worked fine: a clear, if a bit deadpan, slightly tone-deaf delivery. But dialogue was horrendous: it didn't understand emotional reactions and connotations at all. More so than cringey and robotic, it felt soulless. And the distance from "something that makes sense" to "something that feels human" felt unsormountable. Yes. Many novels will be written with LLMs in the coming years. They might even touch us. But this little Text-to-Speech experiment felt like an evidence that this technology has a void at its core: it doesn't have access, like a human does, to a gargantuan emotional spectrum, which allows us to understand all sorts of subtleties between what is being said, and why, and what does it actually mean, and why does it affect us (or, hell, how should the next line be read in this context, because it has no context, it doesn't feel).

Malcolm Lowley writes on The Literary Situation (1958; first published 1947):

"Aside from the hard-working authors of textbooks, standard juveniles, mysteries and Westerns, I doubt that two hundred Americans earned the major portion of their incomes, year after year, by writing hard-cover books".

This was before television took over.

Mail is not a good example. Why would you like to read a collection of documents through A Single Page interface? Gmail was a fantastic improvement over Hotmail and Yahoo, and it provided UX innovations we still haven't caught up with, yes, but MPAs are naturally more suited for reading and composing them. Overriding perfectly clear HTML structure with javascript should be reserved for web experiences that are not documents: that is, videogames, editors, etc (Google *Maps* is a good example). The quality of the product usually depends on how it was implemented more than the underlying technology, but as I see it is: if it's a Document, if the solution has a clear paper-like analogue, HTML is usually the best way to code it, structure it, express it. Let a web page be a web page and let the user browse through it with a web browser. If it's not, well, alright, let's import OpenGL.

Except they're fast and built with care, with graphic design given as much importance as technology itself (as in actual "interface problem solving", not "the same product as everyone else's, but with gradients and transparency"). Navigation's different but it's very good. The text editor is best-in-class. I don't prescribe to the notion that a professional worker should always have 64gb RAM so both Notion and Jira can be open at the same time, and I for myself appreciated that whatever page I was on was just a single page, an slightly interactive html page, and whenever I needed to go somewhere else I'd browse there clicking on hyperlinks, and get there fast. It might sound dated, but compared to, say, Asana and Monday or dear god Microsoft or Jira's "reinventions", it's really many years ahead.

(I have nothing to do with the company, just a happy client)

Functional programming it's quite obvious, actually: there's data, there's transformations, there's data again. Sometimes there's side effects. Doesn't math work that way? I'm no expert on it, but the key for me was understanding that usually, in functional languages, you actually write _less_ functions, and most of the application behavior is expressed through static data.

I remember the first time I encountered a C-like for loop, and felt as a most alien thing: until this day I still feel it's an unnatural construct, a third of it abstracted from the application logic, the other two halves low-level requisites. And of course, watching that classic video of Rich Hickey destroying Java's HTTPServletRequest class just once made it clear, at least for me, that OOP's stance to redefine every data input and output into its own understanding of the universe isn't the obvious approach at all.

Yes, agree. I mean GPT-4 is an all in all a fantastic tool, but it's especially good for developing. The moment you transform a blurry idea into structured data in any form (and it helps a lot with that: you can chat like two decent citizens and ask it to transform it to json at any given time), you can pretty much generate infinite boilerplate that's consistent through a whole application: interfaces > tables > migrations > models > forms > tests. But it goes way beyond crud, and during that iterative process you can come up with some sophisticated enhancement that you wouldn't have even entertained and all of a sudden it's easy to implement. It's great for longform code & structure generating conversations and it's great for picking up little details that would have taken the most of the afternoon. I'm in awe, really (as is everybody else?).

And yes, it does make mistakes, very rarely, and you can't really upload the whole source code everytime you want to talk with it, but it makes the programming dream real again (if only for a couple years lol): is not like you don't _type_; there's so many things you stop thinking about. And you can say: oh, there's the catch, but the truth is my own buffer is so much freer all the time, I get to tweak files, with excitement, that a couple months ago would have been very tedious to get a grasp of. And about code quality: its Elixir is alright, its Typescript is excellent, but it's absolutely flawless at concatenating unix commands: it has read all the man pages. I've aliased more custom commands these couple weeks than in the whole of last year, and my workflow is getting tighter and tighter each day. There's just so much power into this thing.

The "technical" aspect of djing will never be as important as the sense of what song should go next, and there's no shortcut for that.

how do magazine ads look dated?