nlawalker

This is what Windows Explorer does when you cut a file, except it does also place it on the clipboard.

pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert [...] Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point

What if you want the original semantics of cut? Ghost cut makes that two keys rather than one: copy to clipboard (control-C or command-C) followed by Backspace to remove it from the original document. I so rarely use cut without paste, that this is a clear win for me.

This is just as "broken" as the existing functionality, just in a way that the author prefers. It's a neat idea though, I like it, makes you wonder what would have happened in other apps if cut/paste was never developed as a system-wide, cross-app capability.

Yes, this right here. Generated content that's based on sources that readers already have access to has no value beyond what they can ask an LLM to generate themselves.

Now, if you write it with tender loving care and bake all that stuff into it, then will humans read it directly? Maybe not, but the information that their agents read and then pass on to them at least has a better chance of being correct and useful. If the success criteria for your documentation was "measurable count of human eyeballs" and not "better outcomes", your docs aren't going to be good anyway.

My problem with passkeys is that "don't have to" is actually "don't have to, and couldn't if I wanted to".

handwriting docs adds less value than writing high quality instructions to your agent

Are the instructions not docs?

And that’s a net win for a lot of people in a lot of situations; that’s the part that needs acknowledgment and study, sociologically.

You can’t say it didn’t warn us, it’s on the tin: “AI might be wrong.”

Software engineering has always been kind of a game for the people who love it; it turns out that making it a game-as-a-service with lootboxes is just as effective for driving engagement as with other kinds of games.

Humans working on documentation who are not set up for success and not incentivized to do the right thing exhibit exactly the same behavior.

Proving care still leaves the audience to determine if the care is in the message or in attracting attention.

The premise of understanding a codebase distracts from the actual issue in the debate about AI in software engineering, which is how well you have to understand the problems you're solving. I think most people who advocate for understanding the codebase actually mean to advocate for understanding the problem, they're just using the codebase as a concrete representation of it.

Each individual digression from our core competency like this can probably be measured positively on ROI when considered locally. But I believe they collectively add up negatively.

I’d love to see the official internal leadership stance on what Meta’s core competencies are today.

I prefer adding the detail; if it's going to turn into a phone call anyway I might as well have a script ready to go.

The LinkedIn feed was Moltbook before anyone had the idea for Moltbook.

I’ve always wondered what the major industry players’ theoretical price would be for offering transferable licenses, and how many people who say they want to be able to resell would pay it. It’s also interesting to me that we got all the way to 2026 and one of them officially going all-digital and we never saw price differentiation for physical copies.

Honest question, what are the advantages of an integrated system? These three things are kind of the whole game for me, but I also don't have a very sophisticated taste when it comes to cars.

grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.

no one else seems to find this to be quite damning for the AI services being offered, preferring instanced to be wowed by the convenience and speed at which they can be delivered unreviewed and unproven information

"Be wowed by the convenience and speed", or merely "take advantage of the mere availability"? What most people find to be damning about expert advice is that they simply can't get it anywhere, at any cost that they can afford.

What if you label standing still as 0 mph and start moving 10 mph, gaining x energy, then call that zero and start moving 10 mph from there? It's just as intuitive to say that you would gain x energy in that case, but you don't.

We know intuitively that a ball atop a 20ft ladder has twice the potential energy of a ball atop a 10ft ladder.

What makes this intuitive? The foundation of the asker’s question is that it seems intuitive that kinetic energy would increase linearly with speed, but that turns out to be wrong.

common sense, discernment, good judgement

I feel like the whole point of all the experimentation with AI right now is determining whether any of these things actually matter to the end result, over various timeframes.

This isn’t sufficient, it needs to be “if you are asking for assumption of accountability, demonstrate human effort.”

In my experience, people who make requests like this don’t care about your attention, they only care about getting you on the hook for something. Your application of attention as a requirement for that is irrelevant to them.

Not a better publicist, but:

A) a newly-receptive audience - engineers who have discovered that they very much enjoy and appreciate the tradeoff of proximity to the code for amplified velocity and impact, now that it's possible to achieve without being a manager of messy human teams.

B) an ecosystem in which it's grown nearly impossible to connect a functional description of something to how much bespoke construction and effort was involved, partially because of marketing and partially because of how much software already exists to be built on top of. It's impossible to tell from a few paragraphs of functional description whether something was built in a weekend or took a team 4 years to ship, so volume of code is the natural fallback for describing complexity.

My concern is less about knowledge and more about the ability to communicate and make good decisions. I'm not sure how well it holds up against technology that can sometimes make a good showing at it, but is most importantly automated, cheap and subservient.

It's profoundly facile to think that only first order effects matter. Yet this is an incredibly popular folk belief in software. Why?

So I think partly it's an ego defence mechanism.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that it’s a folk belief, or that it has to do with ego.

I don’t think anyone truly believes “the user doesn’t care” is sufficient justification for anything. It’s about accountability. “The user doesn’t care” is shorthand for “On this team, we’re held accountable for not delivering, not for the results of decisions that only materialize a month or two down the road. We don’t pay attention to how we got to where we are, we fight fires as they pop up.”

The headline on that section, "Static sites are for people who can still read", caught me off guard.

If you are sure

--force-with-lease exists for the scenario where you are sure, but wrong.

Talk about burying the lede, headline should be "Instagram gives arbitrary account access to anyone who asks their support AI nicely."

Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.

I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.

It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.

Yeah that's a really stiff interview to publish, it reads like the interviewer pulled up to him while he was eating lunch and peppered him with questions.

Yeah, you're not an outcast if you're the one rejecting and cutting off other people.

If you haven't tried Animal Well, give it a shot. The whole game and its custom engine are like 35MB and it's filled with really cool visuals and physics powered by fluid equations.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/813230/ANIMAL_WELL/