mox111

I get that the whole "co-authored by Claude" thing is supposed to be future-facing. But it's a bit cringe, for want of a better word.

GPT-5 has used the phrase "heck yes!" a handful of times to me so far. I quite enjoy the enthusiasm but its not a phrase you hear very often.

Perhaps some package authors are more accepting of this than others. I stumbled upon this comment in the `json` package the other day:

// isValidNumber reports whether s is a valid JSON number literal. // // isValidNumber should be an internal detail, // but widely used packages access it using linkname. // Notable members of the hall of shame include: // - github.com/bytedance/sonic

Happy new years you crazy people. Hear’s to many failed ideas, to many outrageous schemes, to many goals gone amiss. I love you lot xx

This is great.

One thing that could be improved: sometimes when the AI gives a "fill in the missing word" task i.e a sentence with a "______" in it, the text-to-speech literally says out loud "underscore, underscore, underscore..."

"The Divided Self" by RD Laing is interesting on this

So much of this discourse is like: Act 1: Person builds a brand partly based on AI Act 2: Person achieves moderate success Finale: "I created a monster!!!"

The source code has the following comment:

For information about the theory behind this, see Electronic Circuit & System Simulation Methods by Pillage

This is really great and well executed. Well done!

One problem I'm beginning to notice is that the connection to the realtime transcription is failing (I just see a loading screen when I click to reply). Maybe it's due to heavy load?

I notice you are using Azure Cognitive Services for the transcription at the moment. Out of curiosity, did you consider any other services for this? (I'm building a transcription-based app myself and I'm worrying about the ability to handle lots of connections at once)

Yeah, it's a good point, there's no ruling that out, although the cycles would need some explaining

I noticed that if you plot just the counts of submissions each hour, it shows a very clear cyclic pattern, but _slightly_offset_ in time from the scores data

So the peaks in submission scores tend to coincide with the point at which submissions-per-hour are really beginning to accelerate for that day

thanks a lot! yeah I thought about that - it is a bit of a challenge on mobile to fit everything in with the lack of real-estate. I will keep that feedback in mind :)

Same. Also same goes for anything that has a lot of stuff going on in the same frequency register as the human voice (e.g. piano melodies) - I find that distracting too for some reason.

That's why my go-to concentration music is Kryptic Minds - basically just driving bass rhythms without too much melodic content.

Can imagine extending this to Oura Ring (or similar) data

"Sorry, your heart rate is already too high, no social media for you"

Umm because I looked it up didn’t I. Not that hard mate

There is some GOLD on this list, that I had never even heard of until now. Well worth the effort to go through it. Thank you.

Still reading it actually, but definitely "The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the transition to the information age" by James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (actually the father of current UK politician Jacob Rees-Mogg)

Its main thesis is that the main driver of megapolitical change are shifts in the risk/reward payoffs of violence. Was written in '97 but still talks about cryptocurrency and things like that. Interesting book.

This is going to be an unusual answer for this forum, but... the Harry Potter series

Firstly, I read it as a kid, in my formative years, when it was most likely to have an impression on me.

But I remember reading the books and feeling completely enraptured by this magical world. I also remember feeling a a bit annoyed at what I perceived as Harry's laziness and ingratitude! I would think "if I was him, I would spend all my days in the library, learning all the coolest spells, potions etc., and make the most of all this magical power"

As an adult, this has unintentionally become the frame through which I view my job as a programmer. You can call me a romantic, but I've been doing this for years and I still think it's wonderful. At any time I can open a book or a man page and learn some amazing new spells.

With our computers, we _all_ have access to magic, it's just about learning to use it.

Why are you so obsessed with this "tech bro" construct?

If you are the kind of person that interprets everything as cliché, then you are liable to become one.

Jeremy, that you?

Nobody is forcing us to use this tech. If we all happened to agree that it was annoying or "super weird" then we would just opt out.

Fact is, that for now it feels valuable enough for us to keep using it (more so for social 'hangouts' than for things like stand-ups, which we still do via Zoom and where we can be as authentic and vulnerable as we like)

I hear you. For months I had my Oculus sitting in the corner of the room gathering dust. Unlike a phone, it's not pinging notifications at you all day so it's easy to forget about.

But you know that saying "come for the tool, stay for the network"?

Right now, we are super early in the adoption phase. You can tell by looking at what fraction of your Facebook network are on Oculus (in my case it's about 2%). That's why most of us are playing solo games which feel a bit like mere novelties.

But now that all of my work colleagues have one, I'm using it heaps. The value of VR grows the more your buddies have access to it.

Sounds like you're speaking from experience here, so it's not for me to tell you you're wrong to feel that way.

But from my POV, we've started using VR for work meetings/social gatherings (we're a remote company, myself in Spain, the majority in SF), and we've been able to achieve a level of rapport with each-other that's just not possible via a webcam.

We will definitely continue to use it.

I think that a lot of the cynicism about this space comes from theorisers who have not yet tried VR for themselves and experienced viscerally + emotionally for themselves, the fact that it is a total game-changer for work and play.

The thing with this space is, enough smart people are sufficiently excited by this new media and working on realising its potential, that it will inevitably end up producing value that can’t be ignored.

Large swathes of smart people who see unrealised possibilities will always win out against individuals who only see impossibilities.

Whenever I see a failure to appreciate the potential of new media, I’m reminded of this conversation between Jeremy Paxman (British journalist) and David Bowie when they were talking about the internet back in the 90s. https://youtu.be/LaHcOs7mhfU?t=297

“The internet… it’s just a tool though isn’t it” ?

Most of the CRDT examples I've seen appear to be Electron apps e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin.

My understanding is that CRDT's rely on having a safe place to store data on the user's machine (otherwise it's a bit like doing a `git clone` to receive new data, rather than a `git pull`).

Is this not a major limitation for people hoping to use it for web apps?

I used to blog quite a lot, but nowadays I often worry that my ideas are far too sporadic and random to deserve a single, self-contained blog post of their own, so I end up writing nothing at all.

Twitter incentivises this spontaneity, but I do think there should be some middle ground here.

Readwise (paid service) does this for me.

Lots of integrations (kindle highlights, hypothes.is highlights on the web etc.), and they present your old highlights to you in the form of spaced repetition, either via email or via the smartphone app.

Live in Barcelona too. Can confirm!

I do think this is true - but I also think that the ability to control anxiety (an increased tolerance for uncertainty) is a characteristic that is learned with experience and can be a marker of an experienced engineer. Someone who panics in an interview might also be inclined to panic when a manager frantically reports a bug in master, for example.

I get this too, and I think it has a lot to do with where your imagination tends to go.

If you often imagine negative outcomes, such as the negative judgement that you might receive if you served 2-minute noodles at a dinner party, then your sole motivation will be to avoid these sorts of outcomes. Life becomes about hazard detection. The anxiety that comes with this can obscure your 'true' interests to the point where you are not even sure what they are anymore.

Where does your mind turn when there is no sense of threat? If you bring yourself to imagine positive outcomes, then so long as they are realistic and accompanied by a strategy, then it is natural to be motivated to realise them. Failure to create a compelling future could just be considered a failure of the imagination.

I'd really recommend the book "Psychocybernetics" by Maxwell Maltz for more on this sort of stuff.

This article seems to have divided people somewhat. A think a great reconciliation between the practical and the theoretical when it comes to learning is found in Mindstorms by Seymour Papert:

"An important part of becoming a good learner is learning how to push out the frontier of what we can express with words. From this point of view the question about the bicycle is not whether or not one can "tell" someone "in full" how to ride but rather what can be done to improve our ability to communicate with others (and with ourselves in internal dialogues) just enough to make a difference to learning to ride."