mprast

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constantly getting better, won't these tools be easier to use a year from now? Will model improvements not obviate all the byzantine prompting strategies we have to use today?

great stuff; I've had almost exactly the same experience. I think blow-by-blow writeups like this are a sorely needed antidote to the hype

I started having a much easier time with mathematics when I realized and got comfortable with this idea. In hindsight it should've been obvious to me as a programmer - when I'm building something, I don't ideate in terms of individual lines of code, after all

yeah, this is what i was trying to get at with that notion of "proof-affinity"; imo a well-structured codebase is one in which you can easily prove stuff to yourself about code you didn't necessarily write

yes, what i had in mind were more proof sketches than proofs

I was thinking the same thing!

not launched yet! I will put up a post when it launches; coming in a few months!

Part 1 is at https://the-nerve-blog.ghost.io/baking-the-y-combinator-from...

"And yes, cheating has always existed. But this isn’t traditional cheating. It’s ambient, platform-approved, investor-funded cognitive offloading." really appreciated this bit, it's insane how much some of these vendors equivocate when you call them out on this kind of thing

yeah agreed, I think there are plenty of ways to live a successful and fulfilling 'linear' life

thanks for reading!

I didn't know this! I'll issue a correction

yeah unless you have very specific requirements I think the baseline here is not building/designing it yourself but setting up an off-the-shelf commercial or OSS solution, which I doubt would take two weeks...

that would admittedly be more impressive

personally I don't have as much trouble wrapping my brain around the Omega combinator as I do around the Y combinator, so I just try to remember that the Y combinator is an omega combinator with an extra f injected at the site of replication, if that makes sense

thanks for reading! yeah I think system- and platform- are great terms too. It's kind of a weird distinction because my gut feeling is that platform-level package managers kind of grew out of system-level package managers...but I don't know that for sure

"Objects are extremely good at what they're good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb."

sure, but I think the status quo is to way overuse objects. my preferred style is to bias heavily towards value objects, and to never ever use things like inheritance for control flow

"ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations." hard agree lol

my partner was in love with them; every time we talk about UI design, she mentions Simple. RIP

I do appreciate the little coda at the end - nice that the author was self-aware enough to realize where the cruft was and cut it (and courteous to the reader!)

fantastic

"None of them would admit this, but I think there’s an industry instinct that misery gets results. I think this is mistaken. Misery is a shitty proxy metric for results" +1000

bees will push balls around just for the hell of it - they trained the bees to push the balls and then took the rewards away and gave them unlimited pollen and sucrose and the bees kept going back to the balls. they just wanted to mess around

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6639406

yeah agreed. I don't think Cory Doctorow is right about everything but I think he was dead on with enshittification

I was on tiktok in 2019/2020 and for a brief period it was just ordinary users messing around and posting whatever they felt like. No tiktok shop, very few ads or thinkpieces, nobody was trying to build an audience. A lot weirder and a lot more fun

Hey, thanks for your feedback. You're right; this is basically what the Semantic Web was trying to do. In earlier attempts to explain the idea I had mentioned Web 3.0 (that is to say, the 'original' Web 3.0), but wasn't sure enough people remembered it to be pertinent (I could certainly be wrong on this point).

I think the Semantic Web had a lot of promise, but it simply got too academic, with layers and layers of committees dedicated to ontologizing the entire world in a way that became progressively more detached from the needs of users and developers. As far as I could tell from my research, this was a stark reversal of the earliest ideas behind Web 3.0, which were more about establishing the 'meaning' of a piece of data in a decentralized way. Had the Semantic Web stayed the course on decentralization I think we may have seen a dramatically different outcome.

If you feel that this post didn't pay enough homage to the work that came before, that's a fair critique and I apologize. The concept of a Schema Network is definitely inspired by a lot of ideas that were in vogue in the Web 3.0 days.

hey, thanks for your feedback! If you're up to discussing further, would be interested to hear more about what you like/dislike about the idea and what potential you see, if any (you can just email me at mprast@get-nerve.com). Either way, thank you for reading!

PS: Clicking on the link will let you play around with Nerve, but first it will show you an article that provides a little more context around how Nerve is designed and why it's designed that way. If you just want the technical stuff, skip to the section called "The Schema Network: Integration from the Bottom Up" (if you read my summary above and thought "this will never work" I encourage you to read this section!). If you just want to skip to the demo, click "Skip Intro" on the top right.

TLDR: Nerve is a tool that helps developers write and maintain integrations. It does the same thing as a Unified API, but in a different way. Unified API companies are great but they take a lot of manual effort, which can make it hard for them to provide adequate coverage. Nerve is a Schema Network, which is a network where the nodes are apps and the edges are integrations. The idea is that you can auto-derive integrations between any two apps that have a path between them in the network. Nerve is designed to leverage the point-to-point integrations people are already writing on their own; the lack of a central bottleneck means it can provide much better coverage than a Unified API. Clicking the link will take you to a demo, but first it will show you an article providing more background. You can skip the article and go straight to the demo by clicking "Skip Intro" on the top right. Nerve is in private beta and you can join the waitlist if you want.